[Opening panel of a comic, reading: “On July 1st we celebrate Keti Koti, ‘chains broken’ (say ‘kitty kotty’). The end of Dutch slavery! or well…]
[On this day 160 years ago (1863) slavery was officially abolished in the Dutch colonies Suriname & the Netherlands Antilles. 45.000 enslaved people are now free. Slaveowner: “but now what am I going to do without my free labour?!” Government official: “oh so sad! here’s compensation!”]
[Formed enslaved person: “Now what about compensation for the CENTURIES of free labour my ancestors and I were forced to do?” Slave owner and state official: “Hahahahaha nope” Slave owner: “In fact: to make is easier for ME you’ll be forced to work another DECADE for me! but I’ll pay you. A little.”]
[The Netherlands made a lot of money from enslaved people; by selling them & by the work they did on the plantations in Dutch colonies. The power & wealth of my country is partially build on SLAVERY and 160 years later we still benefit from this.]
[But until recently our colonial past was only seen as something positive… Former prime minister: “We need that VOC mentality!] (VOC= United East India Company)
[White person: “Why should I celebrate Keti Koti?! My ancestors weren’t enslaved!” Other white person: “No, but YOUR ancestors might have been SLAVE OWNERS! just saying.”]
[We all still benefit OR sugger from our history. And we can’t change the past… but we should ACKNOWLEDGE it. Image of a person planting a large flag with the word SLAVERY on the timeline of Dutch history.]
[And because there are too many people like this White person: “What does some Surinamese holiday has to do with ME?!” …we could definitely use a NATIONAL holiday! Other white person holding up a Dutch flag with the words “Built by enslaved people” on it.]
Meet the ✨Most Beautiful Tree Frog✨, Guibemantis pulcherrimus, a new species described by my colleagues and me in the journal Zootaxa this week. The scientific name ‘pulcherrimus’ literally means 'most beautiful’. It’s a close relative of Guibemantis pulcher (just 'beautiful’, ha!), but has more little spots and less pronounced lateral blotches. It’s found in the northeast of Madagascar, where it lives in Pandanus screw-palms.
So my mother recently got married (mashallah). And she set up this thing where guests were encouraged to take photos of the proceedings on their phones and text them in to a given number, after which they would be played as a slideshow on a screen at the front of the venue. I want you to take a minute to imagine how this went.
It began just about as you would expect. People taking photos of each other and the décor and taking selfies and having a good time. The slideshow was tasteful. Clearly not “professional,” but nice and personal.
And then people start getting a little drunk. A person who signs their work only as “Moo” posts this masterpiece:
[ID: a vertically oriented photo of a garbage can. A long table draped with lavender fabric at which the bride and groom are seated is in the background. The garbage can is centred in the frame, clearly the focus of the photo. End ID]
Someone at my table notices. “Is that… a photo of a garbage can? What?” We all express confusion and have a chuckle about it. Clearly someone is taking the prompt liberally. But the avant-garde approach to what is worthy of documenting does not end here, and our artist soon enters these submissions into the canon:
[ID: photos of a pendant fire sprinkler, a ceiling vent, a lightswitch, and a door handle. the photos show a casual, non-intensive approach to framing (neither perfectly even nor deliberately askew, &c.) end ID]
Meanwhile someone has uploaded this photo of the groom:
He is sitting at the bride and groom’s table alone with his hands clasped in front of him. I can’t show you his face but he has a bit of stubble and is wearing wire-framed rectangular glasses. I can best describe his vibe to you by saying that he wore this newsie cap to his wedding and this made perfect sense.
Using this photo, someone at our table makes their first few volleys:
[ID: the groom cut out of the photo from before and edited into an empty booth at an empty chain restaurant and an empty movie theatre, respectively. End ID]
At this point, basically everyone except the bride and groom have noticed, and are more or less following the evolution of this guérilla art project. Some people are trying to talk the instigators out of submitting their unworthy photos; others are riling them up.
Moo makes several more of their found object entries:
[ID: a cleaning schedule sign on a bathroom wall; a bathroom sign reading “men”; a digital thermostat; a framed photo of a smiling man, the sign for the men’s bathroom reflected in its glass. end ID]
And it goes back and forth like this for a while, Moo submitting objects (a close-up on the tines of their fork; a mop bucket; a framed fish head) and their nameless collaborator, not be to undone, putting the groom into more situations:
[ID: the groom’s head edited onto the body of a cast member in the Broadway musical Newsies, his cap causing him to blend in perfectly; the groom’s head edited onto Jamie’s head from Mythbusters as he poses next to Adam, his cap causing this edit to be perfectly seamless. end ID]
A further development in the form of these submissions occurs when The Editor invents reappropriation and collage, beginning to edit the groom into photos that other people have uploaded:
[ID: the photo of the groom at the table from earlier, edited so that there are two identical grooms sitting side-by-side: text over their heads reads “Just Married!”; another photo of the groom standing and smiling with a drink in his hand, apparently talking to another groom who is holding his stomach, throwing his head back and laughing aloud. end ID]
Meanwhile, Moo has taken his aesthetic ethos to its only possible logical conclusion:
A photo of a urinal. “Fountain,” Moo, iPhone camera, 2023.
People are now watching the screen even more actively, laughing each time a new silly photo arrives in the stream of genuine submissions. Moo submits a photo of a dented Pringles can seen through a grate in the street outside and a photo of a bag of road-salting ice. The photo of the groom at the table is edited so that he sports a towering Cat-in-the-Hat hat instead of the newsie cap; the groom is edited into an astronaut suit on the moon; he and the bride wearing her fur stole are edited as Jackie O. and JFK in the limo (this last The Editor wisely did not upload but sent only to me).
Not content, however, with editing the groom into non-wedding photos or with sabotaging earnest submissions to the photo album, The Editor proceeds to bring us full circle by reappropriating Moo’s recontextualisations, Sherrie Levine-like:
[ID: 1. the photo of the garbage can from earlier, with the groom edited onto the flap that you push garbage through; 2. the groom edited into the photo of the framed photograph from earlier; he has been made greyscale to match the photograph; 3. the photo of the urinal from above, with the groom edited into its bowl. end ID]
The people at Moo’s table (groom’s family) love this last submission (“Urine a Urinal,” Anonymous, iPhone camera, 2023). They watch the screen waiting for it to come up again, and when it does, they shout “there it is!” and laugh and clap.
Alas, our destabilisation of what constitutes artistic merit was not allowed to persist. Like the Society of Independent Artists sticking Duchamp’s “Fountain” behind a partition, the bride and groom silently deleted all of the unworthy submissions from the publicly shared album. Luckily, I saw this coming and was able to document the proceedings.
In conclusion, I recommend not crowdsourcing your wedding photos unless you have a very well-developed sense of humour.
