Paul Emmanuel
- Mark Auslander
- Mar 23
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Untethered / Retethered (2025)
Untethered/Retethered (2025) by South African artist Paul Emmanuel is a multimedia video installation exploring intimacy, loss, and connection among U.S. and Lebanese soldiers. Developed through interviews with combat veterans, the work brings together military material, moving image, and testimony to reflect on the bonds formed in war and the challenges of returning to civilian life.
Close Looking: Queer African Art and Family
A decommissioned U.S. military parachute hangs from the ceiling, its suspension lines severed, its fabric collapsing inward as it pools onto the gallery floor. At its center, a paratrooper’s harness hovers—empty, suspended—onto which a video is projected.
The video shows landscapes from Iraq and Afghanistan while voices of U.S. and Lebanese soldiers fill the space. Their stories move between humor and tenderness, recalling moments of intense camaraderie, including forms of playful, sometimes homoerotic bonding between “battle buddies.” These recollections reveal a kind of intimacy that exists within highly structured, masculine military environments—one that is rarely acknowledged outside of them.
The parachute, no longer functional, becomes a powerful metaphor. Once designed to control descent and ensure survival, it now suggests collapse and vulnerability. Its downward drift evokes both the physical act of falling and the emotional experience of soldiers returning to civilian life—“untethered” from the deep bonds that once sustained them.
At the same time, the act of storytelling—shared across languages, cultures, and experiences—offers a form of reconnection. Projected onto the harness that once covered the soldier’s chest, the voices seem to gather at the site of the body, suggesting memory, care, and emotional presence. In this way, the work holds a tension between disconnection and repair: between being untethered and the possibility of being “re-tethered” through shared experience.
Installed within the exhibition’s theme of Family, the work invites us to reconsider what family might mean. Here, family is not biological but forged through proximity, risk, and mutual dependence. The bonds described are intimate, complex, and often difficult to sustain beyond the conditions in which they were formed.
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Reflect and Explore
Why do you think this work is placed within the theme of Family? What kinds of relationships are formed under conditions of danger and dependence, and how do they continue—or break—once those conditions are gone?
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Extended Prompts for Closer Looking
Untethered Retethered Paul Emmanuel queer African art
Why do you think this work is placed within the theme of Family? What kinds of bonds emerge among soldiers in conditions of danger and dependence? How might these relationships continue—or fracture—once they return to civilian life?
What does this work suggest about maleness and masculinity? Is it significant that the inward-curving form of the parachute resembles anatomical forms associated with femininity, such as the cervix or vaginal passage? Might the artist be pointing to a longing for emotional or relational states that exist outside conventional gender binaries?
How do you understand the role of play in the video? Play can be both “not real” and deeply meaningful. What truths about intimacy, violence, joy, and vulnerability might be expressed through the soldiers’ humorous and sometimes provocative recollections?
Can this installation be understood through D.W. Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects—objects that help individuals navigate moments of psychological or emotional change? Might the parachute function in this way, mediating between military and civilian identities, or between grief and healing?
What do you experience when looking into the tunnel-like opening of the parachute? Does it evoke movement through time, memory, or states of being—perhaps between life and death, presence and absence?
Do you see parallels between this form and sacred architectural spaces, such as a church altar niche or a mihrab in a mosque? Might the installation create a contemplative or transitional space that invites reflection beyond the immediate present?
You might also compare this work to memorial sculptures such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Adams Memorial (also known as Grief), which commemorates a life marked by loss and suicide. Do the draped forms in Untethered/Retethered similarly evoke both mourning and the possibility of refuge?
Finally, consider depictions of Christ’s crucifixion, such as El Greco’s Christ on the Cross. These works often invite contemplation of suffering, sacrifice, and redemption. Are there resonances here with the artist’s careful rendering of the soldiers’ hands and feet, or with broader themes of care, service, and sacrifice?
Untethered Retethered Paul Emmanuel queer African art
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