Fig 1: deSouza creates fictional landscapes—what he calls “fabricated, tabletop landscape models”

In the summer of 1982, during the Israeli invasion and the siege of Lebanon, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “‘I won’t be leaving,’ I say, ‘ because I don’t know where I’ll be going, I won’t leave.’” Then he asks a person he calls ‘F’, “And you?” And F answers, “‘I’m staying. I’m Lebanese, and this is my country. Where am I to go?’”¹ F’s reply suddenly makes Darwish become aware of his status as an exile, and the void created in a space where his home was supposed to be. Darwish was born in Upper Galilee, present- day Haifa in Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, he and his family fled to Lebanon.² This seemingly distant event cannot be distanced from the tragedy that took place here in New York. Since 1982, the U.S.-Israeli relationship has been constantly provoking the Arab world’s antipathy toward this country. Later, this exile from Galilee for thirty-one years writes: “We have traveled like other people, but we / return to nowhere / we have a country of words.”³

Because of political and economic conditions, nearly 100 million people are displaced from their geographical boundaries of home, and this unparalleled level of demographic change is profoundly challenging our world’s most basic notions of community, nation, culture, and citizenship.⁴ For many émigrés, home is no longer a physical geographical boundary, but where their memory resides.

If words are home to a Palestinian exile, visual expression can be regarded as a home to Allan deSouza, a second-generation immigrant. No single country claims deSouza, who was born in Kenya to Goan parents. His family’s move from their home, the former Portuguese colony of Goa, India to Kenya was mainly for economic reasons. With Kenya’s independence, the deSouzas moved to Great Britain, and currently deSouza resides in Los Angeles. In his ongoing series of works begun in 1999, entitled Terrains, deSouza creates fictional landscapes—what he calls “fabricated, tabletop landscape models” (Fig. 1). The void as homeland also exists in deSouza’s works. Being twice removed from his place of birth, deSouza has a strong longing for a homeland. As he described it, Terrains is an effort to “externalize those emotions of longing to undo their hold [and] view them from a distance.” He obsessively introduces objects from everyday life, often from his own body, such as earwax, eyelashes, and fingernail clippings, in his artificial landscapes. DeSouza then photographs such fabricated landscapes, computer-scans the negatives, and manipulates them in the manner of painting. Such painstaking acts to reclaim the void, the longing for and belonging to home, by fabricating imaginary landscapes, open up a new page in the American landscape tradition.

In Allan deSouza: Recent Works, held at Talwar Gallery , one room exhibited such works dealing mainly with body parts. Filling the void with a particular presence—such as his bodily detritus—and using photography, deSouza’s work can most effectively be interpreted from the photographical index. Traditionally, the paintings can be regarded as Symbolic, as it enters into human consciousness through pictorial representation by forming a connection between objects and their meanings. This relationship, however, does not apply to photography, because photography is the result of a physical imprint, or index, transferred by light reflection onto light-sensitive paper. The separation of the image from the actual presence of the object disallows the process of schematization. Photography is a place, filled with signification, that operates between different shifters and becomes the culture of reception.⁵

The “shifter” is a category of linguistic signs introduced by the linguist Roman Jacobson, which is filled with significance, only because it is empty. The word ‘this’ is such a sign, waiting each time to be supplied with its referents. The personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are also shifters that shift according to their users. Because of its nature, in the early development of a child, the acquisition for the uses of the shifter, “I” and “you” is the last thing to be correctly learned, and often, in the case of speech in autistic children, the use of personal pronouns collapses and becomes reversed.

DeSouza, however, moves one step further from the photographical index through the added process of image manipulation. DeSouza deliberately fabricates the Symbolic with a falsehood in order to expose another. For example, in his rhetorically fashioned landscape photography, which resembles nineteenth century barren landscape paintings, in comparison to representative nineteenth century American Romantic landscape paintings, such as the works by Thomas Cole, we see that his work does not convey any fixed ideas. Rather it presents its readers with something uncanny; in many cases, it even betrays our expectation of finding any representations of landscape. In this process, the reader ought to fill a falsehood with signifiers from his or her own reservoir to produce meaning in deSouza’s landscape. Such process heightens the reader’s reception toward the constitution of Symbolic, as often, the Symbolic entails both historical and social frameworks preexistent to the reader’s own being.

Leading a nomadic life, deSouza has a rather ambiguous cultural identity. Usually, as pointed out by the Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, culture serves as a source of identity, helping us to see ourselves, our people, and tradition in the best light. “In time,” Said writes, “this differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them.’”⁶ Such is not the case for deSouza. Here, we may expand the concept of shifter from personal pronouns to geographical boundaries or countries. As deSouza moved from one continent to another, every time, the shifter changed and produced a different significance, resulting in a complex vision.
This flux in vision generated by living in different parts of the world gives deSouza a good reason to challenge the Symbolic that exists in any given society. For example, his deliberate use of the nineteenth century pictorial American landscape tradition questions the social and cultural constitutions of the U.S. In the nineteenth century, American Romanticism played an active role in establishing a specific American identity. According to the art historians James Soby and Dorothy Miller, American Romantic tradition “came into being in London with Benjamin West, as part of the European movement, and brought to this country in the early 19th century.”⁷ The art historian Oswaldo Roque makes a similar observation. British cultural identity, therefore, is crucial in the establishment of American identity. Roque also sees that major human concerns, such as a people’s morality, a nation’s mission, and the future, found their way into works of art in this period.⁸ Such ideas presented by the artist find ways to connect to the establishment of nationalism. For example, a nineteenth century former mayor of New York, Philip Hone, said: “I think every American is bound to prove his love of country by admiring Cole. ”⁹ This statement confirms for us the connection between culture and nationalism. Remembering that the Romanticism in America began as part of the European movement, in terms of institutional nationalism, the U.S. worked from European models to fabricate a linear historiography since the time of independence. On the other hand, America is an immigrant settler society superimposed on the ruins of a considerable native presence, and American identity is too varied to be unitary and homogenous. DeSouza’s seeming adherence to the nineteenth century landscape tradition is a re-examination of the notion of unitary identity, and linear and subsumed history, where he sees the whole as complex, hybrid, heterogeneous, and un-monolithic.¹⁰

A Blurring of the World, a Refocusing Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days Maybe Years Later, with Everything Put Together Differently, in Ways He Doesn’t Understand, is the latest work by deSouza exhibited at Talwar Gallery. The title suggests how our perception of an event alters by different moments, and finally becomes something entirely different from what originally had took place. This specific work evokes the event that took place on the morning of September 11th. However, as one recovers from the initial shock caused by this work, one discovers that the scene is composed of mischievously arranged discarded computer chips, thin blue lines, inserted images of the flickering flames and the tailing smoke. There are no Twin Towers or crashing airplanes depicted here. Much of what evokes the events of 9/11 owes to the power of mass media that has harped incessantly on the unbearable suffering, consequently evoking a chilling patriotism, and reasserting a worn-out nationalism in a multiracial, and multicultural environment.

In reality, only the title of the work came after September 11th, forging a more concrete relationship between the work and the tragedy.¹¹ DeSouza happened to create this work about a month prior to the 9/11 event, when he traveled and lived in Donegal, Ireland and heard about sectarian violence that takes place in Northern Ireland.

DeSouza’s American landscape manifestation, which does not seek to forge any concrete connection between objects and their meanings, operates contrary to the traditional relationship between object and idea entailed in painting. This traditional relationship often insistently connects culture and nationalism. Such insistence, as Said points out, only ends up in the “awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess.”¹² On the other hand, keeping in mind the concept of “shifter,” we recognize that “self” and “other” can also be regarded as artifice. DeSouza’s fictional homeland, constituted of his memories and thoughts living a nomadic life, works to reveal contradictions inhabiting static or Symbolic ideas in a given society, and thus brings the world into more layered and complex place.

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