The Green Hijab Movement: Gitte Sætre and Frans Jacobi.
by Gillian Carson.
I was once asked to describe my genetic and social environment by arranging paper dots around a large red dot (myself) on a white, A2 sheet. I did it and then I drew a black zigzag around all the dots. The zigzag described the noise that pollutes my environment, the noise results from what I call the momentum; the brainchild of capitalist society and what has become our driving force. The momentum is an egotistical see-all, hear-all parasite, gagging for a profit. It consumes like water filling a space. No opportunity is too small, too large or too sacred and wherever there’s a sale, there’s noise. I fantasize about sticking my finger into it, to slow it down or even stop it for a while.
My momentum and the noise it makes found a home with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.1 In theatre history, spectacle alludes to the sensory effect created by lights, costumes, music etc. and it can be measured by the ability of a theatre piece to draw the audience away from reality and into the story unfolding on the stage. Debord’s spectacle does the same but no curtain comes down because it would appear that his spectacle never ends. Debord’s spectacle alludes to Capitalism’s use of mass media, to deliver a perpetual supply of new realities promoting, selling, opportunely distracting, manipulating or endorsing – anything really, that suits capitalist agenda. Sticking my finger into the velocity of these ‘new realities’ does no more than out my impotent stance in the path of runaway capitalism. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the many beautiful functions of art is that of slowing down runaways.
In October 2017, The World Cyclist Championships flooded Bergen in fences, road blocks and temporary structures with fancy lighting: all of which worked to take the sunlight from everything that makes Bergen beautiful. There was a constant stream of police cars, marksmen waited on roofs and the whole was wallpapered in an assault of advertising and promotion clamouring for attention. Helicopter and drone streamed a flag waving, howling mob as they tracked cyclists through the streets and up the mountain towards the finishing line. Half way up the mountain the route passed by a large pond and standing in the water was a group of green hijab clad people. It was a fleeting image, but it entered the consciousness of millions. I wonder how many of those millions registered the image and wondered about its place in this particular runaway spectacle, but with their Green Hijab Movement, Sætre and Jacobi stuck in a finger long enough to turn at least some minds to the issue of our climate. From a Bymag interview -
By using hijab and removing the elements that are primarily linked to the controversial garment, the movement "Green Hijab Movement" wants to turn the focus on exactly that. In short, we use green hijabs. Green is the colour of ecology and the hijab is a symbol of grouping, says Gitte Sætre, the artist behind the project, which is first and foremost about climate issues.2
The green hijab marries two powerful symbols; the hijab, with all its religious/cultural/political baggage, and the colour green for global ecology,
We are The Green Hijab Movement
Green Hijab Movement is indifferent to nothing in this world
Pollution knows no borders
Green Hijab Movement is a movement emerging
from the ecological waste of our planet
Green for awareness of climate change
Green for change of direction
Green for sustainable systems
Green for global women
Green for global sisters
Green for global sister solidarity
Sætre and Jacobi wear green hijabs, and in so doing they exploit not only the garment’s ability to group; therefore regroup, but also its laden aura of heated debate. The hijab is a hot object and Gitte Sætre and Frans Jacobi have hijacked it.
The French détournement: to reroute or hijack, was adapted in the 1950s by Guy Debord in the SI -Situationist International3- as the practice of using existing artistic/cultural production within a ‘superior construction of a milieu’: or a new piece of art or cultural expression, most often used to further a political or social, critical point of view. In 2011, Martin Kaste, a correspondent on American NPR (National Public Radio), described détournement in Exploring Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Adbuster’ Origins as - turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself4 – as we know culture-jamming, as using slogans and logos to confront their advertisers or the political status quo. In short, détournement trips minds to send them in a different direction.
Tripping minds with something as ‘touchy’ as the hijab comes with a fair share of lip-service. Under a facebook post advertising a Green Hijab event, came the following question- ‘Why a green hijab and not a green sari?’ Dear fellow Facebook user, like the hijab, the sari is a cultural symbol but it is not the spectacle that the hijab has become, and to pierce the momentum to spark the minds within, one needs a far more loaded sign. Pussy riot would never have reached us wearing green saris while playing acoustic guitars on a beach. It takes guts and balls to strum up sympathy for a cause these days. Guts and balls.
We know what you are all thinking?
Why Hijabs?
Our answer is two other questions:
Who is benefitting on dividing people into groups?
Who is benefitting on setting people up against each other? Doom Meditation The Green Hijab Movement is spiritual. A critic of capitalism must contain spirituality.’
Resetting loaded symbols is a technique destined to succeed in drawing attention to whatever cause they are applied to. Sætre and Jacobi wear green hijabs, and work to draw public attention to critical issues that would otherwise be buried beneath the barrage and cacophony of the momentum. In a society where finance and profit are held closer to the heart and gain more respect than healthy public relations or human life, Sætre and Jacobi work to compensate for social ‘inattention’ and/or complacency. Their performances reveal, and present for attention, bad behaviour from the political and commercial sphere, and are strategically designed to stop-up and reset popular modes of thought and opinion. Performance videos and images are destined to be repeated in a public context, replaying and furthering the live event’s purpose.
While wading through information about activist art, I came across a paper ‘Image events, the Public Sphere and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups’ (2003), by John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca. This paper presents the term image events and describes them as ‘staged protests designed for media dissemination’. They characterize image events as arguments that take the form of protest, providing images as -argumentative fragments; as an intervention for public consideration that shifts the responsibility for argument construction to the audience.2 They claim that – ‘images, operating as argumentative fragments, are capable of offering unstated propositions and advancing indirect and incomplete claims in ways that function to block enthymemes as well as advance alternatives’.5
I’m still working to get my head around the enthymeme issue, but the advancing of alternatives seems to me to be exactly what Sætre and Jacobi are doing with their Green Hijab Movement. In Image Politics, The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, Kevin Michael DeLuca considers the activity of activist groups Greenpeace and Earth First! as image events. In a 1975 Greenpeace action involving a Soviet whaling ship, Greenpeace activists positioned their rubber boat between the course of the ship’s harpoon and a whale. The belief was that the Russians wouldn’t risk the activists’ lives by firing the harpoon. The Russians did fire the harpoon, right over the activists’ heads and into the whale. The steel harpoon cable missed slicing the rubber boat occupants by about one and a half metres. They didn’t manage to save the whale but they had the whole event on film. Robert Hunter, the then director of Greenpeace called the footage a -”mind bomb”, an image event that explodes “in the public’s consciousness to transform the way people view their world”. In the context of The Green Hijab movement, is not using the hijab to increase environmental consciousness “mind bomb” enough, to qualify as an explosion in public consciousness and to transform the way people view their world; or at least take some notice of what’s going on in it?
The success of an image event is not only how far it is disseminated through media, but also how much it reduces complexity to a set of symbols that work to suggest alternatives. DeLuca suggests that the ‘rhetorical force’ of an image is as, if not more, powerful than the rhetorical force of text or speech. That the image event is designed to be filmed and disseminated through media, doesn’t mean it has to accomplish an immediate goal. The image event is designed to enter consciousness, create discussion and increase, and/or change, public awareness.
The way I see it, slowing down runaways will take a countless and relentless variety of sticking fingers. Art is one; performance art is a powerful one that can take its body and strategically place it where it can have best effect. Where the body stands, what it does and what it uses, stops up the eyes, ears and consciousness of those around it, and suggests something else; a different way to see, think and behave. In the case of the green hijab, it is all about faith and repetition, until one day the image sparks the right thought, the right attitude. Gitte Sætre, from her text A Wednesday in May, Synchronised 6, point four of five points listed as potential catalysts for breakthrough –
In Scandinavia – of all places – a new global ecological movement emerged called the Green Hijab Movement. The movement increased awareness across cultural and religious division and started a new way of thinking about biodiversity and technology.
1 –Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord Originally published: 1967.
Original title: La société du spectacle.
2 –Bymag – Dette betyr de grønne hijabene. Kristine Kjendalen. Publisert:12. oktober 2017
Oppdatert:13. november 2017, 19:58 - http://bymag.no/2017/10/dette-betyr-de-gronne-hijabene
3 -Under Guy Debord in the 1950s the group LI -Letterist International- developed the
technique of détournement. When the LI evolved into the SI -Situationist International-
détournement was adapted and became known as - the practice of using existing
artistic/cultural production within a ‘superior construction of a milieu’.
4 -https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins
5 -Image events, the Public Sphere and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical
Environmental Groups. John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca.2003. Pg.317/318
http://comphacker.org/pdfs/338/10574147.pdf
John W. Delicath is co-editor of Communication and Public Participation in Environmental
Decision Making(SUNY Press).
Kevin Michael DeLuca is Associate Professor of Communication, University of Utah
6. Gitte Sætre. A Wednesday in May, Synchronised. Publication, Bergen International
Performance Festival 2012 – 2014 – 2016. Page 120-122.
by Gillian Carson.
I was once asked to describe my genetic and social environment by arranging paper dots around a large red dot (myself) on a white, A2 sheet. I did it and then I drew a black zigzag around all the dots. The zigzag described the noise that pollutes my environment, the noise results from what I call the momentum; the brainchild of capitalist society and what has become our driving force. The momentum is an egotistical see-all, hear-all parasite, gagging for a profit. It consumes like water filling a space. No opportunity is too small, too large or too sacred and wherever there’s a sale, there’s noise. I fantasize about sticking my finger into it, to slow it down or even stop it for a while.
My momentum and the noise it makes found a home with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.1 In theatre history, spectacle alludes to the sensory effect created by lights, costumes, music etc. and it can be measured by the ability of a theatre piece to draw the audience away from reality and into the story unfolding on the stage. Debord’s spectacle does the same but no curtain comes down because it would appear that his spectacle never ends. Debord’s spectacle alludes to Capitalism’s use of mass media, to deliver a perpetual supply of new realities promoting, selling, opportunely distracting, manipulating or endorsing – anything really, that suits capitalist agenda. Sticking my finger into the velocity of these ‘new realities’ does no more than out my impotent stance in the path of runaway capitalism. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the many beautiful functions of art is that of slowing down runaways.
In October 2017, The World Cyclist Championships flooded Bergen in fences, road blocks and temporary structures with fancy lighting: all of which worked to take the sunlight from everything that makes Bergen beautiful. There was a constant stream of police cars, marksmen waited on roofs and the whole was wallpapered in an assault of advertising and promotion clamouring for attention. Helicopter and drone streamed a flag waving, howling mob as they tracked cyclists through the streets and up the mountain towards the finishing line. Half way up the mountain the route passed by a large pond and standing in the water was a group of green hijab clad people. It was a fleeting image, but it entered the consciousness of millions. I wonder how many of those millions registered the image and wondered about its place in this particular runaway spectacle, but with their Green Hijab Movement, Sætre and Jacobi stuck in a finger long enough to turn at least some minds to the issue of our climate. From a Bymag interview -
By using hijab and removing the elements that are primarily linked to the controversial garment, the movement "Green Hijab Movement" wants to turn the focus on exactly that. In short, we use green hijabs. Green is the colour of ecology and the hijab is a symbol of grouping, says Gitte Sætre, the artist behind the project, which is first and foremost about climate issues.2
The green hijab marries two powerful symbols; the hijab, with all its religious/cultural/political baggage, and the colour green for global ecology,
We are The Green Hijab Movement
Green Hijab Movement is indifferent to nothing in this world
Pollution knows no borders
Green Hijab Movement is a movement emerging
from the ecological waste of our planet
Green for awareness of climate change
Green for change of direction
Green for sustainable systems
Green for global women
Green for global sisters
Green for global sister solidarity
Sætre and Jacobi wear green hijabs, and in so doing they exploit not only the garment’s ability to group; therefore regroup, but also its laden aura of heated debate. The hijab is a hot object and Gitte Sætre and Frans Jacobi have hijacked it.
The French détournement: to reroute or hijack, was adapted in the 1950s by Guy Debord in the SI -Situationist International3- as the practice of using existing artistic/cultural production within a ‘superior construction of a milieu’: or a new piece of art or cultural expression, most often used to further a political or social, critical point of view. In 2011, Martin Kaste, a correspondent on American NPR (National Public Radio), described détournement in Exploring Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Adbuster’ Origins as - turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself4 – as we know culture-jamming, as using slogans and logos to confront their advertisers or the political status quo. In short, détournement trips minds to send them in a different direction.
Tripping minds with something as ‘touchy’ as the hijab comes with a fair share of lip-service. Under a facebook post advertising a Green Hijab event, came the following question- ‘Why a green hijab and not a green sari?’ Dear fellow Facebook user, like the hijab, the sari is a cultural symbol but it is not the spectacle that the hijab has become, and to pierce the momentum to spark the minds within, one needs a far more loaded sign. Pussy riot would never have reached us wearing green saris while playing acoustic guitars on a beach. It takes guts and balls to strum up sympathy for a cause these days. Guts and balls.
We know what you are all thinking?
Why Hijabs?
Our answer is two other questions:
Who is benefitting on dividing people into groups?
Who is benefitting on setting people up against each other? Doom Meditation The Green Hijab Movement is spiritual. A critic of capitalism must contain spirituality.’
Resetting loaded symbols is a technique destined to succeed in drawing attention to whatever cause they are applied to. Sætre and Jacobi wear green hijabs, and work to draw public attention to critical issues that would otherwise be buried beneath the barrage and cacophony of the momentum. In a society where finance and profit are held closer to the heart and gain more respect than healthy public relations or human life, Sætre and Jacobi work to compensate for social ‘inattention’ and/or complacency. Their performances reveal, and present for attention, bad behaviour from the political and commercial sphere, and are strategically designed to stop-up and reset popular modes of thought and opinion. Performance videos and images are destined to be repeated in a public context, replaying and furthering the live event’s purpose.
While wading through information about activist art, I came across a paper ‘Image events, the Public Sphere and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups’ (2003), by John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca. This paper presents the term image events and describes them as ‘staged protests designed for media dissemination’. They characterize image events as arguments that take the form of protest, providing images as -argumentative fragments; as an intervention for public consideration that shifts the responsibility for argument construction to the audience.2 They claim that – ‘images, operating as argumentative fragments, are capable of offering unstated propositions and advancing indirect and incomplete claims in ways that function to block enthymemes as well as advance alternatives’.5
I’m still working to get my head around the enthymeme issue, but the advancing of alternatives seems to me to be exactly what Sætre and Jacobi are doing with their Green Hijab Movement. In Image Politics, The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, Kevin Michael DeLuca considers the activity of activist groups Greenpeace and Earth First! as image events. In a 1975 Greenpeace action involving a Soviet whaling ship, Greenpeace activists positioned their rubber boat between the course of the ship’s harpoon and a whale. The belief was that the Russians wouldn’t risk the activists’ lives by firing the harpoon. The Russians did fire the harpoon, right over the activists’ heads and into the whale. The steel harpoon cable missed slicing the rubber boat occupants by about one and a half metres. They didn’t manage to save the whale but they had the whole event on film. Robert Hunter, the then director of Greenpeace called the footage a -”mind bomb”, an image event that explodes “in the public’s consciousness to transform the way people view their world”. In the context of The Green Hijab movement, is not using the hijab to increase environmental consciousness “mind bomb” enough, to qualify as an explosion in public consciousness and to transform the way people view their world; or at least take some notice of what’s going on in it?
The success of an image event is not only how far it is disseminated through media, but also how much it reduces complexity to a set of symbols that work to suggest alternatives. DeLuca suggests that the ‘rhetorical force’ of an image is as, if not more, powerful than the rhetorical force of text or speech. That the image event is designed to be filmed and disseminated through media, doesn’t mean it has to accomplish an immediate goal. The image event is designed to enter consciousness, create discussion and increase, and/or change, public awareness.
The way I see it, slowing down runaways will take a countless and relentless variety of sticking fingers. Art is one; performance art is a powerful one that can take its body and strategically place it where it can have best effect. Where the body stands, what it does and what it uses, stops up the eyes, ears and consciousness of those around it, and suggests something else; a different way to see, think and behave. In the case of the green hijab, it is all about faith and repetition, until one day the image sparks the right thought, the right attitude. Gitte Sætre, from her text A Wednesday in May, Synchronised 6, point four of five points listed as potential catalysts for breakthrough –
In Scandinavia – of all places – a new global ecological movement emerged called the Green Hijab Movement. The movement increased awareness across cultural and religious division and started a new way of thinking about biodiversity and technology.
1 –Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord Originally published: 1967.
Original title: La société du spectacle.
2 –Bymag – Dette betyr de grønne hijabene. Kristine Kjendalen. Publisert:12. oktober 2017
Oppdatert:13. november 2017, 19:58 - http://bymag.no/2017/10/dette-betyr-de-gronne-hijabene
3 -Under Guy Debord in the 1950s the group LI -Letterist International- developed the
technique of détournement. When the LI evolved into the SI -Situationist International-
détournement was adapted and became known as - the practice of using existing
artistic/cultural production within a ‘superior construction of a milieu’.
4 -https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins
5 -Image events, the Public Sphere and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical
Environmental Groups. John W. Delicath and Kevin Michael DeLuca.2003. Pg.317/318
http://comphacker.org/pdfs/338/10574147.pdf
John W. Delicath is co-editor of Communication and Public Participation in Environmental
Decision Making(SUNY Press).
Kevin Michael DeLuca is Associate Professor of Communication, University of Utah
6. Gitte Sætre. A Wednesday in May, Synchronised. Publication, Bergen International
Performance Festival 2012 – 2014 – 2016. Page 120-122.