Between 1978 and 1980, queer German novelist, poet, and self-taught ethnographer Hubert Fichte traveled to New York to engage with a city that he perceived to be a center of Afro-diasporic culture and tradition. From the early 1970s and into the following decade, alongside his partner Leonore Mau, Fichte made several journeys to research the daily lives and religious practices of Afro-diasporic communities in Benin, Senegal, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, and the US among other places. During this period Fichte attempted to create a new ethnology that would run counter to an academic and colonial model. This effort coalesced in Fichte’s development of a diaristic form of ethnographic writing that accounted for his own subjectivity and embeddedness within a given context. Fichte’s novel The Black City features several sprawling long-form texts and interviews related to his encounters with artists, scholars, activists, spiritualists, everyday citizens, and queer communities in New York. Taking Fichte’s text as a starting point, Journeys with the Initiated unfolds along two registers. The first is a reading room featuring selected texts, photographs, and other documents that contextualize Fichte’s sojourn in New York and highlight his writing, as well as the work of other key thinkers that ground his perspective on ethnography and writing. The second component of the exhibition includes a selection of existing and newly commissioned works across video, sculpture, performance.
New York City, NY; NYC