Having worked on her archives, I thought I knew Nathalie’s work fairly well; yet in this exhibition I discovered an incredible amount of material I had no idea existed.
These cine-photographic objects, for example, conceived when she was a student in Santa Cruz (California), which require the viewer’s participation to unfold or unroll the film.
The Villa Arson art center is large enough for the exhibition to spread across 14 rooms, allowing it to trace the different stages of a journey through tactical media, feminist and lesbian struggles, the appropriation of the Internet (Maybe the internet is really a great environment for women, because people can’t interrupt what you’re saying. Men can’t interrupt you. You can always finish your sentence online — Kathy Rae Huffman). At the intersection of all this: cyberfeminism, with a French translation of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which upends everything.
International Photography Festival, Arles, 1983. Bottom: recreation of the work for the Magnanrama exhibition.
One can also read some of her articles published in Gai Pied —a French gay weekly—, including one that flips all the “questions” typically directed at homosexuals, asking instead “why are you heterosexual? How do you know you’re straight if you’ve never been with a man?”, etc.
My goal in this post is simply to share a few images from the exhibition, and some memories and reflections it brings back. This is not a summary of Nathalie’s work (for that, see the exhibition website), nor a critical review for a cultural magazine such as Télérama. On that note, don’t be misled: the exhibition’s name comes from the title of the documentary Lesborama that Nathalie made for the first Nuit Gaie (gay night) on the TV channel Canal+. A compilation film… simply brilliant. Watch it on archive.org.
Nathalie never put herself forward; on the contrary, she tirelessly promoted others. She always had mailing lists to share, she brought together hackers of the free Internet, queer activists, art students… She was part of every hacktivist group, among those who play with technology, bend gender, attack and twist all kinds of borders.
Our generation is sometimes called “internet pioneers.” A generation, in the sense of those who had a modem in the early 1990s. Shaping ways of producing the internet, experimenting on the medium, and connecting people and ideas. (Both online through forums, mailing lists etc., and offline, in meetings — for me in Paris it was the Zelig conference, SPIP apéros, etc. — Nathalie had antennae that took her all over the world, and there too she shared her discoveries and her friends with us.)
In an interview, Nathalie explained why she disliked the militant approach, a word evoking the military, the notion of a group formed under a leader. For her, action was personal, networked, and solidary.
“Pioneer” is also a dangerous word. (A masculine word): soldiers employed in clearing and earthworks (note: as a child, I was myself a “scout de France”, haha). Pioneers brutalise the terrain, cut down forests, flatten hills; they also build bridges for future generations. With all the colonial imagery that carries — the scout movement was, after all, forged for the needs of the British colonial army in India and South Africa.
In short, “internet pioneer” places us in a very particular historical role: that of having created the conditions of possibility, of acceptability, for the practices that allowed the emergence of Google, Facebook, etc. Even though our actions were defined, most often, by opposition to this corporate takeover of the network.
Our relationship to politics, in those years 1995–2000, is a minority relationship. At the time I didn’t understand it: we were fighting on certain issues that seemed important to us, but for my part without much reflection on structural relations. In fact nothing in my profile — cis white man, son of teachers, maths student, straight, born in a wealthy country with a passport allowing me to travel everywhere — nothing therefore pushes me by necessity in a minority direction. But who listens to us? Who is interested in the issues that arise around this new means of expression? In the media, when Internet is mentioned (not often), it is to insult us; we are complicit in all crimes, complacent with the worst scum humanity can produce: paedophiles, nazis, Holocaust deniers… We are pirates, enemies of artists, destroyers of order. (And writing this, I can hear Nathalie laughing and saying: “yeahhhhh!”)
The Indie Web Manifesto
by le minirézo
The indie web, it’s these thousands of websites delivering millions of pages, built up with passion, opinions and information by Net users assuming their rights as citizens. The indie web is a new type of link between people, it’s a free and open space of shared knowledge where vanity has no place.
(…) While commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate.
uzine.net, 2 February 1997.
We discuss pseudonyms and secure communications? It must be because we can’t even stand behind our own actions, advocating anonymity to enable even greater crimes. That, roughly, is how we are portrayed in the press.
Nathalie, for her part, does not seek to produce moral panic, but instead makes a documentary (Internautes, 1995) that talks about what it actually means to be online. She gets involved, she tinkers, she produces a do-it-yourself discourse (Jello Biafra’s famous slogan: “Don’t hate the media, become the media”).
We defend freedom of expression? Our political elders call us Libertarians, Americans… Of course, compared to what LGBT people endure at the same period, it is nothing; compared to what Muslims have experienced since 2001, it is nothing. Compared to what all those with the wrong skin colour, the wrong gender, the wrong look, go through, it is nothing. But through this violence directed at us, through the effects it produces, one can understand, a little, these other violences — recognize oneself in them, see how they work.
So who is interested in our questions? Who joins us or invites us to discuss, to open spaces and perspectives? At the time, it is minority activists: anti-colonial, (cyber)feminist, Act Up. Nathalie is at that crossroads. These bridges, these conversations are for me the truly “pioneering” action, in the word’s second sense: the one that creates the spaces and conditions of possibility for what comes next.
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In keeping with Nathalie Magnan’s wish that every presentation of her work include a call for donations in support of sea rescue, we invite you to discover the commitment and actions of the association SOS Méditerranée, which was especially dear to her heart.