Mike Phillips’ "A Shadow of Myself": Reading a post-Cold War Thriller through an Afropean Lens

When Mike Phillips’ novel A Shadow of Myself appeared in 2000, the book’s cover – a lone man walking into the fog on Prague’s Charles Bridge – suggested what the inside of the dust jacket confirmed: The text was marketed as a political thriller, a type of text related to both spy novels and crime fiction, and thus to a broader genre which, in turn, had formerly relied on and been transformed by the dual power relations of the Cold War (cf. Boltanski 2014, 37). A Shadow of Myself transcends not only its genre’s limitations but also the Cold War time frame (the bulk of the novel’s plot is set in 1999 but reaches back to 1956) with its political dichotomy. While the novel is teeming with former spies, the authorities to which they reported are no longer in place – making A Shadow of Myself a former-spy novel, i.e., as I hope to show, a text that demonstrates a genre’s dissolution (or transformation) through its own example.

A few words on the author: Mike Phillips is well-known not only as an author of crime fiction but also for his non-fiction texts, for his longstanding work in broadcasting and journalism, and for his enduring political engagement. His non-fiction book Windrush. The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998), co-written with his brother Trevor Phillips, is still considered a seminal publication on the Windrush generation. In 2018, Phillips was part of the independent advisory group formed in response to the so-called ‘windrush scandal’ of 2018, when, as a result of Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ home office policy, Windrush generation citizens were treated as illegal immigrants to the UK.

Unsurprisingly, Phillips has never shied away from tackling highly relevant and divisive political questions in his crime fiction as well. A Shadow of Myself’s generic thriller-cover coupled with the enduring prejudice against the genre does not necessarily lead an audience to expect the novel’s narrative and political complexity. Phillips’ 1997 crime novel The Dancing Face has recently fared better in this regard: In 2021, it was republished as part of the Penguin series ‘Black Britain. Writing Back’, curated by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo. The 2021 edition comes not only with an introduction by Evaristo herself but also boasts a tasteful abstract cover created by London artist Daniel Dzonu-Clarke that highlights the novel’s themes. 

In the introduction, Evaristo confronts crime fiction’s “bad rep in literary circles” (Evaristo 2021, viii) head on. While she admits to the genre’s “tendency to focus on the more formulaic mechanics of storytelling” (Evaristo 2021, viii), she stresses its diversity in terms of its sub-categories, reaching from the classic hard-boiled detective novel to the legal thriller. Evaristo insists that she is not interested in establishing a counter-canon with the ‘Black Britain. Writing Back’ series (thereby merely producing another hierarchical, exclusive structure; Evaristo 2021, vii). Nevertheless, the crime fiction re-published in the series (one other novel, a legal thriller, thus far) is, I would argue, elevated not only to a new level of visibility but also to a new level of prestige.

Evaristo honours Phillips as a pioneer of Black British crime fiction “whose novels are both page-turners and intellectual investigations into important social and political issues” (Evaristo 2021, xi). The plot of The Dancing Face could not be more illustrative of this statement: As university lecturer Gus is increasingly frustrated by the ‘Committee for Reparations to Africa’ of which he is a member, he decides to re-steal a priceless Beninois mask from a London museum. A Shadow of Myself, too, is concerned with questions of cultural heritage, criminal activity (and its potential for transforming society), even with art theft but in a very different geographical and cultural context. In an essay published under the title ‘Narratives of Desire – A Writer’s Statement’ in the volume Facing the East in the West. Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, Phillips reflected on his first foray into this new context: 

Ironically, one of the first questions I was always asked in Britain when I published my novel A Shadow of Myself (2000) was: ‘Why are you interested in Eastern Europe?’ The issue, of course, was partly that, as a black writer, I was expected to limit myself to the former colonies. On the other hand, statements of this kind were in some sense a measure of our collective failure (Phillips 2010, 47).

Phillips’ British interrogators, as described by him, seem to imagine Eastern Europe as a white space and simultaneously seem unaware of its imperial and colonial legacies. A Shadow of Myself dismantles such a facile, monolithic idea of ‘Eastern Europe’, this ever-shifting imaginary with its diffuse borders, through the entanglement of its Afropean characters’ lives with Eastern Europe and through its reflection of Central Eastern European marginality, specifically in its Prague chapters (cf. Gasser 2023, 16). Confronting British representations of Eastern Europe and their ‘collective failure’, Phillips’ novel aims to “meet the challenge of a new East European context” (cf. Phillips 2010, 45).

Considering this endeavour, Phillips’ choice of genre might seem counterintuitive. The political thriller transformed with the Cold War and to a certain extent relied on its antagonistic binary structure, suited to tense and thrilling plots. Furthermore, the genre traditionally demands stereotypes. In his instructive Mysteries and Conspiracies – Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, Luc Boltanski has traced the history of British crime fiction’s (mis-)representations of Eastern Europe back to the Victorian period. Commenting on Sherlock Holmes’s “geopolitics”, Boltanski notes that Arthur Conan Doyle’s texts present “foreign countries, especially those of continental Europe but also Russia and South America, […] as places riddled through and through with revolutionary forces whose leaders are bloodthirsty criminals. The duty of good Englishmen is thus to protect Great Britain, a space where order reigns, against the risks of contamination by outside agents” (Boltanski 2014, 312). Such xenophobic stereotypes, Boltanski argues, were already a Victorian commonplace. Maurizio Ascari showcases crime fiction’s responsiveness to “changing geopolitical conditions” based on the example of the so-called ‘invasion novels’ of the late-Victorian and early Edwardian period, tied to a loss of imperial confidence and perceived fragility (Ascari 2007, 162).

Phillips continues this line of inquiry as he sketches British fiction’s “subtle mutations” in representing Eastern Europe in the 20th century. A “straight conceptual line”, Phillips argues, might be drawn “between Olivia Manning’s prewar Bucharest, drenched as it is in terror and anxiety, to Eric Ambler’s assassin-haunted Balkans, and Graham Greene’s dangerous Vienna” (Phillips 2010, 43). These kinds of tropes are united and heightened, Phillips argues, in the spy novel popularised by, amongst other, John le Carré. In comparing British representations of Eastern Europe with images emerging from Eastern European cinema (specifically, two Romanian films) Phillips makes a distinction between what he calls ‘active’ and ‘static’ stereotypes: “There is [...] a world of difference between active stereotypes, that is, stereotypes which are subject to being affected by current experiences and debates, as opposed to static stereotypes which are essentially a recycling of archaic mythologies” (Phillips 2010, 46).

My objective here is not to determine whether the distinction between active and static stereotypes is viable in the long term (I suspect that it is not). Rather, I propose to read A Shadow of Myself as Phillips’ experiment with ‘active’ stereotypes in a genre that has been shaped by their ‘static’ counterpart. Going back to Evaristo’s observation about the ‘formulaic mechanics of storytelling’, it should be noted that Phillips has already significantly altered the formula of the political thriller as it emerged in the 20th century by writing A Shadow of Myself as a post-Cold War thriller or, in other words, a former-spy novel that explores the aftermath of espionage. This alteration amounts to breaking the genre’s mould completely. At the same time, the novel still operates with the remnants of both Cold War-associated stereotypes and the spy novel as a genre.

The ’activation’ of geopolitical and genre-specific stereotypes is enabled not only through the novel’s time frame but through its geographical boundaries as well. Its six main chapters are divided by the cities in and around which the plot unfolds: Hamburg (first chapter), Prague and London (second and fourth, and third and fifth chapter, respectively), and Berlin (final chapter). Thus, Phillips constructs a spatio-temporal context that defies facile categorization. The novel is both of and outside of the Cold War time frame, while its geographical scope complicates the East-West binaries associated with the period. 

The trio at the novel’s centre are a Ghanaian father, Kofi Coker, and his two estranged sons, Joseph and George, who grow up, one in London, the other in East Berlin, each without knowledge of his half-brother. George is raised by his Russian mother, Katya, without knowing his father. The story of how Kofi met Katya while studying in Moscow in 1956–57, is told in four excerpts from Kofi’s ‘diary of desire’, written years later in a London public library. These four chapters (functioning essentially as ‘flashbacks’) are interspersed with the chapters moving the plot along in 1998 and mainly 1999. The two brothers meet for the first time in Prague, where Joseph is presenting a documentary about his father Kofi and his friends, fellow Africans who came to England after their countries achieved independence, at a film festival. The film’s troubled production history serves as a kind of meta-commentary to A Shadow of Myself. Kofi and his friends view Joseph’s film with scepticism because, as Joseph comes to realize himself, he has neglected to present their stories in the context of social change and political action, making them trivial and palatable for a white British audience instead (Phillips 2000, 52). A Shadow of Myself, on the other hand, presents the characters’ interpersonal relations and their biographies as inseparable from the political history the novel traces. 

While the novel’s characters and geographical constellations are set in triangular structures, the figure of the double is equally important, as the ambivalent title A Shadow of Myself already suggests. The novel introduces the idea of the brothers’ doppelgängertum at their very first meeting in Prague: “The first time Joseph Coker saw George he had the peculiar feeling that he was looking at a jumbled-up version of himself […]”. Here, the image of the double is evoked with a striking immediacy but as an image that is distorted. Through Joseph’s eyes, George appears as the titular ‘shadow’ of himself, the ‘other’ brother from another Europe. The doppelgänger theme runs through the novel and reaches its escalation point in the novel’s last chapter when Joseph is mistaken for George in the streets of Berlin and beaten up by his brother’s criminal rivals. In a sense, this can be read as a play on the stereotypes of spy fiction in which the villains/criminals are often not only more internationalist than the heroic protagonist but also clearly racialised (Woolf 1990, 92f.). While this is true for both brothers, one of them is elevated by his Britishness in a hierarchy that the novel depicts and discusses.

George comments on his British brother’s view of himself: “Because you are English you think this is some mad man from the East” (Phillips 2000, 55). Joseph’s incredulity at finding an unknown brother at all is increased by finding him in Prague: “None of this would have surprised me much if it had been the USA or South America. Anywhere except Eastern Europe. These are places where you expect to find black people. We’re part of the culture, we helped shape it, we’re part of what it is. It seems natural somehow to be there. Out here it’s as white as a bowl of milk” (Phillips 2000, 83). The prejudice that Phillips assigns to Joseph is well-established and not limited to an outsider’s perspective. To give an example, Afro-Czech writers Tomáš Zmeškal and Obonete S. Ubam discuss their confrontation with the implicit idea of an exclusively white Czech identity, despite socialist Czechoslovakia’s pretence to the contrary (cf. Pucherová 2023, 144). A Shadow of Myself ascribes similar experiences to both Kofi in Russia and George in the GDR and Czechoslovakia: as they experience racism in socialist states that had proudly declared to have overcome it, they are denied thinking of themselves as belonging.

Despite thus highlighting a seldom represented perspective, George’s storyline is more genre-conventional (or ‘formulaic’) than his brother’s. He is involved in a criminal racket with his Russian cousin Valentin, selling German cars to buyers in Eastern Europe and receiving valuable art pieces as payment in return (among them a painting by the Jewish Russian landscape painter Yitzchak Levitan, the key piece, which gets them into deep trouble). In the novel’s first chapter, his life story growing up as an Afro-German boy with a Russian mother in East-Berlin, alternates with the unfolding criminal plot in 1998. The chapter ends in a brutal shootout. The subtly told biography clashes with the genre-specific violence, whereas the rapid alternations (or ‘cuts’) between the storylines produce a cinematic effect reminiscent of the genre’s intermedial quality (also present, implicitly, through Joseph’s work). As the reader later learns, George has been not only “a petty criminal [but also] an equally petty [Stasi] informer” (Phillips 2000, 270), reporting on his mother and on a dissident professor with whom he had an affair. The man who recruited him through blackmail, Liebl, might be called the novel’s central villain (but is conspicuously absent from it). In 1999, Liebl is one of George’s criminal contacts by necessity, not choice. However, this criminal story recedes into the background for long stretches of the novel, framing and propelling the family story at its core.

Both characters, George and Liebl, are indicative of the way in which a post-Cold War thriller like A Shadow of Myself is inevitably structured differently than its Cold War-era counterpart: Since the states in question, most importantly the GDR and the Soviet Union, no longer exists, the novel can no longer (or at least not in the same way) dramatize “the trials a state faces and the way it manages to come through them to its own advantage” (Boltanski 2014, 122). Even the inversion of values that the genre sometimes experienced in its Cold War iterations (the state depicted not as victim but aggressor) is no longer immediately relevant here (cf. Boltanski 2014, 121), instead the characters are dealing with the aftermath of totalitarian states and their actions within them. The dissolution of the states representing or belonging to the Eastern superpower in binary Cold War logic is transferred into the dissolution of the genre’s Cold War iteration. The new narrative-structuring power, it seems, becomes global capitalism (cf. Boltanski 2014, xv). In contrast to Phillips’ The Dancing Face, almost none of the criminals in A Shadow of Myself have any other motivation than profit although the question of recovering stolen national treasures briefly occurs in relation to the Levitan painting.

At the same time, A Shadow of Myself is intensely concerned with the idea of Europe, its borders and internal margins. The novel was written with the beginning EU accession negotiations of Central and Eastern European states in mind (Phillips 2010, 47) and thus with the possibility, or in Phillips’ view necessity, of reconfiguring British representations of Eastern Europe. With the brother’s first meeting set in Prague and the final family reunion in Berlin, the setting alone tells a story. While Berlin as a formerly divided city presents the most obvious ‘contact zone’ of East and West in the novel, Prague is representative of perceived ‘Easternness’ versus its geographical position (the comparison to Vienna is always enlightening here) and the designation of marginality ‘within’ Europe (Gasser 2023). In the same vein, the character of Radka, George’s Czech wife, daughter of a formerly imprisoned dissident, almost seems to embody Kundera’s idea of a kidnapped West (or in the German translation: die Tragödie Mitteleuropas). What can be considered the normative and hierarchically structured nature of Kundera’s famous plea for the recognition of Czech ‘Westernness’ (Gasser 2023) finds its expression in Radka’s dislike of Valentin, George’s Russian cousin and partner in crime – that is, at least from George’s point of view. In a complicated scene, her husband accuses her of anti-Russian sentiment which he, based on his own experiences, frames as racism, an accusation that cuts Radka to the quick. The novel portrays George as a European of double precarity whose belonging (tied to an idea of white European ‘Westernness’) is challenged at the intersection of his African and his Russian/East-German heritage. 

Through its characters, their biographies and, not least, their mobility, the novel not only depicts a complex and highly diversified Europe but also critiques what Prague author Libuše Móníkova’s has called the “impoverishment of Europe, the flattening reduction of the world to east–west, north–south, and even more fatally the modern countability – the first, the second, the third, the fourth world” (ctd. in Gasser 2023). The novel turns this kind of thinking against itself. When questioned by George, why he chose to study in Russia, Kofi replies with a smile: “Why did white men go to Africa? Europe was our dark continent” (Phillips 2000, 284), reversing the constellation of colonialist fascination (cf. Pucherová 2023, 145).

The timing of Kofi’s arrival in Moscow in 1956 is significant because it, too, can be read as a pioneer narrative, his ‘diary of desire’ a report of charting unknown territory. His journey precedes the founding of the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia in 1960 (named after Lumumba after his assassination in 1961), an institution that would later become a notorious topic in Anglophone Cold War fiction as, supposedly, a training ground for terrorists and a threat to Western democracies (Rubin 2021, 261). Kofi’s ‘diary of desire’ (his memories of his time in Moscow) does not support this narrative, neither does it paint a picture that aligns with the Soviet ideal of an anti-racist, anti-colonial empire. By centering the perspective of a student from Ghana in Moscow, the fictional text sheds light on an aspect of the Global Cold War that has had comparatively little resonance in spy fiction and (British) literature in general. At the same time, the diary itself suggests that it should not be read simply as an addendum to a larger Cold War narrative ‘from the margins’.

Rather, Kofi’s story is presented in a way that aligns with Paul Gilroy’s conception of diasporic Africans (in this case, students from newly independent countries) as agents of modernity, the Black Atlantic extended eastwards and adapted to the Soviet context (cf. Matusevich 2012, 327–328). After working as a stoker on a boat from the Ghanaian coast to Liverpool with his father, a young Kofi encounters a group of men in Manchester who leave a lasting impression on him: the Pan-Africanists T. Ras Makonnen, George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame Nkrumah – the last an acquaintance that ultimately earns him the scholarship to study in Moscow. At the same first meeting, he is equally, if differently impressed, by British writer, activist and Modernist muse Nancy Cunard, whose cameo appearance in the diary only hints at the underlying theme of European modernism and its indebtedness to (and appropriation of) African cultures. Once in Moscow, Kofi finds himself in a group of young men who are the first to experience their subversive and modernizing effect on the isolationist host society (Matusevich 2012, 329) – and its effect on them: “These were the first days when we talked without suspicion or purpose. There were boys from everywhere, mostly British colonies, although there were some from French-speaking Africa too, but English was the language we spoke among ourselves […]” (Phillips 2000, 106). Their first Soviet acquaintances are fellow students at the dormitory: “Russian boys lived there too, although one or two would always correct you if you called them Russian, because they were from the Soviet Republics, not from Russia itself” (Phillips 2000, 106).

Kofi befriends one of these fellow students, a Ukrainian student named Valery. The novel casts Valery, an engineer by profession, as a specialist in extraction, first of information, then of oil in Siberia. His Ukrainian-ness is only relevant as it casts him as a character with his own peripheral experience (he is “from the marshes and forests to the north of Kiev” (Phillips 2000, 107) and lack of privilege. These circumstances exculpate him, in Kofi’s view, from his betrayal of the novel’s star-crossed lovers, Katya and Kofi (“he did what he had to do”, Phillips 2000, 107). The classical story of love and betrayal is another of the novel’s conventional elements, although here, too, the novel relies on an established trope for its (in genre-terms) non-conventional story. Kofi’s and Katya’s ‘forbidden’ union exposes the enduring racist prejudice under the thin veneer of Soviet anti-racist rhetoric. Katya’s father, a high-ranking party official, is opposed to their relationship and tries to create a scandal around Kofi. When he learns from Valery that his daughter and her lover are planning to defect to the West, he stops her from leaving and ensures that Kofi is banned from entering the Soviet Union, separating the couple. Kofi, seemingly stood-up and stranded in London, builds a life there, while Katya, who discovers she is pregnant after they are separated, moves to East-Berlin with their child (George). 

The novel’s central conspiracy is made possible through the potency of distance versus presence: “While presence encloses the possibility of a certainty resulting directly from experience, distance, which constrains each person to form beliefs based on nothing but the word of another, opens up the possibility of manipulation” (Boltanski 2014, 168). The couple’s breach of (inofficial) Soviet social order results in Kofi’s banishment. Their joint potential to subvert Soviet norms, behaviour, and discourse (cf. Matusevich 2012, 329) is thereby rendered ineffective. Rather than interfering with the isolationism of his ‘host society’ (cf. Matusevich 2012, 329), Kofi himself is isolated. (Here again, the novel’s timing is crucial insofar as it precedes the organized formation of political dissent among Black students in the Soviet Union in the 1960s (cf. Matusevich 2020, 242–243).)

The betrayal results in Kofi’s loss of a sense of agency, rendering him the titular shadow of himself. Looking back, Kofi tells Joseph: “My life was over some time ago. I eat and drink and sleep, go to the library, talk to people. None of it matters, except for you, and I’m like a shadow, even to you. […] Some years ago I realised that nothing would happen any more because of me, and all the things that happened to me before are like that.” At this point of the narrative, his story seems to have been relegated to the margins after all.

However, the novel’s surprisingly conciliatory ending contradicts this reading. As the rivalry with George’s criminal rivals from Tbilisi escalates in Berlin, it is Kofi’s connection to Valery that can fix the situation. Valery, who feels remorse and has in the meantime graduated from engineer to billionaire-oligarch, can fix the criminal mess George and Valentin have gotten themselves into (and make a nice profit from it, too). As all major characters emerge from the novel’s action-packed plot more or less unscathed, the text’s departure from the ‘more formulaic mechanics of the political thriller’ is thrown into relief. The revealed conspiracy, the untangled criminal web are not the novel’s prime focus in the end. Rather, the focus shifts back to transformations on a personal level: Kofi has found private bliss with Katya and a sense of self again. Radka decides to abandon her marriage with George as well as her blossoming romance with Joseph and move to London with her son Serge by herself, choosing a yet unknown kind of freedom. George, on the other hand, aspires to become like Valery: “This is a new world for me. I’m going to shape myself to live on top of it” (Phillips 2000, 317).

With this conclusion, George’s storyline, the most ‘formulaic’ from the start, remains true to the genre in the sense that, within a novel that deals with the genre’s post-Cold War transformation (or, out differently, with the dissolution of its Cold War-era iteration), it predicts its second coming: with the emergence of criminal oligarchies as new political elites. A less grim outlook on the future opens up at the last gathering of the novel’s central character. At a family dinner, Kofi raises his glass to his grandson Serge: “Here’s to another life. This is for Serge, African, Russian, Czech, German, soon to be Englishman Serge. A new life for a new man” (Phillips 2000, 319). The novel comments on the undercurrent of Socialist rhetoric in both Kofi’s toast (“a new life for a new man”) and George’s declaration (“a new world”). Kofi, who has his own experience with the concept of the New Socialist Man and Way of Life without ever quite being shaped by it, acts as intermediary between his sons, attempting to bridge the gap between George’s and Joseph’s experiential knowledge: “They [meaning Radka and George] grew up with the idea that it was possible to be a new kind of person, that the kind of society in which they lived would reshape their identity. It didn’t happen, so they’ve got to give up or reshape life in some other way” (Phillips 2000, 318).

Thus, the novel shows its focus on personal transformation as deeply politically informed, individual choices as tied to societal changes on a geopolitical scale. In the same vein, Kofi’s toast to Serge’s ‘new life as a new man’ may also be read as an emerging Afropean consciousness in British fiction, meaning the increasing awareness of a transnational Black European history and identity. This theme re-occurs in A Shadow of Myself repeatedly through the characters’ reflections on their own identity in relation to national categories and histories. Theirs are not yet (at least in name) the unhyphenated identities of Johny Pitts Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (the text which popularized the term ‘Afropean’ in Britain and the Anglophone world more broadly). Yet, their conversations revolve around the absence of such a term: Kofi jokes about the discrepancy between his Ghanaian origin, his British passport, and his self-conception (Phillips 2000, 283). In the same conversation, George discusses not being accepted as German (Phillips 2000, 283). At another instance, he introduces himself as “a special Russian, […] like Pushkin” (Phillips 2000, 76), referring to Pushkin’s African heritage. Pushkin is an important figure to George as an Afropean who, in his view, was fully embraced by a European nation. 

His image of Pushkin (Russia’s cultural saint) is elaborated in a short speech in front of the monument to Bohemian King Wenceslas (Czechia’s national patron saint): “I hate these monuments. All over Europe, in every city, there are monuments to some hero. But all they did was to create terror. Then they put these monsters there to remind you that such things are possible. When I was a little boy I could never bring myself to look these statues in the face. I had the belief that somehow they would recognize me as a foreigner, someone who did not belong. […] Pushkin understood all this. He wrote about Peter’s statue, but I think of his poem every time I come here. ‘The Rider of Bronze’. This is what frightened me.” George’s Pushkin reception includes this somewhat surprising turn, with a focus on Pushkin’s own monument critique (extended here to a critique of European memory politics) and not, as might be expected, on the poet’s canonization through his monuments, most famously the Pushkin monument of 1880 (central to Afropean’s Moscow chapter; Pitts 2019, 264). 

Despite Phillips’ criticism of Johny Pitts’ view of Europe (cf. Phillips 2019, 48), his novel can be seen as a forerunner to Afropean, specially in its engagement with both Aleksandr Pushkin’s African heritage and the experience of African students in Moscow. Notwithstanding the novel’s avowed attachment to stereotypes, A Shadow of Myself is unique (not only as a thriller) in its exploration of the complexity and heterogeneity of Afropean identities in combination with its setting in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Soviet Russia. Reading this post-Cold War thriller through an Afropean lens makes it stand out as another one of Phillips’ pioneering works. Far from formulaic, A Shadow of Myself plays with the tropes of Cold War spy fiction, displays an awareness of the stereotypes it reproduces and comments on the genre’s responsiveness to geopolitics. 

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ThisTThis paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380.