- Jul 16
- 11 min read
PHOTOFILE | ESSAY
BIRGIT EUSTERSCHULTE
NOMADIC HISTORIES AS ARTISTIC ARCHIVE
Central Asian Counter-Narratives in Gulzat Egemberdieva’s Film Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field
“Speaking nearby” is a concept by Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha that can be traced back to her first documentary film, Reassemblage. The footage for this film was shot in 1982 in Senegal, where Trinh was then living and working. In a critical examination of knowledge production concerning the African continent, she states right at the beginning of the film: “I do not intend to speak about / Just speak near by.”[1] This form of “indirect speaking,” as Trinh later described it in an interview with Nancy N. Chen, refrains from speaking about or representing others. In the same interview, she elaborates that it is “a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it.”[2]
This quote can also be used as an introduction to Gulzat Egemberdieva’s documentary practice in her 2017 film Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field. In Egemberdieva’s film, speaking nearby can also be understood as “speaking with,” as the filmmaker develops a complex dialogical structure in her film that allows narrative forms and documentary images of different origins to speak and resonate without objectifying or representing them. Trinh understands “speaking nearby” not as a transferable method, but as “an attitude in life, a way of positioning oneself in relation to the world.”[3] In the following, I would like to show how Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field achieves this kind of speaking, which is not limited to commentary, and to establish the potential for such a practice of artistic historicization as a method for dealing with archives.[4]
A few years ago, Egemberdieva, who now lives in Berlin, had the opportunity to conduct interviews with a group of Kyrgyz Pamiri in the province of Naryn in Kyrgyzstan. The term Pamiri is a self-designation of the nomadic groups who live in the Pamir Mountains, a high mountain range in Central Asia that spans Tajikistan, Afghanistan, China, and Kyrgyzstan. On this occasion, the leader of the group, Khan Abdil Bait, handed Egemberdieva video material that the Pamiri had recorded themselves with a small Panasonic camera. Abdil Bait had the idea that the artist could do something with this material.[5] These recordings document the traditional life of the nomadic group and at the same time serve as a means of communication in an oral culture, enabling them to exchange information with relatives who lived far away and were separated by national borders. Accordingly, the footage shows everyday scenes, traditional equestrian games, and weddings, but also includes specific messages to individual family members.
What does it mean to work with the documentary video material of a nomadic group whose tradition is not based on a written culture? How can an adequate practice of historicizing or archiving be developed that does justice to the private documents of an oral culture and its significance for the present, but without codifying them?
In his 1995 book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified four moments that lead to the silencing of history and the past, and one can think of the absence of nomadic voices in historiography as an exemplary case. According to Trouillot, this disappearance can be felt “in the moment of fact creation (the making of sources)” and “the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)” as well as in “the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”[6] Trouillot’s analysis of the moments of disappearance are helpful here to trace the elementary steps of a production of history, and to see the handover of collected video recordings of the Pamiri as a self-determined form of archiving as well as an emancipation from a hegemonic and imperial historiography in which a nomadic perspective does not seem to play a role.[7]
While the handing over of collected artifacts decisively initiates the process of producing history, it is above all the methodology behind the practice of artistic historicizing that I would like to explore here. The concept of historicizing initially refers to the narrative shaping of the past; it is a fundamental component of the work of historians. Narrativization has the inherent task of establishing a connection between the past and the present. I assume that the “artist as historian”[8] can deal more freely with the methods of historicizing, not only because they are not bound by academic conventions, but also because they address other questions to the archive and the past. At the same time, reflecting on the methods of narrativization and the conditions of knowledge production is an essential concern of artistic historicization. The practice of historicizing and working with archives is not about the past itself, as Jacques Derrida repeatedly noted in Archive Fever: “The question of the archive is not […] a question of the past. […] It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and a responsibility for tomorrow.”[9]
Egemberdieva’s method of historicizing is also directed towards the future. She fulfills her responsibility towards the video “letters” entrusted to her by responding with a dialogical approach that takes up and continues the oral principle of the found-footage material. The dialogical principle is laid out in the Pamiri’s video material, where the autobiographical dialogue is directed to family members separated by national borders, expecting an answer. This answer is provided in the film through further conversations, interwoven with the Pamiri’s stories.
In addition to her documentary images, a central element of the response in Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field are five telephone conversations in which the artist (in Canada) and her brother (in Kulanak) talk to each other, whereby the images we see onscreen are reserved for Kyrgyz life in the past and present. The very personal narratives of the artist and the video letters of the Pamiri meet in what they report and how they do it, and enter into a multi-layered conversation where they operate as equals and in coevalness.
In this way, the artist avoids speaking for or dealing with representation by bringing autobiographical speech and documentary footage from various places and times into an encounter with the found footage material. All narratives are told from a personal perspective, address a direct counterpart, and assume the presence of a listener. The video material of the Pamiri is thus neither analyzed, categorized, nor objectified, but is instead made to speak for itself in this encounter. The narratives reflect and respond to each other across space and time and create a complex and poetic reflection of individual and collective living conditions under the socio-political transformations of Kyrgyzstan from the pre-Soviet era to today’s post-Soviet era. The films oscillate between documentary and fictional narratives, historical footage, autobiography, and video portraits; they reflect the search for identity between past and present as well as national and regional borders in modern Kyrgyzstan.
The aforementioned telephone conversations between Egemberdieva and her brother, Azamat, structure the 15-minute film. While these telephone conversations begin with a view of the night sky over Toronto, they are followed by cinematic images of the artist. The filmmaker and her brother situate themselves in relation to the video letters through shared memories and the different realities of life that they share. The conversation about the editing process and the content of the film also takes on a reflective level. These dialogues create resonances with the found-footage material on various levels, with life being separated by national borders, forming a clear analogy between the narratives. Similar to the video communication of the Pamiri, the telephone conversations reveal the insurmountability of borders: “Let the others go to Canada and be happy,” we hear Azamat say, who has once again been unsuccessful in obtaining a visa. He later speaks of the Pamiri: “They are mountain people, free. We are neither on the mountain, nor in the fields.”[10]
From the interviews and recordings that Egemberdieva herself was able to make with the Pamiri a few years prior, an interwoven structure of stories and narratives with dynamic constellations of meaning emerges in the film: we hear about yesterday and today; stories of the ancestors are recalled; dreams and memories are shared; literary texts are read aloud. Like the textual level of the film, the visual level revolves around a montage of the intricate and unfinished story of Kyrgyz nomads between past and present, between tradition and modernity, the private and the political, nomadism, sedentariness, and national border regimes, reflecting the social and political present of a post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. The polyphony of voices and narratives resists a hierarchization of materials and perspectives as well as the objectification of nomadic representation. Rather, the dialogical principle creates a poetically-resonant space that opens up constellations of meaning, but does not fix them. In the montage of voices, the individual elements remain locatable to their original contexts via the film formats and the materiality of the film images, and exclude an appropriative aestheticization.
In the siblings’ conversation, we learn about the family history, livestock farming, the collectivization of herds during Soviet times, and the later dissolution of the kolkhozes, a Russian form of collective economy. It becomes clear that the political changes from the pre-Soviet to the post-Soviet era, which continue to shape the siblings’ lives to this day, are linked to the experiences and accounts of the nomads. The stories correspond with each other without saying so in concrete terms: for example, when the state-enforced settlement of many nomadic groups is visually associated with images of today’s rather dreary settlements; or when excerpts from the patriotic historical novel The Broken Sword (1971) by Tologon Kasymbekov are read out, recounting the Kyrgyz people’s struggle for independence from Russian rule in the 19th century. In other constellations of images, the film tells a story of self-empowerment, when the Pamiri take the camera into their own hands and create a different image from the one that had been created by German ethnographers and others around a hundred years earlier, whose attributions and historical representations still shape the perception of nomadic life today.
When I previously spoke of a “poetic” space, it was because the film both reflects on its own verbal or cinematic means (for example, when the production process is thematized in the film) and operates with an openness to the individual elements, allowing them to speak for themselves. On the level of the visual and the narrative, correspondences appear in the course of the film, disappear again, and open up new layers of meaning. The constitution of meaning cannot be fixed in individual set pieces, but moves dynamically between them in a polyphony.
Reflexivity and multivocality alone, as Trinh puts it, are not new approaches in the critique of anthropology and are “not necessarily a solution to the problems of centralized and hierarchical knowledge”; rather, their contributions “would have to depend on the way they are practiced.”[11] In Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field, the continuation of the oral tradition, the analogies and connections between the personal narratives from differing perspectives, and the dialogical reference to the found-footage material form the methodical core of the historicization. A hierarchization—both of materials and of the positions of the speakers—is thus countered, as is a linearity of narration. In the montage, the filmic fragments frame each other and take on a life of their own, which does not require any supposedly objective commentary from the outside. The film thus does not strive for a fixed or objective form of knowledge, as is often the basis of Western, dualistic knowledge production, and does not create a chronology of events, but rather traces a dialogically-structured experiential space of the search for identity, belonging, and freedom in the Kyrgyz present, in which the commonality of experience becomes just as visible as differences and positionalities. The film avoids objectification and othering through an open and poetic narrative structure in which different voices not only speak but are also heard. One could also say that the subaltern voices become speakers here—speakers in Spivak’s sense: they are heard and given meaning.[12]
In Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field, the archive of the nomads becomes a starting point for counter-history and a different production of knowledge on various levels, which neither claims objectivity nor creates a static narrative: the film literally makes the materials and sources speak and seeks an adequate form to respond to the archive. In doing so, the artist takes a critical and reflexive distance from dominant, one-dimensional historiographies and creates a layered and multi-perspective understanding of history. In an artist statement concerning Neither in the Mountains, nor in the Field, Egemberdieva refers to the “decolonial option,” as developed by Anibal Quijano and others of the Modernidad/Colonialidad group, which has guided her.[13] To refer to “decolonial options” is by no means to apply “a system or a uniform reservoir of methods and practices,” but rather a way of thinking that “generally feeds on the critique of the colonial conditionality of occidental thinking and the imperial and colonial ideas developed from it.”[14] Egemberdieva’s decolonial thinking is particularly evident in the attitude of “speaking nearby” described at the beginning, which makes the voices of others perceptible in Neither in the Mountains, nor in the Field. Like Trinh’s “speaking nearby,” no transferable method of historicizing can be deduced from her approach, but rather a methodological orientation based on dialogical thinking and a polyphony of voices.
All images are taken from Gulzat Egemberdieva’s film Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field, 2022; © Gulzat Egemberdieva
Bibliography
Chen, Nancy N., and Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Speaking Nearby,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990 – 1994, ed. Lucien Taylor, New York; London: Routledge, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Godfrey, Mark, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring, 2007): 140–72.
Kastner, Jens, and Tom Waibel, “Dekoloniale Option. Argumente, Begriffe und Kontexte dekolonialer Theoriebildung,” in Walter D. Mignolo, Epistemischer Ungehorsam: Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität, Vienna; Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2019.
Mignolo, Walter D., and Arturo Escobar (eds.), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, London; New York: Routledge, 2010.
Spivak, Gayatri, Can the subaltern speak? Postkolonialität und Subalterne Artikulation, Vienna; Berlin: Turia+Kant 2008.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed, New York: Routledge, 1992.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003.
[1] Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96.
[2] Nancy N. Chen and Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Speaking Nearby,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990 – 1994, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York; London: Routledge, 1994), 433–51.
[3] Ibid.
[4] I would like to thank my colleague Lisa Paland for introducing me to the work of Gulzat Egemberdieva.
[5] This is based on an unpublished conversation between Gulzat Egemberdieva and Eva Bentcheva in the context of the exhibition Talking Heads: Archival Echoes, Kunstverein Tiergarten – Galerie Nord, Berlin 2023.
[6] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 26.
[7] Since the 19th century, under Russian rule, many nomads were forced to settle down and adopt a “modern” way of life. The nomadic tradition still characterizes the Kyrgyz culture and self-image today.
[8] Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring, 2007): 140–72.
[9] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36.
[10] Gulzat Egemberdieva, Neither on the Mountain, nor in the Field, 2017. Quote taken from the film.
[11] Nancy N. Chen/Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Speaking Nearby,” 439–40.
[12] Gayatri Spivak, Can the subaltern speak? Postkolonialität und Subalterne Artikulation (Vienna; Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2008).
[13] Artist Statement by Gulzat Egemberdieva, https://www.chemodanfilms.com/neitheronthemountain; On the concept of the “decolonial option” see e.g. Globalization and the Decolonial Option, eds. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (London; New York: Routledge, 2010).
[14] Jens Kastner and Tom Waibel, “Dekoloniale Option. Argumente, Begriffe und Kontexte dekolonialer Theoriebildung,” in Walter D. Mignolo, Epistemischer Ungehorsam: Rhetorik der Moderne, Logik der Kolonialität und Grammatik der Dekolonialität (Vienna; Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2019), 30 (translation by the author).
How to cite
Eusterschulte, Birgit. "Nomadic Histories as Artistic Archive." Archivo Photofile. 16 July 2025. https://www.archivoplatform.com/post/essay-eusterschulte-25 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15971890.
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