Arts of the Working Class No. 11 Faux Culture

N ⁰ 11 / FAUX C U LT U R E

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Q UA R A N T I N E

I S S UE

REALITY IS NORTH, FAKE HOPES ARE EAST, EMPTY DREAMS ARE WEST, WE ARE SOUTH

by NIGIN BECK

Also Poster inside!

No cuts no profits tax havens nor benefits just health above all fair pays and material

Nein Danke! flatten that curve of profit flatten that curve once for all make us all come first first and above it all ANNA MUCHIN

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EXTRABL.A.TT NO5 WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS Top: KATHERINA OLSCHBAUR, MINOTAUR (2018) Right: NEÏL BELOUFA, GLOBAL AGREEMENT (2017) Bottom: NIGIN BECK, GRANATÄPFEL, (2017)

Back to Normal?

ON THE STREETS

The Goethe Institut L.A. proposes an interdisciplinary global engagement with homelessness & its connections to inequality, gentrification, racism & migration

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ARBEITER*INNENBRIEFE MIKALA HYLDIG DAL & DAS NEST

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‫ﻧﻪ ﴍﻗﯽ ﻧﻪ ﻏﺮﺑﯽ‬ ‫مینا خانلرزاده‬

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LAMENTS FROM A SALTED CORPSE NBDBKP

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KOCAMAN KESKIN BiR ÇELiŞKi DiDEM YAZICI

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THE IMPERIAL MUSEUM CHRIS PAXTON

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STASI THERAPY QUINN SLOBODIAN

NEÏL BELOUFA, SURPLUS VALUE (2020). Copyright: Studio Neil Beloufa.

5

INDEX

EDITORIAL

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Cover Nigin Beck, Neïl Beloufa, Katherina Olschbaur Editorial

5

‫ویراستارها‬

Directory

6

Pick-Up Stations, On the Streets

Mikala Hyldig Dal & Das Nest

8

Arbeiter*innenbriefe

Maternal Fantasies

10

Fake Gleichberechtigung

Kolja Reichert

13

More Contamination, Please!

Mina Khanlarzadeh

14

‫نه شرقی نه غربی‬

Suzanne Treister

16

Microsoft

Darren Kaplan

17

The Sunday Service Moment

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos

21

Digital Labour

Jennifer Walshe

22

This is Why People O.D. on Pills

Göksu Kunac

23

Cabaret Portrait: Döner Blackout II

Nigin Beck

25

Poster

EXTRABLATT #5 / Goethe Institut L.A. Worlds of Homelessness

tay Woke? In a world facing COVID-19 ‘Cancel Culture’ has fundamentally changed. Now, it does not only question how to deal with Nazis, racists and white supremacists, who think they can take over all platforms, all voices, all thoughts. Our answer is: That’s not happening. We talk to those who live in denial, but this street newspaper doesn’t provide the platform and visibility they want for their selfish fantasies. AWC’s priorities are the voices that need to be heard in the ideological struggle that surges with a crystal-clear message: The self-predatory economy, to which we are all subject, has to come to an end.

Time has come to see the bigger implications of ‘cancelling’, and reflect on what we call Fake/Falsche/Faux Culture. Never in our wildest dreams could we have forecasted the storm of the viral epidemic in Wuhan, China, where news of COVD-19 was first reported. The trend has been so pervasive and life-altering that it has dominated all spaces of the media, as the reality of the illness has taken millions of people around the world hostage, forcing them to stay home and avoid human contact.

There is no way around it: Conversations about how the crisis should be handled from a leftist perspective have begun to be part of the everyday. Rent strikes, demands for government cash handouts to everyone in need, and, of course, the right to fair medical treatment, is how the forces behind democratic socialism should translate their political principles into action.

What we are experiencing is a new world in the making, and fuck yes, we better race against the opportunists of the free market and the fascist waves in governments around the world to make it a better one.

Being part of this large-scale change, we must remember to not forget, dig out the so far unseen herstories, and act. Now. Outside of the vortex of hysteria that is social media, reality is once again becoming larger than its cybernetic feedback loop.

So what remains of our Faux Culture as we sit in self-isolation? Profit finally becomes worthless when we’re all stripped of basic needs. And that’s an empowering prospect.

- ‫ویراستارها‬

For those overwhelmed by the content overload experienced on Zoom and all the mediatheques from cultural institutions afraid of losing their ‘relevance’, and those who have to remain on the front lines, shelves, and desks: The spring of 2020 is testing our values, our patience and the nature of our practices. Whom are we doing this for? For everyone. If so, how can we make the idea of democracy, of community, of unions, liveable? Can we re-learn the skills that we had to externalise because of capitalism? Planting, Caring, Harvesting, Cooking, Sewing, Seeing, Walking, Being with oneself.

Chris Paxton

29

The Imperial Museum

James Ginzburg

31

Time: Capital and It's Limits

Skye Arundhati Thomas & Santhosh S.

32

Dispatches around the Indian Gate of Saheen Bagh

Didem Yazici

34

Kocaman Keskin Bir Çelişki

NBDBKP

35

Laments from a Salted Corpse

Klaus Speidel

36

Sprich nicht mit Feinden.

Unterwerfe Sie.

Didem Yazici

38

Working Conditions in Three Acts

Max Haiven

39

No Artists Left Alive

Quinn Slobodian

41

Stasi Therapy

Katherina Olschbaur

42

Trouble in Paradise

Valentin Golev

43

Акселерация русской травмы

Jan Eberlding

44

Durchdrehen/ Weggefahren

Nika Dubrovsky & David Graeber

45

The Museum of Care

Misal Adnan Yildiz

46

They

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Suzanne Treister

48

Google

Founders / Gründer: María Inés Plaza Lazo, Pauł Sochacki

Hallie Frost

49

Horoscope

Neda Genova

50

институционална амнезия

Suzanne Treister

51

Apple

IMPRINT / IMPRESSUM Publishing Address / Verlagsadresse: Reflektor Monde gUG (haftungsbeschränkt) Lynarstrasse 38 13353 Berlin

Associated Editors of Issue 11: Boaz Levin, Eva Scharrer, Maya Shenfeld, Mohammad Salemy

Vertreten durch die Geschäftsführer: Alina Kolar, María Inés Plaza Lazo Pauł Sochacki

Art Direction/Layout: Jowita Kepa

Publishers/Herausgeber & Editors/Redakteure: Alina Kolar ak@artsoftheworkingclass.org María Inés Plaza Lazo mi@artsoftheworkingclass.org Pauł Sochacki p@artsoftheworkingclass.org ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

Managing Editor: Hallie Frost

Extrablatt Layout: Laura Catania & Thomas Spallek Office Management: Chris Paxton Cover Images: Nigin Beck, Neïl Beloufa, Katherina Olschbaur Publication Images: Katherina Olschbaur,Nigin Beck, Kasra Rahmanian, Neïl Beloufa (© the artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018) Druck: Presse-Druck- und Verlags- GmbH, Augsburg, DE Alle Vertriebs und Kundenfragen an: Tel: +49 1716292064, E-mail: hey@artsoftheworkingclass.org Post: Arts of the Working Class, Lynarstrasse 38, 13353 Berlin, DE

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HILFE WÄHREND DER CORONA-PANDEMIE

Obdachlose Menschen sind der Pandemie noch stärker ausgeliefert als andere Menschen. Wir fordern deshalb, sie von der Straße zu holen und in den leerstehenden Hotelzimmern und Schulen unterzubringen. Leider haben zur Zeit auch viele Hilfseinrichtungen geschlossen. Deshalb haben verschiedene Initiativen alternative Hilfen während der Pandemie auf die Beine gestellt. Die Hilfsangebote und Listen zu Essensausgaben während der Pandemie und Geöffnete Notübernachtungen findet ihr hier: www.berliner-obdachlosenhilfe.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ Essensausgaben-Wochenübersicht.pdf

GELDAUSGABE

Die Sozialgenossenschaft Karuna zahlt 10€ pro Tag an obdachlose Personen aus. Das Geld wird von Teams der „Karuna Task-Force“ verteilt. Die Teams verteilen auch Essen und nehmen die Daten obdachloser Menschen auf, um sie für weitere Hilfen kontaktieren zu können. Weil andere Geldquellen wie Flaschen sammeln oder Zeitungen verkaufen gerade nicht funktionieren, ist das sehr wichtig. Hier könnt ihr dafür spenden: www.betterplace.org/de/projects/77963-taglich-10-euro-fur-jedenobdachlosen-berLINS-CORONA-SOFORTHILFE

GABENZÄUNE

Eine andere Möglichkeit für Bedürftige, sich mit Essen und Sachspenden zu versorgen sind Gabenzäune. Sinnvolle Spenden sind warme Kleidung, Schuhe, Hygieneartikel und Essen in beschrifteten Tüten. Hier findet ihr eine regelmäßig aktualisierte Liste der Zäune mit mehrsprachigen Informationen zum Ausdrucken und verteilen: gabenzaun.de

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ARBEITER*INNENBRIEFE CARE IN TIMES OF CORONA-CAPITALISM

ones – our children in particular, those most in need of our love and our unconditionality – are in the way in times of quarantine? What is it they are in the way of? 10+ hours daily spent in front of screens engaging in pseudo encounters on the inside of institutional entrails or being unwrapped by platform capitalists disguised as fury cats that plan towards immortality for the few and dispensability for the many?4

Lover, I write to you because there are cracks in our space. I write to you because I am full of hope to mend these cracks. I write to you because otherwise the words will get stuck in my throat, they will decompose there and clog my breathing, they will make my speech smelly.

/ /5

I am grabbing the top leaves of something that looks like a vegetable, a beetroot perhaps, but it might turn out to be a fruit once elevated from its dirt-embrace.

There. It’s in my hand.

Inscribed in its sore and uneven surface I read “Why did love letters fall out of fashion?”

When did love letters mutate into short and bitter text messages decapitating our love affairs in their infancy? There are longer ones, Email ones, but mostly I have found them blameful, unreconcilable and strangely bureaucratic, listing errors and incompetencies, lacking the Shakespearian charm a lover’s complaint1 can have. Mostly they position the writer at one extreme of the spectrum of wrongs&rights and the receiver at the other, as Shakespeare’s fair maid does too, but without her attention to form and the care that is present in this.2 Is it yet another brutal effect of late capitalist societies that love letters have been indefinitely shortened, or exist only as kitschy echoes in shared links to one-sized pop songs, while business Emails and logistical communication are flooding our electronic Dasein3 – is turning our Dasein itself electronic and screenbased. How much time did you spend on E-communication aimed at optimizing the infrastructural flow of your institution and rendering to the institution invisible the state of emergency Covid-19 has suspended all of our bodies in? In the same period, how much time did you spend meandering, extending and communicating, fertilizing and growing the love you feel for and share with those closest to you? Were the proportions notably different before the virus broke out? What is it that tells us that to focus on love rather than business is untimely, naïve and anachronistic? The same thing that makes many of us feel that our loved

I am with the Invisible Committee: it is as dirty a trick of capitalist logic to make us think of poetry as bourgeoise, as it is to rewrap itself in the guise of sharing-economies; instead poetic emancipation and our profound commitment to sharing and maintaining experiences of love might be the one force more likely to burst our shackles than any other.6 - Mikala

Hyldig Dal

1 www.shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/LoversComplaint. html (with explanatory notes for 21st century speakers here: www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/complaint) 2 (Needless(?) to say the writer mostly places her/ himself at the point closest to doing, being, right, while positioning her (no longer? Or only in spite) beloved at the other end (But if we enter this space, the space of our love, our fusion, together; do we not co-create the positions(?) of one another? Does it even make sense to speak of opposites in this case? If our relation is organic rather than deterministic why force a rigid framework of reading onto it?))

3 the universal you, but also the specific you that you are 4 Lizzie O’Shea: Future Histories; Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future?; Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; Jean Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Death 5 The internet-repair-guy was just here, to hook me into my new access; since moving in in March I have been co-surfing the neighbor’s net. After he left I find myself washing my hands for no reason.

We never remotely touched and stayed well within security refines. He was charming and cautiously flirtatious, despite my obvious pregnancy. Or because of it? There are fetishists for this current state of my body too. What do they do once their lovers deliver? Impregnate again swiftly? Endorse upon the discharged body an ectoplasmic ever-pregnant one?

I am pulling in the green lounges of yet another vegetable-like growth, that might turn out to be more

flowery than savory once it enters open space.

In its folds and fractures I read: “When will parenting become communal?”

Was our last meeting a fight? Perhaps at least, it was a struggle. I got pregnant before we got together.

The bio-father swiftly chose to be no father at all. Our common acquaintances are appalled by the fact that this did not make me opt for an abortion. I am stunned and, with an eye to history, mildly amused to live in a time where birthing a child sparks more offense than aborting it. I am petrified to still live in a time where the Existenzberechtigung of a pregnancy is dependent on a male’s willingness to accept fatherhood. This swelling belly of mine is not a plan or a project; it is life happening, shaping itself along patterns immense and intricate, mostly invisible, hardly ever tactile. It cannot be undone; it cannot be edited retrospectively to fit a simpler mold.

Can your love for me encompass the child that I carry, the child whose existence is no longer separable from mine? Would your answer be different if the same blood would run through your veins? Tell me why, but tell me in a form that is so immersively yours, that it may become ours to share; tell me in words from the other side of institutional jargon; tell me in words that farm a garden of their own.

Whatever grows from that patch of yours I will accept it, as it is, as a shared space.

6 The invisible Committee: Now Your favorite paragraph: „Love does not bring individuals into relation, it cuts through them as if they were suddenly on a special plane where they were making their way together amid a certain foliation of the world. To love is never to be together but to become together. If loving did not undo the fictitious unity of being, the “other” would not be capable of making us suffer to such a degree. If, in love, a piece of the other did not end up being a part of us, we wouldn’t have to mourn it when separation time rolled around. If there were nothing but relations, nobody would understand one another. Everything would be awash with misunderstanding. So there is no subject or object of love, there is an experience of love.“ And mine: “If communism has a goal, it is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life. One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form. After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term.”

BERLINER OBDACHLOSENHILFE e.V. BERLINER OBDACHLOSENHILFE e.V.

Essen und Kleidung Food and clothes Essen und Kleidung posiłki i odzież Food and clothes ‫وثياب‬ ‫طعام‬ posiłki i odzież

‫طعام وثياب‬ mittwoch & samstag // wednesday & saturday // środa & sobota // ‫األربعاء السبت‬

sonntag // niedziela // ‫األحد‬

mittwochLeopoldplatz & samstag // wednesday & saturday // środa & sobota // ‫األربعاء السبت‬ Alexanderplatz Kottbusser Tor 18.15 Uhr Leopoldplatz 18.15 Uhr

19.15 Uhr Alexanderplatz 19.15 Uhr

sonntag //Hansaplatz niedziela // ‫األحد‬

20.45 Uhr Kottbusser Tor 20.45 Uhr

U+S Alexanderplatz U+S Alexanderplatz

18.15 - 20.00 Uhr Hansaplatz 18.15 - 20.00 Uhr U Kottbusser Tor

U Hansaplatz

U Kottbusser Tor U Hansaplatz

U Leopoldplatz

U Leopoldplatz

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HELFEN HELFEN IST EINFACH IST EINFACH

9

Ein Nest ist ein Ort des Wachstums, Zusammenkommens und gleichzeitigen Auf bruchs. Hier wird sich vorbereitet und ausgetauscht, um außerhalb dessen selbstständig bestehen zu können. Hier wird diskutiert und im Schutzraum weitergedacht, wie es sonst oft nicht so leicht möglich ist. Die Kunstakademie Münster versteht sich als weltoffenen und ideologiefreien Ort, welcher die Kultur offener, kritischer Dialoge und Diskurse fördern möchte. Es ist wichtig, als Hochschule ein mutiges Zeichen zu setzen, das für diese Werte steht.

Der Workshop mit Rodolfo Samperio, an welchem klassenübergreifend viele Studierende teilnahmen, war bereits ein wichtiger Ausgangspunkt, dieses Anliegen nicht rein in der Theorie zu belassen. Gemeinsam wurde eine Raumstruktur entwickelt und das Nest ermöglicht nun in diese Richtung weiter zu gehen. Es schafft einen Ort an welchem gemeinsam mit Gästen, Besuchern und Besucherinnen der Blick über die Grenzen der Akademie hinweg gerichtet wird.

Das Foyer bietet sich mit seiner zentralen Lage dafür an. Erlebt man es im Alltag und ganz besonders zu den bisherigen Rundgängen meist als Durchgangsort und weniger als Ort zum Verweilen, wird sich dies durch das Nest ändern. Der Rundgang wird nun durch eine wichtige Ebene ergänzt werden –die der Teilhabe und Mitgestaltung unserer Gäste. Der Aspekt die passive Haltung des Konsumierens und Unterhaltenwerdens zu verlassen, selbst aktiv zu werden, eine Meinung zu entwickeln und zu vertreten ist heute wichtiger denn je. Indem die Kunstakademie in der Ermöglichung des Nestes selbst aktiv wird, wird sie zum Vorbild Auseinandersetzungen nicht zu scheuen.

Theater im Kopf, übersetzt

TRIKE TRIKE TRIKE !! tryking offould dabeil Selbtra isses dabeytr PLÜSCH netto labballa blewtrehell KOGNITIV FRIKATTIERT rolly kjokt dawahl outross was möchte ich ACHTUNG ROHENDE DESILLUSIONIERT was sollen wir brettachsell sheifh MOMENTE APFELMITTEL BAY Nefft Nefft Nefft auffragahlah outbound sekt KURYLUFT KURZLUFT

Jede Klasse hat seine eigene Sprache und System.

Auch wenn wir eine Akademie sind, unsere Nachbarklassen, Sie kommen mir so vor, als ob sie erst nach stundenlangen Flug erst erreichbar sind.

Wenn man in einer anderen Klasse geht, muss man erst neu ihre Sprache lernen.

Es ist nicht anders als unsere Welt und die verschiedenen Ländern.

Eine Schule ist eine Miniatur der Welt.

Du immigrierst in einen anderen Ort und die Integration steht vor dir.

Die Integration; wie viel von außen, wie viel von innen will man balancieren?

Willst du die Sprache ganz beherrschen? und die Kultur?

ZEICHNUNG ZEICHNUNG ZEICHNUNG G ZEICH Aromageschwângwre Zigarillos Alle Fellah innen ja VERGESSEN ABER OK (Insektenbiotisch) Da ist es nicht ?

Safe space ?

Unter Schutzraum kann man auch so Could the noun hyperbole describe verstehen, dass es dich sicher the words ‘safe space’? machen soll.

Is it not ironic, to try find a place which can be … Sicher… in der marked as ‘safe’ in the midst of a public event?

Sehweise?

The feuerwehr come and go.

Verwaltung appear again and again.

Juli Lee The extra security that has been hired watch closely. voice Yet the safe space isn’t created through all the rules and regulations.

Alik Klein It isn’t the kuschelig carpet surrounding or the illusion of a closed room.

The only real safe place can become in our minds.

The inner-safe-space.

The physicality and the tangibility of das Nest only serve our eyes and senses, but without our inner-safe-space, das Nest will never comply to it. So we all try to find a ground which we can stand on and feel at ease. Some find it quicker than others. Some find it there, others find it in different areas.

The intervention from students and guests open up a space and allow for many forms of energy exchange to take place; through different types interactions in the form of performances, discussions and concerts.

People come and go.

Energy flows and flows.

The chairs call for some human warmth.

Every day a new schedule would be written on the floor with chalk.

18.00-18.30 Performance - Sierra Louise Diamond „Kreisverkehr“ and as the hours went by, the words would start to fade, each step that walked over it would take a layer on its sole and sprinkle it across the academy.

Joshua K. Singh & Alik Klein

Katharina Kneip

Kunsthochschule; Künstlerischer Studiengang; Freie Kunst; Ordnung; Verordnung; Rechtsverordnung; Hochschulordnung; Prüfungsordnung; Einschreibungsordnung; Gesetz; Paragraph 41; Absatz 9; Nachweis der Qualifikation; Nachweis der künstlerischen Eignung; Vorgeschriebene Frist; Eingang der vollständigen Bewerbungsunterlagen [...]

Begutachtung der künstlerischen Arbeiten; Kommission; Bewertung; hochschulinternes Bewertungssystem [...] ausreichende deutsche Sprachkenntnisse; Bestehen; endgültiges Nichtbestehen; Zulassungsbeschränkung; Anspruch auf Einschreibung; kein Einschreibungshindernis; Studierfähigkeit

Der diesjährige Rundgang der Kunstakademie Münster wird durch ein Rahmenprogramm namens „Das Nest“ begleitet, welches Diskussionen, Lesungen sowie musikalische und künstlerische Performances beinhaltet.

Eigens für diesen Zweck haben Studierende in einem Workshop unter der Leitung des Industriedesigners Rodolfo Sampiero eine besondere Gestaltung für das Foyer der Kunstakademie entworfen.

Eine Arbeitsgruppe hat diese gemeinsam umgesetzt.

Drei Gäste sind eingeladen um Das Nest mit öffentlichen Gesprächen über die im Rundgang gezeigten Arbeiten einen kick start zu geben: Leiterin des Berliner Künstlerprogramms des DAAD Melanie Roumiguière, Direktor KW Institute for Contemporary Art Krist Gruijthuijsen, und Galeristin Barbara Wien. Am Mittwoch, 05. Februar 2020 um 17:00 Uhr werden sich die Gäste in „Das Nest“ der Akademie vorstellen.

Danach gibt es, bis zum Ende des Rundgangs, ein tägliches Programm von Veranstaltungen, die von Studierenden und Mitarbeitenden initiiert worden sind. @das.dest

Juli Lee

Maria Renée Morales Garcia

Tarabea Guastavino San Martín „Feststellungsprüfung“

Art School is Not Kindergarten - Collaging Reflections on "Das Nest" of Nicoline van Harskamp and Mariana Castillo Deball Is the academic space a nurturing space? Or rather an arena of cruelty? In questioning the role of the Kunstakademie as a space for artistic expression and critique, it is also important to ask: who critiques the institution itself? If academies are designed to serve their students, students should be able to shape the discourse and talk back. As the name “Das Nest” might suggest, the Kunstakademie represents a protected space for artistic development and coming together. Nicoline van Harskamp and Mariana Castillo Deball encouraged the Rundgang-exhibition participants to search for group agency and present alternatives to the ego driven art economy.

Promoting collaboration, students can become more independent, and join forces to build their own environments, in spite of the bliss that may surround it. In discussions between students, professors and guests, Arts of the Working Class witnessed certain topics begin to surface and reappear, such as: the conceptual formation of „Das Nest“, the institutional structure of the Kunstakademie as a “safe-space” (Schutzraum) and issues of how to address abuse of power (Machtmissbrauch) within universities and art institutions. Students unpacked and reworked these topics to try to address some of these questions. Here with a collage of reactions from the students in response to these discussions. - Chris Paxton ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

Photos courtesty of Maternal fantasies.

10

FAKE GLEICHBERECHTIGUNG Plädoyer der Fürsorgearbeit als Quelle für eine Zukunft basiert auf Nächstenliebe.1

von M AT E R N A L F A N TA S I E S

1 Was muss sich ändern damit die Dinge sich ändern? *1 (*1 Auszug aus der Rede zum internationalen Frauentag, von Mikala Hyldig Dal / Maternal Fantasies Collective . Demonstration “fair shair” vor der Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 8. März 2020.)

2 Corona Blog, Die Morgenpost, Samstag 4. April 2020, 16.42 Uhr: "Frauen sind Experten zufolge besonders schwer von den Folgen der Coronavirus-Krise betroffen. „Frauen machen fast 70 Prozent der Beschäftigten im Gesundheitswesen aus und setzen sich damit einem höheren Infektionsrisiko aus“, heißt es in einer Studie der Organisation für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (OECD).

Frauen würden außerdem einen Großteil der Last zu Hause tragen, da Schulen und Kinderbetreuungseinrichtungen geschlossen würden und es bei der unbezahlten Arbeit seit langem geschlechtsspezifische Ungleichheiten gebe, so die Experten. Sie hätten zudem ein hohes Risiko von Arbeits- und Einkommensverlusten und würden in Krisen- und Quarantänezeiten einem erhöhten Risiko von Gewalt, Ausbeutung, Missbrauch oder Belästigung ausgesetzt, schreiben die Autorinnen und Autoren. Vorherige Krisen deuteten darauf hin, dass die CoronavirusPandemie wahrscheinlich zu einer Zunahme der häuslichen Gewalt führen werde."

3 Note to Corona, Isabell Spengler, 4.04.2020: I feel the current crisis manifests how unsustainable things were already prior to it. It shows the essential role of care work in societies worldwide and the necessity of eco-feminism (ecological and economical solidarity). But why does it seem like humans do not learn from history? Why do humans only learn the hard way (when they have to)? I hope it's not too late. I hope, this time, we can learn. It also makes me aware of my privileges, and how relatively lucky I am to be living in Germany at this particular time and to not be a single parent.

4 Aino El Solh - 5:38 PM 5.4.

At this time of self-isolation, family units gain importance as we are all being deprived from many social contacts through restrictions at work and in the free time.

We can observe how we relate to each other in this intimate sphere that is home, which gains importance in becoming the main arena for expressing the individual needs of family members, sharing thoughts and feelings, but also while being a common good that the family shares. We can ask about our family politics, about equality, about

I

ch möchte ungern mit Kapital argumentieren, aber dennoch darauf hinweisen, dass die Grundlage für jede Wertschöpfung die Fürsorgearbeit ist, die bislang vor allem von Frauen, und vor allem unentgeltlich geleistet wird. Dass immer mehr Kapital in immer weniger werdenden, immer Weißer werdenden, männlich gebliebene Hände sich akkumuliert, hängt auch mit einer der Grundlügen des Kapitalismus zusammen: nämlich das Fürsorge-Arbeit gratis ist.

Das ist sie natürlich nicht, bloß Frauen mussten bislang allein die Kosten tragen, während andere Gewinn aus unserer un-entlohnte Arbeit erzielten, unter anderem in Form von Ausschöpfung zukünftiger Arbeitsleister*innen.2 3 Alleinerziehende Mütter und ihre Kinder sind in Deutschland die Gruppe, die dem höchsten Risiko ausgesetzt ist in Armut zu leben.

Diese Armut bedeutet oft von kultureller Teilhabe ausgeschlossen zu sein. Wir wissen, dass in der Kunst prekäre Lebensbedingungen geschlechterübergreifend sind; 90% von uns rutschen später durch unzureichende Rente in die Altersarmut. Kein Wunder, wenn selbst öffentliche Kulturinstitutionen mit einer Vergütung für Künstler*innen von wenigen hundert Euro für die Beteiligung in Ausstellungsprojekten rechnen.

Selbst konservative Ökonomen argumentieren mittlerweile für die Einführung eines globalen Grundeinkommens, um systemimmanente, ungleichheitssteigernde und crash-affine Strukturen unseres neoliberale Systems entgegenzuwirken – Strukturen übrigens, die mit PrivatMonopolen auf künstliche Intelligenz eine noch prekärer Existenz für die Mehrheit der Menschheit bedeuten könnte.

Es gibt in all dem nur eine Antwort: Wir müssen uns solidarisieren.4 Auf ethischer, politischer aber auch auf existentieller Ebene.

Denn: Die Art wie Wertschöpfung im Kapitalismus definiert wird ist zutiefst sexistisch.

Während Frauen erst nach jahrhundertelangen Kämpfen, die vor gar nicht so langer Zeit beendet sind und vielerorts immer noch stattfinden, überhaupt Kunst studieren dürfen, machen Frauen mittlerweile die Mehrheit der Anzahl der Studierenden aus; Männer aber sind immer noch stark überrepräsentiert bei den Professuren.

Während nackte Frauenkörper als das beliebteste Motiv der Kunstgeschichte gelten, wie Pioniere der neuen Kunstgeschichte wie ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

how much accomplishment we require from ourselves and from each other, about how much self expression do we allow and do we misuse power inside of this sphere? The question of care is evidently arising too; care, in my eyes being almost like the currency of the non-monetarily operating family life. We feel good when we’re rewarded by each others care, let it be affection, care work, showing interest towards each other or expressing gratitude.

Is `feeling good ´a good parameter to estimate the distribution of care inside a family, or should it be more rationally evaluated?

5 Like so many...Both of us are not working in Corona Times. Both at home. There is it. It doesn't stop, or make pauses. The dishes also. Are always there to be cleaned. Laundry. Toys. We need to be creative. Let's optimize our time. Lets do like this- no -like that. The third element needs decisions but it's getting difficult to find agreements. He is a witness. I am a witness. We judge. I demand more. I take more care. He has requirements, but does care work (house and kid) when he is in the mood to. But IT doesn't make pauses. Actually he plays. Great job. The rest, I don't accept to do alone.

We are both at home. We are not “working”. We are both healthy. We optimize communicating to each other by mobile messages..

6 BILD:0Maternal_Fantasies_Landpartie_01_593. jpg 7 BILD: Screen Shot 2020-03-17 at 16.19.37 8 Olga Sonja Thorarensen - 10:01 AM Today Dear work, I have mixed feelings towards you. I was raised in a family that valued you highly and I was quite young when we met the first time. I loved spending time with you. It made me feel important to have things to do. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that not all work is the same and how differently you are valued.

After I became a mother we have spent much more time together, especially in my home. In fact I feel like we are together most of the time, maybe apart from the time I sleep during night. Although you even have a way of squeezing yourself into my sleep.

We’ve spent time together in different places doing different things. Until now the work I’ve been paid the most for was in a stripclub, taking my clothes off and dancing naked. Making art has always been the worst paid and the most work.

And then there is the care work which my grandmother and other women of her generation did for free in their homes. Resulting in badly paid

professional care work. Right now kindergarten teachers in Iceland are on a strike and have been for two months. They are demanding a fair pay. But the politicians are reluctant to meet their demands.

14 Aino El Solh - 11:00 AM 17.3.

Note to Corona, Thanks to you my responsibilities have reached a new level. Today I’m not only an artist and a working single mother, but also a math and german teacher, a football trainer and a doctor in case of illness in my temporarily isolated family unit. You have not only taken over individuals, but entire countries, and we all work for you now. Tell me when we can get over this.

It is interesting because when you think of it, it is the foundation for the wheel’s of society to keep running, to have care workers taking care of the children while people do their “important” work. Still it seems impossible to pay a decent salary for care work.

I guess it is work that people, mostly women should enjoy. Is the reasoning that it is all a pleasure, so there is no need to get paid for it?

Khorus Fausta - 4:54 PM Today Dear Olga. Your experiences resonate with mine on so many levels. In my family love entered through the grandmothers. Atypically for the time, so did financial wealth. My top wages prescribed the absence of children: As an exclusive call girl in London (before childrearing), and later as a full-timing university lecturer (seeing my children less than 2 hours daily). Is essential care work left unpaid so that women may stay financially dependent on males and as a result sexually subordinate? Is the absence of wages another way of controlling our bodies?

9 Fru_Dal - 10:13 AM TODAY

die Guerilla Girls pointierten, so sind immer noch Werke männlicher Künstler stark dominant in öffentlichen wie privaten Kollektionen. In Deutschland gehen wir von einer Überrepräsentation der Männer von 800% aus.

Das Kinderkriegen5 ist immer in der Gleichstellungsdiskussion ein Knackpunkt, den wir nicht übersehen dürfen, auch wenn wir von mancher Stellen dafür den Vorwurf des „biologischen Essentialismus“ hinnehmen müssen. Gehen wir diesen Diskussion nicht aktiv nach, sondern gehen wir von einer vermeintlichen „Gleichheit“ aus, dann arbeiten auch Strukturen in vermeintlich progressiven Kulturinstitutionen gegen uns; unter anderem in Form von Altersobergrenzen bei Förderprogrammen und Stipendien, die fast ausschließlich Frauen schaden, da viele von uns einige der vermeintlich entscheidenden Karriere-Jahre mit Fürsorgearbeit verbringen; Auf diese Art schreiben viele Institutionen Frauenkörper, die es wagen zu gebären aus ihrer Geschichte raus.

Note to Corona II, I am alone. You make me alone. You make me feel more alone. You make me feel the absence of my child more. You jizz words into the mouth of the chancellor: She tells us distance is care. She tells us to use phones, not touch. To touch screens, not bodies. To turn 2-dimensional, out of care. You fill me with fear that we will not know how to exit our screens again. You steal my lover. Every day you do. My body grows, in spite of you, while I enjoy the silence of the streets. .

10 Lena Chen - 1:53 PM Today Note to Corona III, Life will not go according to plan. Technology will fail us. We will be forced to improvise.

These are the moments when we find possibility in the impossible, when creativity becomes a survival tactic, when solidarity transforms from theory to practice.

11 Olga Sonja - 1:58 PM Today Note to Corona IV, I have often thought about this, what would happen if everything would just stop. If people would just stop doing their jobs. And that is almost happening now, or at least now we see what jobs need to be done in order for society to exist. Everything has slowed down immersively. I think this might actually be the end of capitalism. A new era, where people will have to rethink our way of living, and find a new structure or unstructure. I’m thinking of a future where it is normal to share the care for each other. Where it will be absurd to fight for being on the top.

12 Fru_Dal - 2:30 PM Today After becoming a mother, meeting my daughter, I know The world is experienced through the mouth, but words are off-point Before entering speech, before legs can carry, and faces become recognizable Everything enters the mouth, things, eatable, uneatable, sweet, poisonous, smooth, crispy Dirt, glass, metal, pillows, nipples, grain, plastic Stone fork concrete carpet bathroom dust Strange lady’s wrist watch, chin (mine) Whatever is touched, is touched to enter the mouth, we learn the world by taking its literal components into our mouths, possibly further, Swallowing, consuming, absorbing, digesting, secreting, excreting, This is learning, this is knowledge Before the abstract, is the concrete, is hunger, is curiosity, is mouth 13 Lena Chen - 10:38 PM TODAY I am dust swept and dishes cleared. I am the alarm clock. I am the promise of comfort. I am the memory keeper. I am yours and yours and yours. I am sympathy. I am gratification. I am healer. I am teacher. I am calendar. I am love. I am affirmation. I am the anticipator of sorrow, the architect of joy. I am first to be blamed.

Deshalb: Die Art wie Wertschöpfung im Kapitalismus definiert wird ist zutiefst sexistisch.

Während meines Erachtens immer noch gleich viele Männer wie Frauen Eltern werden, gilt Kunst die sich mit Elternsein auseinandersetzt immer noch weitgehend als "Frauenkunst." Was muss sich ändern damit die Dinge sich ändern?6 Ich kämpfe nicht dafür die gleichen Fehler begehen zu können wie es so viele Männer schon gemacht haben, und seit einiger Zeit auch immer mehr Frauen; Ich kämpfe nicht für das Recht mein Kind nicht sehen zu können, weil ich den Großteil meiner Lebenszeit an Großkonzerne verkaufe, für weit unter dem finanziellen Wert den meine Arbeit hat, und unvergleichbar viel unter dem Wert den mein Lebenszeit hat. Ich kämpfe nicht für das Recht mich im Konsumrausch verlieren zu können und so zur anthropozänen Präkarisierung unsere Umwelt7 weiter beizusteuern.

Ich kämpfe nicht für das Recht mich im Alleingang in eine selbstoptimierte, marktdefinierte 1-Personen-Brand zu verwandeln. Sondern ich kämpfe dafür, um mit euch gemeinsam Mensch sein, Eltern sein und Künstlerin sein zu können, und betrachte dabei diese Kategorien als tief miteinander verwoben, untrennbar.8 9 10 11 Die Kunstgruppe Maternal Fantasies ist ein Versuch, gemeinsam Strukturen im Kunstschaffen aufzuarbeiten, die diesem Imperativ gerecht werden.

Wenn wir Kunst schaffen sind unsere Kinder dabei, und eingeladen mitzumachen; So laden wir uns nicht selber aus vom künstlerischen Austausch, weil und wenn wir Mütter werden.

Wenn wir arbeiten üben wir rotierende Autorenschaft aus, das heißt wir sind im Wechselmodell Regisseurin und Putzfrau, Kamera- und Ton-Frau, Performerin und Kinder-Aufpasserin, 12

Manuskriptautorin und Köchin. Alle diese Aufgaben sind gleich wichtig für die Durchführung unserer Projekte, und durch das Würdigen dessen entstehen keine Macht-Monopole und Privileg-Abstufungen.

Wenn wir arbeiten und recherchieren suchen wir uns als Quellen andere Frauen aus, auch wenn wir dafür manchmal länger suchen müssen, weil Frauen gelinde gesagt stiefmütterlich behandelt worden sind von der Kunstgeschichte Wenn wir arbeiten lassen wir uns von dem Wissen und den Strategien des Spielens das unsere Kinder uns vermitteln inspirieren; wir beziehen sie als aktive Mitgestalter*innen in unsere Werkprozesse mit ein

15 Magdalena Kallenberger - 1:58 PM TODAY What would happen, if we take this demand seriously? How would it shape and transform our economy? Our artistic practice?

What would happen, if we would pay CARE work adequately instead of outsourcing it to poorly paid labourers or doing it for free ourselves? As a collective we give the same value to, and rotate all tasks from directing, performing, producing to cooking and childcare.

Since becoming a mother, doing art became a luxury (it already was). I could clean up the apartment, instead. I could sit in a café talking to friends, instead. I could hang out on a playground with my kids, instead. I could invest everything in trying to earn more and more money, instead. But for me personally, producing art became a necessity. Something to think through and with, and for us to connect with each other in the process. A way of integrating and reflecting on our precarious life, a way of distilling and transforming our experiences towards other realities. A way of embedding ourselves (with)in history.

Accepting the before and the after within generational lines of lives lived. Choosing our allies, becoming allies. Transforming from isolated particles into hybrid crowds, relying and building up towards an utopian moment of hope and change. As an artist collective of feminist artists and mothers, we are leaning towards and on each other without disregarding our differences while weaving a net of extended solidarity and care.

16 Image 3 people wearing masks. Videostill 17 Lena Chen - 5 AM TODAY We create and nurture based on what we have learned from our own mothers, our ancestors, our predecessors (both familial and intellectual). Our work is an inheritance and a legacy, a blessing and a burden, a privilege and a necessity.

18 Maicyra Leão - 12:29 PM Mar 18 How much potential I see in this!!! But how ambiguous the feeling is too.

We deal with the experimentation of being surrounded by children when we work, aware of the innovation it can bring, but at the same time, we should not sound like "pure" mothers observing the flow and the expertise of their children. I need to assume that this is a hard task. We try. It is always a try. But sometimes we are consumed by deadlines and consumer modes of existing.

In order to manage the little time we have, we self-impose a sense of efficiency, high performance, and professionalism - to be able to deal with the "serious" art and its systems that sometimes is our own callus on the foot.

19 0Screen Shot 2020-03-23 at 13.59.00 20 Maicyra Leão - 12:42 PM Mar 18 Um Salve! para os nossos ancestrais! Salve mãinha, vóinha, Anastácia, Chiquinha, Bella Geiger, Irigaray, Hoch, Beth Carvalho, Chico Mendes, Aioasca, Yemanjá e as forças que entendem que nossa luta não é apenas no papel.

Wenn wir arbeiten zielen wir darauf ab, die künstliche Trennung zwischen Theorie und Praxis, Kunst und Leben, Bibliographie und Biographie aufzulösen…

Wir können nur zusammen die Gesellschaft aufbauen die wir uns erträumen, und unsere Methoden müssen nicht nur intersektionell sein, sondern auch intergenerationell.

Wir stellen uns monopolitischer Ausbeutung gemeinsam entgegen!

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • FEBRUARY 2020

MATERNAL FANTASIES is an evolving and interdisciplinary collective of international artists and cultural producers based in Berlin, Germany.

Current group members are: Aino El Solh, Hanne Klaas, Isabell Spengler, Lena Chen, Magdalena Kallenberger, Maicyra Leão, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Olga Sonja Thorarensen, Sandra Moskova. www.maternalfantasies.net

LE N BACH HAUS. DE

IHR KU NSTMUSEUM I N MÜ NCH E N

Making of „And...“, 2007 © Sheela Gowda

SHEELA GOWDA IT.. MATTERS

BIS 26 JULI

LENBACHHAUS

13

S

KATHERINA OLSCHBAUR, COVERED HORSE (2018).

top pointing at others. Stop scanning pictures for triggers as if you were an algorithm. Stop banking on moral capital. Stop commodifying identity. Stop treating pictures like protest signs. Stop making pictures like protest signs. Stop being so sure of what you see. As if this is this and that does that. Why are you in the arts? To prove moral superiority? To fuel the reckless battles of throwing shit at each other just to get a step up on others and enjoy the limited breathing space that mob approval grants you?

There will be no time to catch your breath if everyone's on the hunt. There will be no safe space if everyone's defending theirs. There will be no art if everyone's just observing and scanning and monitoring, measuring what we see against existing demands and programs, baiting for moral advance, with no one taking the time to stand and watch, to allow ourselves to lose ego weight, to drift away from our feedback loops and be intoxicated by something that is not us.

Digital connectivity has perforated the membrane between private and public, but it equally has hardened the membranes of our recognition and sensibility. It has turned us into watchguards in panopticons, sovereigns in control rooms, firing back at what comes at us. But while scanning the night skies full of pulsating self-positionings aiming for recognition, we don't act as if we are beholders contemplating but rather as if we were on display ourselves, hunted by other observers.

Everything follows the logic of the cliché 'art work' A strange exchange of positions has taken place. From discussing art works we went on to judging each other, like specialists, for the most far-flung fields of our identities, willing to do anything to shield our objects of interest from contamination, like art conservators. While people are increasingly treating each other like art works, art works are increasingly being treated like social media posts: public utterances of what some private individual thinks or feels. This shortcuts the polar extremes which had previously energized art: the subjective (individual) and the objective (public). As a result art loses its capacity to transcend the socially drawn contours of the individual, to be an expression of societal conditions or what Adorno called "fait social".

Interestingly, this happens at the same time as all social space is being artified.

German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has a fresh theory that can help make sense of this aggressive economy of judgments. In his book "Society of Singularities", out in English on May 8th (polity books), he describes how industrial capitalism's logic of the generic, aiming for lowest production costs by selling as many copies of the same thing as possible and offering standards for how to lead a successful life, has increasingly been overwritten by a logic of singularities, producing extremely valuable singular and uncopyable products, experiences, and life forms: luxury goods; events; subcultures; celebrities; cultural cities; atmospherically charged tourist destinations; everything that proves high narrative density and self-complexity, like the art work.

Class divisions by culture This theory is also one of inequality. Reckwitz concludes that class borders are increasingly defined along those who have the resources to navigate and curate cultural references and progressive ways of living and thereby to perform singular lives. Whereas, since the beginning of the culturalization of politics around 1980, there has been a grim identitarian counter reaction of performing selves by right-wing populists. Identitarians simply reclaim lost hegemony by performing collective instead of individual identities, granting their members a stable place in a rampant battle for recognition – which I think makes a strong point for the politicisation of politics.

What becomes a singularity is decided by collective evaluation processes. This also means that basically everything and everyone can become one. Everyone, I would conclude, is competing and rating everyone else, which makes cultural hegemony something that is constantly contested. In principle everyone is using the same technological means (image production tools and internet access), sharing the same arena as institutions and thereby potentially competing with theaters and newspapers for cultural hegemony.

Fight things not by cancelling, but by looking at them My point here is, the more we understand the aggressiveness of the economy of singularities, and the roles that we play in it, the more we can bring things back into focus and relation. The more uncomfortable we feel, seeing ourselves defending our feelings of self-worth by banking on campaigns against others or pathologizing artworks, the easier we can stop producing individual cultural and moral capital and instead inventing ways of action for the many.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

MORE

CONTAMINATION,

PLEASE!

by KO L JA R E I C H E R T

I think if you really look at things, they lose their power. Only if you concentrate on the identity of the artist and why she has no right to tackle the identity of the subject, can you grant power to an image that has nothing to do with what it actually is. You increase its status as a singularity, even if a negative one. And you offer it as a monstrance to all who think work is done by blanketly shouting "freedom of art", as if freedom of art was not more than the freedom of an artist to spontaneously express her feelings.

Cancelling or deplatforming cultural content is like high-frequency trading: it consumes huge amounts of energy and produces destruction over far distances without any real interaction with the object of trade. The aspiration to protect the visual fields of others so they don't get infected by content tagged as toxic is such a highly speculative operation that my mind is turned inside out whenever I think about it. There is no end to this logic.

Care for the common ground In contrast, if we stop talking about speculative abstractions like identity or toxicity to focus on what's actually in front of us, then we can find a way out of this isolating battle that allows us to see what connects us all. Not only art people, but everyone: matter and form. That's the common ground we must harvest. It might be a good start if we scan less and view more, let things come close, contaminate us. I feel something like this happening at least to me in these precious days of isolation.

KOLJA REICHERT is editor for visual art at Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. He worked on this piece during a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

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KASRA RAHMANIAN,

(2020)

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Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

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Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

MINA KHANLARZADEH is a writer currently living in Raleigh, North Carolina. She just finished her Ph.D. in humanities at Columbia University.

Her research interest is comparative literature and cultural studies.

� � ������������� �� ������ ������������������ �� ����������������� � �������������������������� ���� ���������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������� ���� ������������������������� � � ������������� ���������������������������� ������������� ���������������� ���������������������� ������������� � ���������������������������������������������������� ����������� ����������� ������ �� � ���� ������� ���������� � ������������������������������������������������������������ �������� ����������� ������������������������������ ���� ������ ���� � ����������������� ���������� ���� � ��������������������� �������������������� � ����������������� ������������������������ �� � ������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ��������� � ������������������������������������� ������������������ �����������������

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HFT THE GARDENER/BOTANICAL PRINTS/RANK 3: MICROSOFT • US • TECHNOLOGY HARDWARE & EQUIPMENT (2014-2015) Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art London and P.P.O.W. Gallery New York

SUZANNE TREISTER (b.1958 London UK) studied at St Martin's School of Art, London and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

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17 THE SUNDAY SERVICE MOMENT For anyone who is familiar with hip hop artist Kanye West, it may be challenging to describe what exactly he has been up to during the past several years.

by DA R R E N K A P L A N

I

n 2013, Kanye West started publicly experimenting with symbols of the American right wing, wearing a jacket embroidered with a Confederate flag patch at the release of his album Yeezus. A few years later, West infamously wore a “Make America Great Again” red hat, sitting for a conversation at the White House with Donald Trump, and described slavery as a “choice” for black Americans. With gestures like these, there are obvious implications that were naturally drawn. Malaika Jabali described West in The Guardian as a “black conservative” who “is spreading the gospel of white evangelicals'' in reference to his appearance on right wing evangelican preacher Joel Olsteen’s program.

Others consider West’s antics to be indicative of a sincere religious conversion. Further interpretations, and perhaps the general consensus amongst your friends, treat West merely as incoherent, and reduce his recent acts to manifestations of an underlying mental illness.

long drum break that was found on many funk and rock records (James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” being the most known of these records). As the story goes, these parties became immensely popular, and led to much larger public gatherings, which included Masters of Ceremonies, who would entertain crowds by rhyming on the drum breaks. Eventually with the advent and affordability of personal sampler’s, DJs could further manipulate and reconfigure sounds that were already recorded.

This ability to transform any given sound into potentially any and every arrangement, is why we can call hip hop an universal art of the people, especially the working class.

With the advent of hip hop, popular music could no longer be strictly the domain of the privileged, either those with expensive formal musical training, or those who could afford the equipment and investment in time that is necessary to start a band. What KASRA RAHMANIAN, SUNDAY DISSERVICE (2020) also distinguished hip hop from other types of music is that due to the very Yet these views on the recent endeavors of Kanye West, absent of a deeper method of its construction, there were no restrictions on what the domain analysis, paint an incomplete picture of his persona and his craft. So try to of hip hop music could be, in turn leading to a form of music that could not briefly resist the temptation to either evaluate West on strictly moral grounds, be categorized as a specific genre, but rather functioned as a dismantling of whether that be deriding him for his relationship to right wing symbolism and the concept of genre itself. For the most part, this was mirrored in its lyrical public figures (Trump, Olsteen) or praising him for a personal, or spiritual content. Music and cultural theorist Mark Fisher would describe this stage of conversion. It’s impossible to endorse West’s relationship to either Trump or hip hop as, “not a street music, but non-musique abstrakt: a sight of pure sonic Olsteen, but also to simply cease thinking about West. At this point, that would potential, in which inhuman constructivist sound cartoons can be produced be a disservice to our understanding of the larger world of popular culture. without reference to musical protocols of any kind” (Fisher, 2018). Hip hop A statement such as “slavery was a choice” in the context of early American then, did not belong to the commons, but was the commons itself. The very slavery, is at best an incoherent statement, and at worst a cognizant lie. So practice of sampling and reconfiguring the musical arrangements of others let’s stop thinking solely under the judgment of whether West’s statements and serves to subvert the idea of a private or “intellectual property”, and the “artist” actions are “coherent” or not. Moreover, we will first seek to understand West as the “owner” of their art, questioning a way of thinking that is inseparable in the context of the history of his vocation, hip hop music, and specifically, from the idea of what we consider to be a neoliberal subject. the historical relationship between hip hop and neoliberalism.

Hip Hop at the End Of History Hip Hop as the Commons of Music In the 1990’s, as the children of the Reagan Era (the official first neoliberal There is a tendency to consider hip hop as a sort of “street poetry” and locate its American regime) were becoming the young people inheriting the genre of historically subversive potential in its ability to speak truth to power. We think hip hop, something changed. We have all maybe seen the popular internet naturally of N.W.A’s “Fuck the Police”, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”, and meme (this was popular amongst the hip hop blogosphere in the early 2010’s), more recently Kendrick Lamar’s [insert Kendrick Lamar song here], as clear of a man who purportedly was in a meeting of record executives during the evidence towards this claim. But even less so than its lyrical content, hip hop’s early 1990’s wherein these executives were told to promote “gangster rap” true subversiveness arguably lies in the very materiality of its construction, and and a lifestyle of “criminality” in order to turn profits for specific recording its tacit dismantling of the image of artists as an “individual” liberal subject. companies who had invested in private prisons. Internet conspiracy theorists Here, I am referring to the very way in which hip hop music was constructed (in like to cite this as proof that there was indeed a conspiracy to derail the its early days), using the method of sampling. The original construction of hip subversive drive of 1980’s hip hop. However, one need not resort to conspiracy hop music stems from local dance parties thrown in the South Bronx, where DJs theories to track the way in which conservative forces worked to undermine the connected two turntables together, and oscillated between playing the seconds subversive potential of hip hop music.

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18 As hip hop grew to be more of a popular art form, there were naturally more and more people in the music world looking to turn a profit from it.

Certain musicians whose music had been sampled by hip hop artists began to realize that there was the potential that a certain interpretation of U.S. intellectual property law would put them in a position to not only collect royalties off of hip hop songs that their music was sampled in, but be able to have full control as to whether their music was legally allowed to be sampled or not. On December 17, 1991, a landmark ruling came down from The United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, wherein Jude Kevin Duffy (appointed in 1972 by Richard Nixon), presided over the case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc in which Biz Markie was being sued by Gilbert O'Sullivan and his record label, for sampling an O’Sullivan song. Duffy, ruling against Markie, opened his ruling with a quotation from the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not steal”. He found in favor of the plaintiff and his ruling had instant ramifications.

Hip hop music, as it had existed up until that point, became essentially illegal to make. Groups could no longer make music in the same way, as the once limitless scope of sonic resources was reduced to what a record label was willing to pay for. Producers were now producing with newfound financial constraints, and this limitation was not exclusive to the domain of instrumentation. Atlantic writer, Eric Neilson, in an interview with Public Enemy Producer Hank Shockley, recalls, “[Hank Shocklee] told me, having open access to samples often did significantly impact artists’ lyrical content: ‘A lot of the records that were being sampled were socially conscious, socially relevant records, and that has a way of shaping the lyrics that you’re going to write in conjunction with them.’ When you take sampling out of the equation, Shocklee said, much of the social consciousness disappears because, as he put it, artists’ lyrical reference point only lies within themselves.” (Nielson, 2013) The timing of this ruling coincided with a tangible shift in Western political thought. In 1992, months after the ruling of Grand v. Warner Bros, Francis Fukuyama published his infamous text, The End of History and the Last Man. “Good news has come”, wrote Fukuyama. “Liberal principles in economics – the ‘free market’ – have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World”.

Fukuyama explicitly endorsed the Clinton-era belief that “history”, and all of the political struggles that go along with it, was indeed over. The wonders of neoliberal economics had delivered us into the best of all possible outcomes. There was no longer any need to think outside the parameters set by the logic of the all powerful and all knowing market.

No need to apply rigorous Marxist analysis against the concept of “intellectual property”. No need for the politically potent music of Public Enemy. It is here that we can locate the initial death of hip hop.

Like a true neoliberal subject, hip hop did not

completely disappear, but adapted. Stripped of their resources, artists working within the genre were now lacking the ability to create the kaleidoscopic sonic structures that they were once able to make. For this reason, hip hop music was essentially restricted to the familiar structure of rock and roll: a drum loop, bass line, and lead instrument, which often had either one or no samples due to new found financial constraints. Hip hop had been domesticated under the logic of neoliberalism. Shocklee’s claims would be proven correct here, as the lyrical content, and self image of hip hop artists began to reflect this new reality. We see here how the politically conscious and subversive nature of 1980’s hip hop, gave rise to the prominence of “gangster rap”. We will once again turn to the account of Mark Fisher, who, in tandem and reference to the popular films of the 1990’s, gives us an accurate depiction of the 1990’s hip hop world: “Gangster rap neither merely reflects pre-existing social conditions, as many of its advocates claim, nor does it simply cause those conditions, as its critics argue - rather the circuit whereby hip hop and the late capitalist social field feed into each other is one of the means by which capitalist realism transforms itself into a kind of anti-mythical myth.

The affinity between hip hop and gangster movies such as Scarface, The Godfather films, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction arises from their common claim to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for 'what it really is': a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality. [quoting Simon Reynolds] 'To "get real" is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers'.” (Fisher, 2010). This music was now the soundtrack of Fukuyama’s “end of history”.

Post 9/11 Hip Hop It is this history which makes the emergence of Kanye West ever so interesting. It would only be a matter of time before cracks in the facade would begin to show, and the necessity of a return to a more collectivist thought would arise. September 11, 2001 would perhaps be the first event to call into question if history had, in any meaningful sense, ended. On this very same day, unbeknownst to most Americans, another tangential rupture within the neoliberal consensus was taking place. September 11, 2001 was the day that the critically acclaimed Jay-Z album The Blueprint Vol 1. was released, with its lead single “Izzo (H.O.V.A)”, produced by a largely unknown hip hop artist, Kanye West. West’s sound, especially for a producer working with such a mainstream artist such as Jay-Z, came as a breath of fresh air. Bankrolled by Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records, West was able to obtain a sample clearance for the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”. Kanye, bucking the recent hip hop trends of composing original music (as fellow Jay-Z producers Pharrell and Timbaland were known for), had returned to the very material that gave hip hop its original “soul” during the 1980’s.

West would later parlay his affiliation with Jay-Z and Roc-A-Fella Records, into a solo record deal, ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

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one in which he would debut his lyrical potential.

If 1991’s Grand vs. Warner Brothers marked the beginning of the gangster rap era, West’s 2004 debut The College Dropout signaled its end. This was about as close to the original spirit of hip hop that an artist had come to since the initial outlaw of sampling.

Drug Dealing just to get byyy, stack your money till it gets sky high [...] we weren't supposed to make it past twenty five!

West's debut album opens in a highly unorthodox fashion for a hip hop album of its time- a chorus of school children singing joyfully about selling drugs.

One immediately recognizes the historical link to the playful irony of 80’s hip hop iconoclasts such as De La Soul and the Beastie Boys. As usual with West, he once again constructs the song via references to a bygone era of Black America, transforming the 1979 Jimmy Castor Bunch track, “I Just Wanna Stop” into a soulful bed for him to rap over. Immediately, West is able to distance himself from his mentor Jay-Z, a figure who embodies some of the least desirable aspects of Fisher's interpretation of Gangster rap.

There is no defeated stoicism here when West raps of his reality. In fact, West here comes across as a defiantly working class rapper, one who seeks to critique and indict the system he finds himself in rather than remain resigned to it. West raps,

“My momma say she wanna move south Scratchin' lottery tickets, eyes on a new house Around the same time, Doe ran up in dude's house, couldn't get a job So since he couldn't get work, he figured he'd take work.”

Unlike the rappers of the 1990’s, West does not place himself in the role of the “gangster” or even attempt to justify criminal activities. He rather seeks to illuminate the (racist) social forces of neoliberal America, which drive certain people to commit crimes. There is no talk of the Hobbesian dog eat dog world here, only observation and criticism of the system at large. West’s debut is significant here for the history of hip hop, for he not only found a way to smuggle back in the forgotten practice of sampling, but as a revival of the forgotten social criticism that once went hand in hand with the music. We can then see in Kanye West, a man who has woken from the dogmatic slumber that is the liberal consensus of the end of history. But just as many philosophers who are able to recognize such social problems, West does not necessarily have any immediate answers. On “Diamonds from Sierra Leone Remix”, a standout track on West’s sophomore album, we see him developing an inner monologue which wrestles with

19 the concept of ethical consumption under capitalism, specifically in reference to blood diamonds:

See, a part of me sayin' keep shinin' How? When I know what a blood diamond is?

Though it's thousands of miles away Sierra Leone connects to what we go through today Over here, it's a drug trade, we die from drugs Over there, they die from what we buy from drugs The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses I thought my jesus piece was so harmless

After West’s second verse, he then hands the proverbial mic to Jay-Z, who in turn ends his verse on a song called “Diamonds of Sierra Leone”, with not a single reference to blood diamonds. Taking these two songs as a microcosm for the beginning of West’s career, we see a picture of a man who, with the aid of sonic material belonging to a bygone subversive art form, offers up a recognition as well as moral indictment of the current system, but seems to be stuck as to what to do next.

“George Bush doesn't care about black people.”

Kanye West’s appearance alongside actor Mike Myers during a 2006 telethon event for Hurricane Katrina, was perhaps the first time many people had heard of Kanye West. After Myers reads off of a teleprompter, West goes off script and unleashes a tangential criticism of the racism and classism of the mainstream media and the Bush administration. West ends simply with, “George Bush doesn't care about black people ''. There has perhaps never been a more politically significant gesture that an American hip hop artist has made than this. Along with insulting the sitting president of the United States on national television, West implicitly cuts through what he finds

Photo: Curtis Yee

Again, West continues to move into uncharted territories for hip hop music. The neoliberal “realist” rapper of the 1990’s would not have the ability consider the ethical implications of something such as the purchase of jewelry. West reveals the character of a new mind in hip hop, one which is not comfortable discussing exploitation of workers as a mere fact of life. But just as soon as he expresses his moral discomfort, West promptly realizes he has no further course of action, no program, no strategy to combat this, and ends his verse by falling back into a familiar identity:

It's in a black person soul to rock that gold Spend your whole life tryin' to get that ice On a Polo rugby, it looks so nice How can something' so wrong make me feel so right?

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to be empty platitudes of “sympathy” elicited by the other liberal guests on the program. Kanye West exposes the ideology that is already contained in the United States response to a natural disaster.

This is the Kanye that I would like us to bear in mind when discussing his recent activities: Kanye as the inheritor of the subversive tradition of sample based hip hop; Kanye as the critical minded rapper, eschewing the detached fatalism of his predecessors in favor of a joyous criticism; Kanye as the great short circuit-er of the spectacle: the man who said George Bush doesn't care about Black people. It is fair to think that this image that I have painted of Kanye is a diametrical odds with his recent actions, specifically, his affinity for the current right-wing US President, Donald Trump. But even this, can and should be viewed as a symptom of a larger ideological failure. I have outlined the history of hip hop that has placed Kanye at odds with neoliberalism. But is it clear that he is completely cognizant of this? Neoliberalism thrives by making itself invisible. The “Free market” becomes not just one specific economic model which happens to be dominant, but the only possible model. It seeks to distance itself from any outside ways of thinking and modes of being. Kanye West, like many artists laboring under the neoliberal order, is increasingly presented with fewer and fewer options to obtain a truly radical subjectivity in this world. Much like a blue collar worker in the rust belt at a time when they felt as if they were being excluded from this world order, Kanye may have perhaps misidentified an escape route through the reactionary politics of a figure such as Donald Trump.

20 Philosopher Alain Badiou, in his discussion of young men struggling to find themselves in the neoliberal capitalist world order (in his recent book, The True Life), offers an account of the three dominant forms of subjectivity which often condemn young men to “infinite adolescence”, unable to achieve a fully mature political life. These are “the perverted, the deserving, and the sacrificed”. We see variants of the former two all over the modern hip hop landscape. In Lil Peep, Xxxtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert, and Mac Miller, we see the pure hedonism of the perverted body. These subjects ingratiate themselves by “piercing the body, drugging it, [and] deadening it with ear-splitting music” (Badiou, 2017).

In “careerist” hip hop artists, such as 50 Cent, and Jay-Z, we see the status and business obsessions of the “deserved body”. These two types of bodies are able to exist under neoliberalism without posing any threat to its power.

Kanye has more in common with the sacrificed body, a body which seeks to give up its own agency to a higher cause. Badiou sees it as the body of ISIS fighters, evangelical Christians, and reactionaries/nationalists. At the core of the drive of this body, is a bound urge to escape the current world order.

Lacking a structurally sound and functional leftist alternative, some descend into the darkness of the sacrificed body. This is undoubtedly, where many people see Kanye West. But is this a fair assessment?

The Trumped Up Charges against Kanye We should indeed take it seriously when Kim Kardashian claims that Kanye “just happens to like Donald Trump’s personality, but doesn’t know about the politics.” (Miller 2018). West’s appropriation of Donald trump, the MAGA hat, and the confederate flag, were “forbidden” materials for Kanye to experiment with. Far from being the blind zealot that many would make him out to be, his engagement with this material stems not from a bigoted ignorance, but from a rejection of what he perceives as the liberal dogma that told him that

WE CAPITALISTS From Zero to Turbo Klaus Staeck, nach einem Entwurf zu Günter Wallraffs Taschenbuch „Und macht euch die Erde untertan“, 1987 © Klaus Staeck

From the re-opening (tba) until 12 July 2020 in Bonn

African Americans can never engage with this iconography. We are certainly not seeking to endorse this experiment of West’s. We should perhaps instead view it for what it is, a mistake borne out of a certain type of distaste for the political establishment of America; or as West himself refers to it, “God’s practical joke on Liberals” (Ahmed, 2019). Like many voters of the 2016 USpresidential election, West, in seeking a creative route out of neoliberalism, may have mistakenly endorsed something worse (It is worth pointing out that West has since distanced himself from his endorsement of Trump).

In the years since, West has embarked on what again is being perceived to be a reactionary project, that of Sunday Service, a weekly performance featuring West and a gospel choir. I would argue that we should resist viewing Sunday Service to be “the great reactionary art project of our time” as my friend Mohammed Salemy suggested it may be, and rather view Kanye’s use of the traditions of African American Christianity, as similar to the way that he once used African American soul music to construct hip hop soundscapes. Kanye is still a producer. He is still a sampler. The choir that accompanies him on his Sunday Service tour is called “The Samples”. Kanye is doing what he has always done, which is attempting something outside of the current boundaries of music, a task true to the origins of hip hop. Just as he once distanced himself from the mafioso music of Jay-Z, he moves away from both the perverted and deserving bodies that currently occupy space in the hip hop world.

Sunday Service is a project that is inherently communal. West provides a public forum for a shared experience through music. This stands in direct contrast to the atomized culture of neoliberalism, which finds its musical apex in electronic dance festivals. Although Sunday Service contains heavy religious overtones, the god of Kanye West is not the same Christian god that Friedrich Nietzsche detests. West’s own account of god, for which he claims, “God doesn’t exist only in four walls, god is everything and everywhere”, is much more in line with Baruch Spinoza than it is with Joel Olsteen. God is not a patriarchal figure in the sky, but what is common in all of us. This is the spirit of hip hop. We should allow ourselves to imagine the full potential of a project like Sunday Service. Imagine if Kanye were to use this platform to promote socialist policies (what better way to spread the word of Christ?).

Imagine Bernie Sanders being invited to give a speech with the aid of “The Samples” choir. The infrastructure is here. Millions of viewers hearing the good word of universal health care!

We hear the potential of a socialist ethos in West when he says things like, “We have to be in control… of our own minds, of our own food, our health, and our families”. He is aware of the way that capital controls our lives, and that there is nothing necessary about this. His turn to god is a turn away from the capitalist consensus, replacing the law of the market with his god of “everything and everywhere”, a strikingly materialistic concept. If Kanye West is not an overt leftist, we can perhaps lay the blame in the Left itself for its own recent failures to articulate a coherent alternative to capitalism.

References - Ahmed, Tufayel. “Kanye West Says He Will Be President, Wearing MAGA Hat Was ‘God's Practical Joke on Liberals.’” Newsweek, Newsweek, 25 Oct. 2019, <www.newsweek.com/kanye-westpresident-maga-hat-god-practical-joke-liberals-1467663> - Badiou, Alain, and Susan Spitzer. The True Life. Polity Press, 2017. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, 2010.

- Fisher, Mark, et al. K-Punk: the Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016).

Repeater, 2018.

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- Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History and the Last Man.” The End of History. Francis Fukuyama (1992), <www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm> - Jabali, Malaika. “Kanye West Is Spreading the Gospel of White Evangelicals | Malaika Jabali.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 15 Nov. 2019, <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ nov/15/kanye-west-christian-conservative-prosperity-gospel> - Miller, Julie. “Kim Kardashian ‘Educated’ Kanye West on Donald Trump's Policies After His White House Visit.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 15 Nov. 2018, <www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/11/donald-trumpkim-kardashian-kanye-west-oval-office> - Nielson, Erik. “Did the Decline of Sampling Cause the Decline of Political Hip Hop?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 19 Sept. 2013, <www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/didthe-decline-of-sampling-cause-the-decline-of-political-hip-hop/279791/>

DARREN KAPLAN is a philosophy student living in New York City. His interests include the history of sample based hip hop music. He has produced songs for Lil B "the basedgod".

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MX. CIBELLE CAVALLI BASTOS (b. 1978, São Paulo, Brazil) Non-binary, They/Them pronouns. Artist, musician, independent researcher and activist. Lives and works between Berlin, São Paulo and London.

Cavalli Bastos has a conceptual, expanded field and interdisciplinary practice that includes writing, performance, sound, video, painting, sculpture, AR/VR/XR and installation. Currently operating daily through Instagram stories and IGTV under @aevtarperform with the project Aevtar/Deprogram, they work with pattern recognition, linguistics, psychology, cognition and xeno-epistemic practices in search for the core structures that uphold violence, and disable empathy. Cavalli Bastos is concerned with the challenges in perception posed by technological advancements, the constant repetition of violent behavioural patterns and its consequences in identity formation and politics. Website: cibellecavallibastos.xyz IG: aevtarperform

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

22

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer JENNIFER WALSHE was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include Aisteach, a fictional history of avant-garde music in Ireland; EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, a work for voice, string quartet and film commissioned by the Arditti Quartet; and TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, which has been touring to critical acclaim. ALL THE MANY PEOPLS, her second solo album, was released on Migro Records in May 2019. Walshe is currently Professor of Experimental Performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

23 My first diary had a unique fragrance, like chewing gum, which you may still smell.

6 July 1993 Tuesday Dear Diary, Nowadays everyday television news about terror it show. Of course newspapers too. The other day Sister Funda me told they Ankara attack plan.

This entry is accompanied by a drawing: A stickperson holds a weapon aiming at another stickperson with long hair. The victim has a speech bubble saying “Help!”

Turkey is a bridge between the East and the West Do not keep it to yourself!

Remain Alert!

Have a Safe Day!

THINK We like them We like Döner Orientalisches Essen Did you know?

“The Bold and the Beautiful,” a staple of American daytime television for more than 30 years, peaked in its worldwide viewership at 26.2 million in 2008. A few years later, “Magnificent Century,” a Turkish drama, was broadcast to 200 million people.” Writes Adeel Hassan, The New York Times "Today, just under 200,000 personnel are overseas, marking the lowest American troop deployment in six decades. One might argue that as troop numbers decrease, so too does American cultural dominance.” says writer Fatima Bhutto to The New York Times Did you know?

Rakı has been known as the national drink of Turkey.

In April 2013, Mr. President claimed that the non-alcoholic beverage ayran is our national drink. After this claim, there was an increase of stock interest for the Dairy Products companies in the market.

SLIDE. JINGLE.

CABARET PORTRAIT:

DÖNER BLACKOUT II

Mr. P do you think you have blood in your hands?

If there’s no truth, there’s self esteem.

Believe in yourself enough to tell your own truth.

Have you ever wondered what the future holds?

by G Ö K S U K U N A K JINGLE

The finance expert warned Thin legs Lift the Hips Abdomen in Thin Waist Thin Arm Analyst makes KEY point on how lira CRISIS could hit economy THE lira crisis is likely to put “some serious pressure” on , with 40 percent of the country’s private companies owing money in dollars and euros, warned finance expert That excites the audience Welcome The real topics of your lives are brought here at tonight’s show with formulas for a healthy life!

How do you like your truth today?

What the truth can do for you?

Awake-Make your life better JINGLE

Look we have no soldiers in there anymore. We beat them.

We beat them, John.

That excites the audience

Stand behind the victim Fact: T..ish authorities detained

faces steep fall

Steep faces // fall steep // Face lifting 6 face yoga exercises to do at home This medical corset makes me feel so free. I feel free and independent. This medical corset was designed by the finest doctors of the USA manufactured in — It’s skin color, nude.

autocensor autocensor (Reuters).

Fact: A T..ish court sentenced autocensor autocensor (Reuters) autocensor

Whose skin is it that is being given reference to?

(Reuters)

Just authorized

Experience a Turkish Bath

Not good

Temper yourself a pleasure Surrender to Turkish living

At this

Traditional healthy cuisines

Flashback: T.ish currency crisis stokes fear in world markets

Embrace your dreams

THINK WELL

The harem is waiting for you

What to do with 50 nuclear bombs stored in T, US officers ask.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

You’re invited to the residence of the Sultans

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

24 JINGLE

Care Care of scalp wounds only shrapnel wounds of the brain

How do you like your truth today?

What the truth can do for you?

Awake-Make your life better

All wounds heal adequately. X2

JINGLE

ASK: Are you choking ?

The victim came to the hospital with burns on the body caused

by Right and left eye damage, vision —burns left arm, left leg and chest. Difficulty swallowing. Pain and swelling around the face, right arm, and legs Cardiovascular: back to regular rate and rhythm Are You Choking?

Are YOU choking?

Remove cause of the burn prevent any further contact carefully remove Contact your skin immediately carefully loosely remove

Determine if the Victim can Speak Cough or Cry Continue Until you can breathe

Consult your local poison control center or a physician

Push hard

Flush the acid Splashhhhhhh

Push hard until the victim speaks

All wounds heal adequately.

Welcome we have a good day.

Hope you’re well.

Use for whitening and skin lightening of body, face, arms, neck, knees, underarms, armpits, black skin, men, sensitive areas.

Medical drama. Turkish drama. Flu meds.

Tea kettle sick day. Fast delivery

(Source: https://shopee.com.my)

All you need is voice.

Flawless Beauty and Skin is here to help you. We only stock brands that deliver both efficacy and safety. We stay far away from hydroquinone bleaching creams that damage the skin and eventually make it look darker than before.

Write down 3 things you won today!

Deal of the day This is an impasse. BEGIN cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Snow White had anemia and none of us knew. That’s why she was sleeping a lot and her whiteness is because of lack of iron or B12.

The magnitude of boredom. Swallow it. Swallow in the magnitude of this boredom.

The skin has up to seven layers of ectodermal tissue and guards the underlying muscles, bones, ligaments and internal organs.

Shrapnel Wound I brain

SNOW SKIN WHITENING CREAM - 7 ELITE SKIN WHITENING INGREDIENTS FOR BRIGHT, FLAWLESS SKIN - 50 ML BOTTLE ADVANCE WHITENING FACIAL CREAM WITH TA STEM CELL & PLACENTA - INTENSIVE REPAIR EurAbia the Place to Be! The circulation of legal bullets Islamised Europe the doomsday the higher birth rates of racist Germans will create an Islamised Europe HaHA this was fun mind blown Total satisfaction guarantee It looked like it was a knee injury How to roll the thinnest dolma when you have to take care of 4 kids?

required surgical intervention for treatment of facial gunshot wounds Primary treatment of hard and soft tissue injuries of the face surgical debridement develop a seizure disorder shrapnel wounds of the brain Piece in a jaw Post-admission broken teeth wounds of the brain

Apply This Homemade Skin Lightening Cream On Your Face Before Sleeping & See The Magic — Kissable brightening

EurObia the Place to Be! GÖKSU KUNAK (Ankara, 1985) a.k.a Gucci Chunk is a writer, performer, and performance maker based in Berlin. Göksu performed their text-based performances at The Parliament of Bodies Bergen Assembly 2019, Pogo Bar at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, to CAMP Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva, 3hd Festival HAU Berlin, City Lights (by Meg Stuart and Maria F. Scaroni), and others. Their first book 'I thought this would' was published by Belladonna* Collaborative, NYC. (Please visit guccichunk.berta.me for more information).

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

NIGIN BECK, REALITY IS NORTH, FAKE HOPES ARE EAST, EMPTY DREAMS ARE WEST, WE ARE SOUTH (2019)

EXTRABL.A.TTn 5 o

WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS Worlds of Homelessness proposes an interdisciplinary and global engagement with homelessness and its connections to inequality, gentrification, racism, and migration. The project creates a platform for local and international artists, architects, and scholars to come together to share ideas.

by Lien Heidenreich-Seleme

In Los Angeles, where the phrase „Homelessness is just a paycheck away“ is all too well known, the divide between the „haves and have-nots“ is ever-present. While the city is best known for its Hollywood image, it is estimated that 60,000 individuals experience homelessness in LA County on any given night. Among these are also students and working-class individuals, who have to live in their cars because they cannot afford to pay rent.

Worlds of Homelessness is a project of the Goethe-Institut that offers an interdisciplinary engagement with the issue of homelessness and its many related themes, such as the gap between rich and poor, participation, inequality, gentrification, racism, and migration. Worlds of Homelessness brings together international artists, architects, scholars, and others to create a platform to share ideas, thoughts and to present their work, as well as examining the wide range of strategies employed to engage with the many questions and challenges surrounding the issue.

The project is developed in cooperation with the Los Angeles Poverty Department, which has created art with and promoted the activism of Skid Row Artists for decades; the Thomas Mann House, the renowned and independent architecture school SCI-Arc, the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin; and NAVEL, a collectively driven cultural organization.

The Worlds of Homelessness event series, including discussions, music performances, and film screenings, took place from October 22. through 27., 2019 in Los Angeles at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, NAVEL, and SCI-Arc, and culminated with the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s 10th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists on October 26. and 27., 2019.

“How are the issues of homelessness and housing precarity spoken about and addressed in different communities, cities, countries, or parts of the world? How can we understand and examine the interconnectivity and linkages between homelessness and its many related themes, such as the gap between rich and poor, participation, inequality, gentrification, racism, and migration? How have artists engaged in a meaningful way with homelessness? What

Festival for All Skid Row Artists © Khalid Farqharson

Festival for All Skid Row Artists © Khalid Farqharson

important drivers for knowledge production and ways forward?” These were some of the questions discussed during the event series.

The film screenings included the film EX°ST about Radames Eger, who grew up in Brazil and moved to Frankfurt, Germany with a dance scholarship. He has experienced homelessness and designs and creates clothes for homeless people, including jackets that can be converted into tents or sleeping bags that he distributes to the community for free. A film screening of “The Advocates,” by Remi Kessler, had guests Rudy Salinas and Mel Tillekeratne, two of the advocates portrayed in the film, in discussion with the audience.

The Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Festival for All Skid Row Artists is a two-day festival of performing and visual art with plenty of music showcasing the diverse range of talents among Skid Row residents. Taking place in Gladys Park, the festival has become one of the most anticipated grassroots cultural events in Skid Row, where over 100 Skid Row Artists perform or display their artwork to enthusiastic audiences. The participants of the Worlds of Homelessness project joined the festivities.

It is a great pleasure to make some of the wonderful contributions of artists, architects, scholars, and particularly people who formerly and currently experience homelessness available to a broader readership as part of this Extrablatt of the Arts of the Working Class. I would like to thank each of the contributors for allowing us to present their outstanding work, as well as the Arts of the Working Class team, for the collaboration!

Have you ever felt invisible – Worlds of Homelessness © Loredana LaRocca

strategies have they used to engage with communities, or are they part of the communities themselves? What challenges do artists face, and how do they engage with these challenges? What types of artistic engagements with homelessness are problematic, and why? How can architects produce mutually supportive environments for houseless communities? How

can community-driven processes contribute to responsible and comprehensive design solutions? How can schools of design and architecture encourage the success of such initiatives? How is knowledge about homelessness generated? How do we collect data, and how is this data used?

How can the knowledge and needs of communities themselves become

Lien Heidenreich-Seleme is the Director of the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.

She studied languages and international law at the Freie University Berlin and joined the Goethe-Institut in 2004. She was the Director of the Goethe-Institut in Afghanistan before supporting the openings of new institutes and offices in sub-Saharan Africa.

Subsequently, she worked as the Head of cultural programs sub-Saharan Africa at the Goethe-Institut in South Africa.

CONTENTS 2 Lien Heidenreich-Seleme 3 Catherine Wagley 4 Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) 7 Portrait Crushow Herring 8 Ananya Roy 9 Michele Lancione 12 Barbara Schönig 12 Radames Eger 13 Showzart 14 Festival For All Skid Row Artists 16 Fabian Debora 17 Licko Turle 18 Alexander Hagner 18 Ana Elvira Velez 19 Michael Maltzan 20 Thorsten Deckler 21 Tebogo Ramatlo 22 Jutta Allmendinger 24 Hilary Silver 26 Cristina Cielo 27 Charles Porter 28 Artists 2019 Festival For All Skid Row Artists

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WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS Worlds of Homelessness ist eine interdisziplinäre und globale Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Obdachlosigkeit als Ausdruck weiterer gesellschaftlicher Fragestellungen wie Ungleichheit, Gentrifizierung, Rassismus und Migration. Das Projekt bringt lokale und internationale Künstler, Architekten, Akademiker und andere Persönlichkeiten zusammen, um Ideen auszutauschen. von Lien Heidenreich-Seleme

Die Schere zwischen Arm und Reich ist in Los Angeles allgegenwärtig. Während die Stadt meist durch Hollywoodstars bekannt ist, leben in LA County geschätzte 60.000 obdachlose Menschen. „Homelessness is just a paycheck away“ ist eine bekannte Floskel der Stadt, in der teilweise Studenten und arbeitende Menschen in ihren Autos leben, weil sie die Mieten nicht zahlen können.

Worlds of Homelessness ist ein Projekt des GoetheInstituts, das eine zweijährige interdisziplinäre Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Obdachlosigkeit als Ausdruck weiterer gesellschaftlicher Fragestellungen wie Arm-Reich, Partizipation, Ungleichheit, Gentrifizierung, Rassismus und Migration umfasst. Worlds of Homelessness bringt Künstler, Architekten, Akademiker und andere Persönlichkeiten zusammen, um Ideen, Gedanken und ihre Arbeit zu dem Thema auszutauschen und neue Auseinandersetzungen mit den Fragestellungen und Herausforderungen zu schaffen.

Das Projekt wird in Zusammenarbeit mit dem LA Poverty Department, die seit Jahrzehnten mit obdachlosen Künstlern in Skid Row arbeiten, dem Thomas Mann Haus, der Architekturschule SCI-Arc, dem Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin und NAVEL, einer kollektiven Kulturorganisation durchgeführt.

Die Worlds of Homelessness Veranstaltungsreihe beinhaltete Diskussionen, Musik und Filmvorführungen und fand vom 22. bis 27. Oktober 2019 in Los Angeles im Skid Row History Museum and Archive, NAVEL und Sci-Arc statt und endete mit dem 10. Festival for All Skid Row Artists des Los Angeles Poverty Departments am 26. und 27. Oktober 2019. „Wie werden die Themen der Obdachlosigkeit und Wohnungsnot in verschiedenen Orten, Städten, Ländern oder Teilen der Erde diskutiert und adressiert? Wie können wir die Verbindungen und Zusammenhänge zwischen Obdachlosigkeit und den zahlreichen, damit verwandten Themen wie Arm und Reich, Partizipation, Ungleichheit, Gentrifizierung, Rassismus und Migration verstehen? Wie können sich Künstler auf sinnvolle Weise mit Obdachlosigkeit auseinandersetzen? Welche Strategien haben sie angewandt, um sich mit den betroffenen Bevölkerungsgruppen auseinanderzusetzen, oder sind sie selbst Teil davon? Welchen Herausforderungen sehen sie sich dabei gegenüber, und wie gehen sie damit um? Welche Formen der künstlerischen Auseinandersetzung mit Obdachlosigkeit sind problematisch und warum? Wie können Architekten Umgebungen schaffen, die sich gegenseitig unterstützen und für wohnungslose Gemeinschaften geeignet sind? Wie können Grassroots Prozesse zu verantwortungsvollen und umfassenden Designlösungen beitragen? Wie können Schulen für Design und Architektur den Erfolg solcher Initiativen fördern? Wie wird Wissen über Obdachlosigkeit generiert? Wie werden Daten erhoben und wie verwertet? Wie können das Wissen und die Bedürfnisse der betroffenen

#WORLDSOFHOMELESSNESS

Bevölkerungsgruppen zu wichtigen Katalysatoren für die Wissensproduktion und Lösungswege werden?“ Dies waren einige der Fragen, die diskutiert wurden.

Die Filmvorführungen beinhalteten den Film EX°ST über Radames Eger, der in Brasilien aufwuchs, durch ein Tanzstipendium nach Europa kam und nun in Frankfurt am Main lebt. Er war selbst obdachlos und entwirft und schneidert Kleidung für Obdachlose, wie etwa Jacken, die zu Schlafsäcken oder Zelten umfunktioniert werden können. Diese Kleidungsstücke verteilt er kostenlos unter den Bedürftigen. Nach der Filmvorführung von „The Advocates“ von Remi Kessler diskutierten Rudy Salinas und Mel Tillekeratne, zwei der im Film porträtierten Advokaten, mit dem Publikum.

Das Festival for All Skid Row Artists des Los Angeles Poverty Departments ist ein zweitägiges Festival für darstellende und visuelle Kunst mit viel Musik, auf dem die unterschiedlichen Talente der Bewohner von Skid Row vorgestellt werden. Das Festival im Gladys Park hat sich zu einem der am meisten erwarteten kommunalen Kulturereignisse in Skid Row entwickelt, bei dem über 100 Skid Row Künstler ihre Arbeiten vorstellen und einem begeisterten Publikum präsentieren. Die Gäste des Worlds of Homelessness Projekts nahmen an dem Festival teil.

Ich freue mich sehr, dass wir einige der wunderbaren Beiträge von Künstlern, Architekten, Akademikern und insbesondere von Menschen mit Obdachlosigkeitserfahrung einer breiteren Leserschaft im Rahmen dieses Extrablattes der Arts of the Working Class Zeitschrift zugänglich machen können. Ich möchte allen Mitwirkenden dafür danken, dass wir ihre herausragenden Arbeiten vorstellen dürfen, sowie dem Team der Arts of the Working Class für die ausgezeichnete Zusammenarbeit!

Radames Eger Zeltjacke © Jonas Reuter

Worlds Of Homelessness

THE RIGHT TO HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT The Goethe-Institut Los Angeles organized a four-day conference called “Worlds of Homelessness,” bringing local and international scholars, advocates, artists, architects, and current or formerly unhoused people together for conversations held in downtown Los Angeles.

by Catherine G. Wagley

Fabian Debora of Somos LA Arte: When does life experience become expertise? © Khalid Farqharson

The event opened at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive, a space run by the performance art collective the Los Angeles Poverty Department, aka the LAPD. Artist John Malpede, who founded the LAPD in the mid-1980s, collaborates to create performances with residents of Skid Row, where a concentration of the city’s unhoused people live. The collective opened the museum and archive in 2015. It served as an ideal venue for the conference’s opening – and later, its closing – as it assumes that Skid Row residents have the knowledge and expertise to document and preserve their own lived experience.

How do we talk about homelessness?

The opening panel on October 22, titled “Framing the Issue,” questioned the language we use to discuss homelessness, including whether “homeless” is even the best term, and outlined systemic factors contributing to worldwide housing precarity. Ananya Roy, of the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy, spoke about the criminalization of poverty, while Barbara Schönig, director of the Institute for European Urban Studies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, discussed the Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen movement in Berlin, a public revolt against private corporate landlords. Crushow Herring, an artist, muralist and entrepreneur who lives on Skid Row, framed living unhoused as a rejection of the very system that racially discriminates and criminalizes poverty.

Michele Lancione, an urban ethnographer and activist based at University of Sheffield, argued that our collective narratives – including the limiting ways in which we often discuss homelessness – must change if we want a more inclusive future. After the panel ended, the L.A. Playmakers, musicians who belong to the Skid Row community, played until nearly midnight.

Worlds Of Homelessness

When does life experience become expertise?

On October 23, the conference met at Navel on the southwest edge of downtown for film screenings and a discussion on how art can engage with homelessness. John Malpede, artist Henriette Brouwers, and LAPD collaborator Walter Fears spoke about how the LAPD uses performance to engage conversations around the local and national policies that affect the lives of Skid Row residents. Actor and scholar Licko Turle described how street theater and social movements coalesce in communities of unhoused people in Salvador in Brazil. Fabian Debora, an L.A. artist who currently serves as director of Somos LA Arte Homeboy Art Academy at Homeboy Industries, described his own journey with addiction and art, and asked when life experience would begin to be seen as true expertise. The question brought warm applause.

A panel at Sci-Arc on October 24 included architects Darin Johnstone from Los Angeles; Alexander Hagner

Catherine Wagley is an art critic and journalist based in Los Angeles. She is a contributing editor for the art journal Momus and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA). She served as an art critic for the LA Weekly from 2011-2017, and contributes to artnet News, ARTNews, Hyperallergic, the LA Times and The LAnd, among other publications. She is a recent recipient of the Rabkin Prize for art journalism. Her current work often focuses on issues of obscurity: how do we pull stories from the margins of different art worlds without forcing them to fit the mainstream narratives we already know how to tell? Additionally, her reporting in Los Angeles frequently explores the relationships between the art world, gentrification, and urban geography.

#WORLDSOFHOMELESSNESS

from Vienna; Thorsten Deckler and Tebogo Ramatlo from Johannesburg, South Africa; and Ana Elvira Vélez from Columbia. The panelists presented projects they had completed, and also discussed different ways of thinking about affordable housing. The only event that did not include a current or formerly unhoused person or someone working daily with unhoused communities, this panel ended in heated debate over the language we use to discuss homelessness and the way we talk about money in a world, and a city, with steep wealth disparities.

What needs to change to ensure the right to housing?

“Worlds of Homelessness” ended on October 25, once again at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive.

The final panel included two scholars who focused on our lack of adequate, sharable data on unhoused populations worldwide: Jutta Allmendinger, President of the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), and Hilary Silver, of George Washington University. Two others, Cristina Cielo of the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences in Quito, Ecuador and Charles Porter of the United Coalition East Prevention Project in L.A., discussed the possibilities for self-organizing and collective empowerment of marginalized communities. The discussion that followed was wide and urgent, once again touching on how both our mentalities and systems of governance and capital must change if we are to ensure a right to housing.

The Festival for all Skid Row Artists, hosted annually by the LAPD, marked the end of the four-day event.

The guests of “Worlds of Homelessness” took part in the festival, which features art from Skid Row residents who work in music, visual art, theater, and a range of other forms.

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LAPD

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) creates work that connects the experiences of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities.

by Henriëtte Brouwers & John Malpede

Skid Row is the poorest area in Los Angeles, with the largest concentration of homeless people of any neighborhood in the US. At the time of the LA Poverty Department’s founding, homelessness in this area was thought of as a “beans and blankets” issue: The poor and homeless were warehoused in shelters, fed in soup lines and there was little belief and no means for assisting people to rise out of this condition. LAPD started as part of a movement with advocates, residents, and social service professionals to change the paradigm by putting forward the idea that Skid Row could be improved by embracing and nourishing the powers of the people who live there.

LAPD added the arts to this activist mix.

Skid Row Los Angeles is often described as “the last Skid Row in America.”

What’s left out is that all the skid row areas in other cities have been bulldozed, built upon and up-scaled – with all low-income residents displaced. This was about to happen in Los Angeles in the early 1970’s. A downtown business community generated plan that passed City Council was reviewed when Tom Bradley became Mayor. The business generated plan, “The Silver Book Plan,” called for the demolition of all the single room occupancy (SRO) hotel housing in Skid Row and reserved only one block for a large mission and detox center. The Mayor called for public hearings. Catherine Morris and Jeff Dietrich, the first Skid Row activists from the Catholic Worker community, attended the public hearings and became clients of Chuck Elsessor, a public interest lawyer from the Legal Aid Foundation. The three of them and Gary Squier from the Community Design Center developed an alternative plan that argued for saving the single room occupancy hotel housing in a 50 square block area of Skid Row – and for allowing only extremely low-income housing to be built there. It was described as “the containment zone” arguing that if housing and amenities, 4

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including parks, and a branch library were created there, Skid Row folks would stay in that area rather than spending time in the rest of downtown – or drifting into surrounding neighborhoods. This convinced cynical City Council members as well as those concerned about the

1991 CALL HOME – callers on the street © LA Poverty Department

2003 La Llorona, Weeping Women in Skid Row © LA Poverty Department

lives of low-income people, to embrace the “containment plan” and abandon the wholesale bulldozing and obliteration of Skid Row. The Containment Policy had the consequence of protecting Skid Row from development.

The containment and segregation of Skid Row has resulted in the grassroots creation of an ever-strengthening

#CREATIVESTATEMENT

low-income community, that because it was not dispersed has been able to self organize and articulate and defend its interests. Thousands of people live in Skid Row on the streets, and in the past 35 years more than 60 former flophouse hotels have been transformed and new hotels built by nonprofits to provide safe, affordable, permanent housing. This housing stock has been preserved due to the organized civic engagement of Skid Row residents and activists, who have succeeded twice in enacting moratoriums on SRO hotels to prevent their conversion into upscale accommodations. Today, more than half of the people living in Skid Row are permanent residents of these hotels, among them the elderly, women, families, veterans, a large and active drug recovery community, those with mental and physical disabilities, and people recovering from incarceration.

Los Angeles Poverty Department embraces the power of imagination to motivate people, and not only artistically – by acknowledging the hopes, dreams, rational and spiritual power at the core of everyone’s humanity. LAPD has grown from a pipsqueak organization – to become a larger, but still pipsqueak organization – that has had a major impact on raising the value placed on the arts by activists, social service providers and policymakers.

LAPD’s theater projects have thematically focused on a constellation of interrelated issues of continued importance to Skid Row, and other low-income communities. These performances have challenged, destabilized and overturned the dominant narrative on interconnected issues, including gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children on Skid Row and mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.

LAPD has created these theater projects in Skid Row and in extended residencies in communities throughout the US, and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium Worlds Of Homelessness

2002 Agents and Assets – Detroit © LA Poverty Department

and Bolivia, while working with drug recovery programs, shelters, policy advocates, and arts organizations.

“Agents and Assets” addressed the devastation of lives and communities by the “War on Drugs” and was created in Los Angeles, Detroit and Cleveland at moments when drug policy reform campaigns were making change in those cities. Our performance project “ Biggest Recovery Community Anywhere” debunked the city of LA / developer narrative that Skid Row was infested by drug dealers and emphasized that Skid Row’s free recovery programs and the 80 weekly recovery meetings organized by Skid Row residents attested to it’s large, active and sophisticated recovery culture. This project was instrumental in changing the perception of Skid Row, which is now widely recognized throughout the city as the place where recovery happens. Our 2016 performance, “What Fuels Development?” celebrated the campaign we were active in to prevent non-profit housing developers from leasing their street-level storefronts for upscale, full bar restaurants – that were an affront to their low-income, just off the streets tenants who were struggling with sobriety. Our 2017 installation and performance, “The Back 9” challenged the way land-use decisions are made. The project initiated a dialog with the city’s planning department, and led to the formation of a grassroots coalition that developed a plan that articulates that current Skid Row residents want their neighborhood to remain theirs in the future – with no displacement.

LAPD tells the rest of the story – what you don’t hear elsewhere. We create change by telling the story of the community in a way that supports the initiatives of community residents. We work to create recognition of the community and its values.

Worlds Of Homelessness

We want to create a normative community in Skid Row and normative communities for all people living in poverty. In other words, if they’ve got municipal services in other parts of town, then we want them in ours. If they’ve got parks, libraries, community centers, then we want the same. We want the same policing in our community as in others. Not, bending the laws using racial profiling or harassing people so that they will leave the neighborhood so that it can be developed.

We make change by creating initiatives that bring together, grassroots advocacy and arts organizations, community members and Skid Row service providers. With the Urban Institute and Americans for the Arts, we initiated a series of neighborhood conversations for residents

John Malpede directs, performs, and engineers multi-event projects that have theatrical, installation, public art, and education components. He is Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a performance group he founded in 1985, that is comprised of people who make art, live, and work on Skid Row. He has produced projects working with communities throughout the US, as well as in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Bolivia. His 2004 work RFK in EKY sought to recreate Robert Kennedy’s 1968 “war on poverty” tour in the course of a four-day, 200-mile series of events focused on historic and current issues and social policy. As a 2008-2009 fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Malpede developed Bright Futures in response to the worldwide financial crisis. In 2013, John Malpede received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

In 2014, the Queens Museum of Art in New York City mounted the first retrospective gallery exhibition on the work of the LAPD, which traveled to the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in 2016.

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and community organizations to articulate the role of culture in Skid Row and to find out what are their desires for the future. The results were published by Americans for the Arts in a paper co-authored by Maria Rosario Jackson of the Urban Institute and John Malpede of LAPD. The paper affirmed the importance of grassroots culture arising from the initiatives of Skid Row residents, and has been an often-cited source of validation among Skid Row cultural activists and cited at numerous government meetings. The report found that culture comes from the ground up in Skid Row, with people making visual art and music in their hotel rooms, in the parks, and on the sidewalks. The obstacles to making art and the dearth of available workshop, rehearsal and performance spaces motivated LA Poverty Department to initiate the annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists, and in 2015 to establish our Skid Row History Museum & Archive. In October 2020, we held our 10th annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists where 125 Skid Row artists performed and showed their work. LAPD has documented the work of over 900 artists who have participated in one or more of our festivals. The festival undeniably instantiates the creative vitality of Skid Row. In 2012 we held our first biennial Walk the Talk performance parade. This project honors people who live and work in Skid Row and who have made it one of the most significant areas for solving the problems that other people have given up on. As with the Festival for All Skid Row Artists, and many of our other projects, Walk the Talk affirms that Skid Row is a community. A community nominating process engages community brainpower to identify initiatives and people who had made transformative contributions to the neighborhood.

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The selected honorees are interviewed by LAPD (and others who wish to attend). The interviews are distilled into short performance scripts that we perform on the sidewalk in front of the place where each honoree does their work. A visual artist does a portrait of each honoree, and a New Orleans style brass band leads performers and the crowd as we dance through the streets of Skid Row from the site of one scene to the next. The parade route is different for each biennial parade, as it is determined by the location of each honoree’s work.

In April 2015, LAPD opened it’s Skid Row History Museum & Archive. The museum functions as a means for exploring the mechanics of displacement in an age of immense income inequality, by mining a neighborhood’s activist history and amplifying effective community resistance strategies. The current exhibition, “How to House 7,000 People in Skid Row” identifies land-use policies that could generate 3.5 billion dollars to house people un-housed in Skid Row. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive hosts hundreds of events yearly, LAPD events and those initiated by community members and groups. It also serves as a literal and artistic common ground, a space for Angelenos to meet and explore civic issues together.

Skid Row History Museum & Archive 250 S. Broadway, LA CA 90012 Open: Thu. Fri. Sat. 2-5pm

1985 Talent Show Los Angeles Poverty Department – Thieves Corner © Axel Köster

Los Angeles Poverty Department – LAPD Founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede and based in Skid Row, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a non-profit arts organization, the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles. LAPD creates performances and multidisciplinary artworks that connect the experience of people living in poverty to the social forces that shape their lives and communities. LAPD’s works express the realities, hopes, dreams, and rights of people who live and work in L.A.’s Skid Row. John Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers are co-recipients of the 2018 City of Santa Monica Visual Artist Fellowship.

1989 Jupiter 35 – Highways Performance space © LA Poverty Department

Henriëtte Brouwers is the Associate Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department since 2000. She co-directs, produces, and performs in many LAPD performances. Born in the Netherlands, Brouwers has performed, directed and taught throughout the Netherlands, France and the US. In Paris, she became a member of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed group (1979-82) and studied corporeal mime with Etiènne Décroux. In the Netherlands, she founded movement theater ACTA and performed with Shusaku & Dormu Dance Theatre, Grif Theater, Nationaal Fonds, and others. In 1993, the Theatre Project in Baltimore presented her work, “A Traveling Song.” In the same year, 7 Stages theatre invited her to perform the solo “Maya in The Decline and Fall of the Rest” by Jim Grimsley and was movement director for “Blue Monk” by Robert Earl Price for the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta. She performed her solo Malinche and La Lengua, the Tongue of Cortès in the US and the Netherlands and directed a series of devised performances based on the Mexican legend of La Llorona: The Weeping Woman. She is featured in artist Bill Viola’s renowned “The Passions” series. Henriëtte Brouwers worked with John Malpede on the creation of RFK in EKY (2004) a communitybased re-enactment of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 trip to investigate poverty in Appalachia.

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2014 Walk The Talk © LA Poverty Department

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Worlds Of Homelessness

AM FREITAG IST MAL WIEDER BEERDIGUNG Skid Row gilt als eines der gefährlichsten Viertel von Los Angeles. 2.000 Obdachlose leben hier in Zelten. Für Stadtplaner und Soziologinnen eine Herausforderung. von Elisabeth Wellershaus

Ich komme pünktlich um zehn und sehe Bürgersteige voller Zelte. Einkaufswagen, in denen die spärlichen Besitztümer der Bewohner*innen aufbewahrt werden.

Paletten mit Dosenessen neben gebrauchten Spritzen. Der Uringeruch beißt in der Nase. In der Regel treiben die Einladungen des Goethe-Instituts mich in aufgeräumte Tagungszentren, Galerien oder Theater. Das Thema Obdachlosigkeit, um das es im aktuellen Projekt in Los Angeles geht, lässt sich abseits der Straße aber nun mal kaum fassen. Vor einem Zelt, das er mit seinen beiden Pitbulls teilt, empfängt mich Crushow Herring. Er ist Teilnehmer der Konferenz Worlds of Homelessness und hat mich eingeladen, ihn hier zu interviewen. Als ich ankomme, fegt er den Bürgersteig, plaudert mit Nachbar*innen aus den Zelten nebenan. Und ich staune. Über Skid Row, das als eines der gefährlichsten Viertel von L.A. gilt und für Herring schlicht freundliche Nachbarschaft zu sein scheint.

Bislang sind sämtliche Versuche gescheitert, die Zeltstadt in Downtown L.A. mit ihren mehr als 2.000 Bewohner*innen zu räumen. "Zustände wie in der Dritten Welt", schrieb der Völkerrechtler Philip Alston vergangenes Jahr in einem UN-Bericht über das 50 Blocks große Viertel, in dem seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts arme und marginalisierte Angelenos leben. Stoisch beobachtet Herring den Mann von der Stadtreinigung, der die gelben GraffitiBotschaften hinter seinem Zelt übermalt. “Junkie-Asyl”, “Vorort zur Hölle”, lauten gemeinhin die Zuschreibungen von außerhalb des Viertels. Doch Herring kann damit nichts anfangen. Er ist freiwillig hier – und zwar deutlich öfter als bei seiner Frau und den Kindern in Long Beach.

Eigentlich müsste er nicht mehr in Skid Row leben.

Vor knapp 20 Jahren schlug er als erfolgloser Basketballspieler ohne Job und Wohnung hier auf. Dealte, wie so Viele, mit Crack, um über die Runden zu kommen.

Der Kontakt zu Sozialarbeiter*innen und Künstler*innen im Viertel aber hat Herrings Leben verändert. Die eigenen Kunstprojekte interessierten irgendwann auch jenseits von Skid Row, das toughe Image des Viertels faszinierte die Galerist*innen. Doch zumindest phasenweise wohnt er noch hier, will jetzt andere unterstützen. “Vielleicht, weil es der einzige Ort war, an dem ich damals willkommen war”, sagt er und winkt Menschen zu, von denen manche mehr tot als lebendig an uns vorbeischlurfen. Auch Mitarbeiter*innen von Drogenpräventionsprojekten und der Jobvermittlung grüßen den 42-Jährigen.

Menschen vor Kirchen und Suppenküchen, die Sprayer im Park.

Am Abend wird Herring auf dem Podium des GoetheInstituts sitzen, am Wochenende ein Musikfestival moderieren. Er bewegt sich zwischen hippen Galerien und Nachbarschaftstreffen, organisiert Workshops, schafft Toiletten für die Community mit ran. Fast riecht seine Geschichte ein bisschen nach Hollywood, aber fürs Kino fehlt Skid Row die Romantik. Viele hängen schlicht hier fest: Frauen, die sich vor gewalttätigen Männern verstecken, Abhängige, die fast alles für den nächsten Schuss tun, Zwangsprostituierte, Traumatisierte. Doch selbst sie scheinen in Skid Row eine Art Zuhause gefunden zu haben. “In Obdachlosenheimen hat man ein Dach über Worlds Of Homelessness

Crushow Herring © Michael Jaffe

dem Kopf, hier gehört man dazu”, sagt Herring schlicht.

Stadtplaner*innen erforschen das Phänomen informeller Strukturen längst mit großem Interesse. Suchen weltweit nach angemessenem Umgang mit den Konsequenzen städtischer Verarmung. “Menschen, die sich formellen Wohnraum nicht leisten können, schaffen sich eigene Lösungen”, schreiben Fabian Frenzel und Niko Rollmann in der taz. Zwar ist Skid Row bereits die Art von stigmatisiertem Ghetto, vor dem sie tendenziell warnen. Doch gezwungenermaßen trägt gerade hier die Gemeinschaft. “Friday?”, ruft eine junge Frau Herring im Vorbeigehen zu. “Friday!”, antwortet er. Mal wieder eine Beerdigung.

Er trägt eine elektronische Fußfessel Dort, wo gefühlte Wohlstandssicherheit das Leben bestimmt, blickt man mit einer Mischung aus Mitleid und Befremden auf das Geschehen in Skid Row. Noch atmen die Besserverdienenden ruhig, weil die Obdachlosen noch nicht ganz bis vor ihre Haustür vorgedrungen sind.

Dabei verlieren immer mehr arbeitende Menschen Haus und Wohnung – auch in den Zelten von Skid Row leben viele, die morgens ins Büro gehen. In L.A. liegen die offiziellen Obdachlosenzahlen bei 36.300. Eine Mischung aus steigenden Mieten, prekären Arbeitsbedingungen und fehlender sozialer Absicherung treibt die Menschen auf die Straße. Die spärlichen Reintegrationsangebote der Stadt erreichen sie dort kaum.

So gerät das Bild des zugedröhnten Penners, der seinen Abstieg selbst verschuldet hat, in extreme Schieflage. “In unserer Gesellschaft werden vor allem Afroamerikaner*innen viel zu schnell und pauschal als Kriminelle abstempelt”, sagt Charles Porter von der Drogenberatungsstelle UCEPP. “Wenn sie erst mal auf der

Elisabeth Wellershaus Elisabeth Wellershaus ist Autorin und Journalistin. Sie arbeitet als Redakteurin für das Kunstmagazin „Contemporary And“, ist Mitglied der Redaktion von „10 nach 8“/ZEIT ONLINE und Mitbegründerin der Initiative „WIR MACHEN DAS“. © ZEIT ONLINE

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Straße leben, werden sie nur noch als gesellschaftliche Störfaktoren wahrgenommen, die die räumliche und soziale Ordnung stören.” Herring schüttelt resigniert den Kopf, wenn er von den Reinigungsaktionen erzählt, mit denen die Polizei sein Viertel regelmäßig “säubert” und die wenigen Besitztümer der Bewohner*innen einkassiert. Den Weg zum Mittagessen gehen wir auf Umwegen, Herring trägt eine elektronische Fußfessel, an einer bestimmten Straße darf er nicht mehr vorbei. Angeblich hat er dort 2015 jemanden ausgeraubt. Er bestreitet das – doch seitdem er in Skid Row lebt, hat die Polizei ihn auf dem Kieker.

Auf dem Podium von Worlds of Homelessness spricht Herring am Abend vor Architekt*innen, Soziolog*innen und Leuten aus dem Kiez. Über die Kriminalisierung der Armut, institutionalisierte Diskriminierung, Polizeigewalt – darüber, dass all dies noch immer zu oft als Problem anderer abgetan wird. Neben ihm sitzt die deutsche Stadtplanerin Barbara Schöning und erklärt, warum auch Berlin kein Mietwunderland mit bezahlbarem Wohnraum mehr ist. Wie die Preise innerhalb der letzten zehn Jahre durch ausufernde Immobilienspekulation durch die Decke gingen. Und die Obdachlosenzahlen auch dort steigen – selbst wenn die Zustände längst nicht so dramatisch sind wie in L.A. Und Zeltsiedlungen ohnehin meist reflexartig abgerissen werden.

Vier Tage diskutiert Herring mit über Wohnungsnotfragen in den USA, Deutschland, Italien, Kolumbien und Südafrika. Verhandelt die extremen Unterschiede zwischen den Heimatländern der geladenen Expert*innen und applaudiert der US-Soziologin Hilary Silver, die am Ende eine entscheidende Gemeinsamkeit benennt: die Flexibilität des Begriffs Zuhause. “Es ist nicht das konventionelle Dach über dem Kopf, das uns Zugehörigkeit vermittelt”, sagt sie. “Es sind die sozialen Strukturen, die uns tragen.”

Strukturen, die sich im erstaunlichen Potenzial von vermeintlich “gescheiterten” Gegenden wie Skid Row zeigen, wo Drogenentzug, Jobvermittlungen oder den Bau neuer Duschzentren längst die Community selbst übernimmt. Die damit das staatliche Versagen gegenüber den Missständen vor Ort entlarven. Die Abgrenzung von der “Armut der anderen”: Ich praktiziere sie selbst, wenn ich Alltagsszenen unter Berliner S-Bahn-Brücken oder vor Supermärkten ausblende. Dabei liegt die Chance sicherlich auch jenseits von Skid Row im Hinsehen: darin, aus den Bedürfnissen und Ideen “der anderen” zu lernen.

Am Tag nach der Konferenz sehe ich Crushow Herring beim Skid Row Arts Festival. Er steht auf einer kleinen Bühne und kündigt ein Straßenorchester mit einem Solisten an, der früher beim Los Angeles Philharmonic spielte.

Vor dem Stand einer Theatertruppe plaudert ein ehemaliges Gangmitglied der Denver Lane Bloods mit einem Schauspielkollegen. Hinter ihnen ein ehemals obdachloser junger Mann in Uniform, der sich sein Medizinstudium verdient, indem er über die Community wacht.

Zwischen Fitnessgeräten und Spielplatzequipment die schunkelnden Menschen aus Skid Row. Und als Momentaufnahme sieht ihr Leben an den Rändern definitiv nach mehr aus als nach schlecht verkleideter Anarchie.

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HOUSING JUSTICE IN UNEQUAL CITIES

by Ananya Roy

Housing precarity is not a new phenomenon. In a series of essays titled “The Housing Question,” which were published as a pamphlet in 1872, Friedrich Engels noted that structures of housing shortage and geographies of urban displacement were a necessary accompaniment of capitalism. Engels’s uncanny analysis, as relevant today as it was for the industrial city of the late 19th century, is rooted in his own confrontation with social difference.

Son of a wealthy German industrialist sent to observe the cotton industry of Manchester, his encounter with inequality and exploitation at this node of colonial capitalism was to set into motion a formidable critique of the institution of housing, including various bourgeois reforms meant to allay the crisis of slums and poverty.

Engels’s essays lead us to ask: what is the housing question of the early 21st century? Building on many decades of research in the cities of the Global South and Global North, I wish to foreground two processes that are central to today’s housing question. The first is the financialization of land and housing. While housing has long been constituted as a commodity, the first decades of the 21st century are marked by a structural shift whereby large financial investors, the most notorious of which is possibly Blackstone, have sought to turn housing into an arena of financial speculation. In the United States, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 demonstrated the devastating effects of predatory housing debt, engulfing entire neighborhoods and cities in foreclosure. But such financialization continues to deepen, driven by the oligopolistic power of global finance and the deregulatory impulse of governments.

The second is the criminalization of poverty. In cities around the world, the urban poor face stigmatization and exclusion, often through the use of legal reason and legal authority deployed by municipal governments. Framed as encroachers, the unhoused and informally housed are positioned as violations of spatial and social order. Such forms of criminalization are especially harsh today in U.S. cities, with Los Angeles bearing the dubious distinction of pioneering cruel and harsh policies of banishment that deny rights to those on the margins of propertied citizenship. Indeed, in Los Angeles, a series of

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municipal ordinances have turned houselessness into a state of social death, without the constitutional protections and civil rights that accord to those who are housed.

Both these processes – the financialization of land and housing and the criminalization of poverty – must be placed within the present history of racial capitalism.

Engels’s analysis of the housing question, despite its brilliance, is glaringly silent on one point: that Manchester was not only the scene of capitalist exploitation but also that it was a node of colonial capitalism, linking the industrial city of England to the ravaged hinterlands of the British empire. One form of exploitation was deeply

linked to another form of dispossession. Today, in many cities around the world, especially in the United States, the contours of financial exploitation are the throughlines of racial and ethnic segregation. Today, in many cities around the world, especially in the United States, carceral power is directed at racial others and can be understood as the after-life of slavery and colonial conquest.

If such processes constitute today’s housing question, then what is housing justice in unequal cities? It is precisely this question that animates a new global research network situated at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles, for which I serve as director. We view the present historical conjuncture as a moment not only of substantial housing precarity but also of an extraordinary proliferation of housing justice movements. Often connected

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across national borders, these movements constitute the frontlines of urban struggle. They are fighting for rent control and social housing. They are challenging the rightlessness of the unhoused. Most significant, they are crafting new meanings of property and rent, personhood and tenancy. With the uncanny analysis that Engels once demonstrated, they are pinpointing the structures of wealth accumulation for which housing precarity is a necessary accompaniment. Rejecting bourgeois reforms, these movements, from Los Angeles to Berlin, Barcelona to Durban, Rio de Janeiro to New York, are mobilizing instruments of expropriation to insist upon the social function of property and to demand the decommodification of housing. Inevitably, such movements are in alliance with those striving for racial justice and climate justice. Together, they could very well rewrite today’s housing question.

With this in mind, I share an image from the work of organizations and movements in Santa Ana, California. A Latino working-class community, Santa Ana has faced displacement and dispossession. And it is here that movement leaders and scholars continue to assert visions of community-controlled land and social housing. This is the face of housing justice in unequal cities.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare and Geography and inaugural Director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Ananya’s research and scholarship has a determined focus on poverty and inequality and seeks to build power for marginalized communities. Her current research is concerned with racial banishment, or the expulsion of working-class communities from cities such as Los Angeles to the far peripheries of urban life. Ananya is the recipient of several awards including the Paul Davidoff Award, which recognizes scholarship that advances social justice, for her 2010 book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. Ananya currently leads a global research network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities funded by the National Science Foundation.

Worlds Of Homelessness

RECENTERING THE POLITICS OF HOME. NOTES FROM WITHIN AND FROM BELOW I met Paolo in 2009, while doing fieldwork in Turin. He was about 40.

by Michele Lancione

“Those shoes are hidden. They are worth a lot of money […] I could lose my life.”

Mr. J Hillman, Interviewed by the NYT

We were sitting on a bench. We had bought two beers and two tranci di pizza, because that’s what you do in Turin when you are walking and chatting. Paolo was telling me that dealers in the city gave away opiates for free in the early 80s: a long term customer loyalty programme to establish a habit in new users. By the late 80s, he was smuggling cocaine for tourists on expensive holidays in Kenya. By the early 2000s, he had been through a therapeutic community for addicts in Tuscany. But this was not the whole story. He was excited about a new relationship with a lady he was in love with. He was worried whether his mother would forgive him. His life flickered between more and less stable times. He had periods on the street, where he would return to day-hubs, free showers, and soup kitchens alternating with periods of being temporarily housed. He was a homeless drug user, but also a peer educator; he was a giver as well as a taker, a friend as well as an informant, a hustler and another body under the burning Italian sun. You couldn’t reduce him to a single definition. Paolo was a plural: a whole universe entangled with many past and present others, sitting with me on a bench, eating pizza, talking, and smoking in Turin.

Mundane encounters like the one with Paolo showed me the poverty of social science when it comes to capturing the multiple, nuanced complexity of life. Academic discourse about homelessness often silences and contains, it measures and controls. It tries to fit Paolo into a definition of the “the homeless,” which can then be translated into a set of policies for a “service user.” It tries to contrast him with a “normal” subject, the subject at home, making him the one outside – out-casted in the land where things are less, where life itself is conceived and managed on the basis of its supposed lessness.

So the question I’d like to ask is: How can we do Worlds Of Homelessness

more? I am not simply saying “How can we do more to respect Paolo’s complexity” but more to demolish the silencing operating by normative discourse and see, once and for all, the light that comes through, and from, life at the margins? How do we avoid arid intellectual encapsulations and analytical reductions? How do we move beyond categorical interventions? How do we avoid reducing a life to one dimension: “Paolo-thehomeless”; “Paolo-the-drug-user”; “Paolo-the-dealer”; “Paolo-the-deviant,” to start instead to conceive life as a plural, a multitude?

I’m not the only one asking these questions: post-structuralist thinkers, anarchists, feminist scholars, critical race theorists, and the anti-psychiatry movement have been doing so for years. But I’ve developed my own take on this problem, one that is specific to the field of homelessness. My argument is that three things are needed. Firstly, we must attack what I call the “economy of homelessness.” This is a set of discourses, cultural habits, blueprints to actions and a knowledge-making enterprise, which reduce the margins to their given definition and neat policy problems. Secondly, we need to rethink the ways we talk about “home,” to stop seeing it as the opposite of “homelessness” and to start recognising the ways in which precarity also structures so-called “normal” experiences of housing. Thirdly, when it comes to resistance, we must look to life at the margins for inspiration, and learn to feel the light that comes through, to being attentive to that life on its own terms.

On the economy of homelessness To understand why homelessness is such an established feature of the urban landscape, we must move beyond the idea that it reflects an objective struggle for housing, happening “out there”. Instead, we need to look at how

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homelessness is made, how it is constructed by the discourses and practices populating an “economy of homelessness”. Borrowing from Foucault we can understand this economy of homelessness as something that combines the production of knowledge with interventions that define and discipline. Its effect is to reduce the homeless subject to a depersonalised urban paradigm. With help from this framing, one no longer needs to encounter a homeless person “to know” about homelessness; one always already knows about it: from popular discourse, from movies, from videogames, from seeing something that fits that paradigm on the streets, from social media. This “economy of homelessness” erases the living subject, and replaces her with a “cultural truth of homelessness,” which is then reproduced and reinforced by policies and institutional interventions. The individual vanishes, replaced by patronizing ideas and stereotypes. And to show you the damage that this does, here’s another story.

On a November night in 2012, Police Officer Larry DePrimo was patrolling Times Square in Manhattan. He saw a homeless person sitting barefoot, and was deeply moved. So DePrimo decided to buy the man a pair of shoes and socks. Jennifer Foster, a tourist from Arizona, saw this act of charity and took a photo with her mobile phone. Her picture was published on the NYPD Facebook page, and from there, it went viral. Within hours it had been viewed 1.6 million times, had 275,000 ‘likes’ and more than 16,000 comments. The international media from Mexico City to Sydney carried the story. Obviously, Donald Trump also tweeted about it.

Intrigued by this response, I analysed 48,000 online comments under the original Facebook post. I wanted to understand how people were talking about this case.

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from the financialization of housing as an asset (mortLarry DePrimo, and compared him to the Good Samarwhat is simply another version of the same moralising atitan of the Bible (Luke 10:30-37). As you know, the Satitudes, utilitarian policy responses, and depersonalised gages, rent), the normalization of eviction, the precarimaritan in the original story is the unknown quantity: approach. The central problem is that people are trying ty of living in violent households, these are all forms of he is the foreigner, the potential enemy. But he nonetheto “solve” the homelessness “problem” without enquir“lessness” that affect people who are not “homeless” in ing about the personal, lived experience of people expethe conventional framing. Lessness is the precondition less helps a man who has been robbed and beaten in the street, in an act of neighbourly love that transcends barririencing precarious housing, and often without groundof being at home in the contemporary urban West, and ers and asks for nothing in return. The implication is that ing that experience in its own specific historic lineage. possibly beyond. we owe each other a concrete form of practical care, even This framing will always produce the same, inadeHome is constructed around an exclusionary act. if we are “strangers”. quate answers: it is a closed loop. So I think that at this Home is made of walls and doors, which create control But this framing denies the robbed man a voice. We point we need to get out of our comfort zone and start to and allow the policing of a border. Home is made of don’t know – because Jesus does not tell us anything reconsider homelessness from a new angle, a new startsocial relationships based on emotional bonding, which ing point. And this brings me to my second point: reare carved out through exclusion (there is no bonding if about these points – how the ‘victim’ feels, or what he thinks. Similarly, in the modern case, it is only DePrimo thinking the vital, central concept of home itself. there is no exclusion of others). Home is constructed, in we know about: the homeless person is a blank recipiits material form, by accumulations of capital, accumuent, uncharacterised. It’s therefore high time that we gave lations that emerge from, and reproduce, systems of opAt home(lessness) him back his identity: his name is Jeffrey Hillman, and he pression. And home is structured by internal exclusions: In my work, I argue that the problem with homelessness is a 54 year old black American Army veteran. And the is that it is defined as the negation of home, conceptuunbalanced gendered power relationships and paternalimportance of his voice is so great because, once we hear ally and practically. The “less” in the word “homeless” istic modes of breeding. In other words, home is groundit, the whole relationship of care posited by the Good Sasignals a lack: the absence of shelter, financial stability, ed in multiple forms of exclusion. It is rooted in precarity, maritan framing crumbles into pieces. ontological security, and so on. Home is supposed to be in the possibility of being made less, in lessness: because On the 2nd of December, the New York Times pubthe opposite of this lack: a plenitude made up of shelter, precarity is the only thing that can emerge when you have lished an article titled “Homea home structured around enless Man Is Grateful for Ofduring exclusion and unequal ficer’s Gift of Boots. But He power relationships.

So lessness in this context Again Is Barefoot.” A journalist following up on the saturates home. It exists story had gone back to Times beyond, above, and before Square, and found that Jeffrey the event of displacement that Hillman wasn’t wearing the makes someone homeless. It shoes he had been given. is tangled up in the everyday When asked why, Mr. Hillman choices we all make. But this is replied: “Those shoes are obscured by the way that homelessness is currently framed. hidden. They are worth a lot of money […] I could lose my The fictional distinction life.” While he was grateful for between the normal home and the gift, Hillman was deeply the pathological state of homeuncomfortable about his story lessness is a bordering tool. being so well-known. He had It creates l’autre, the deviant taken the shoes off, because he other, a passive subject of study feared they made him vulnerand care. It disguises the fact able, a target. He was frightthat we are actually not that difened of being beaten and ferent from Paolo or Jeffrey robbed as a consequence of Hillman. I don’t mean that in being the recipient of charity: the soft humanitarian sense of the very things that happened a shared underlying humanity to the victim of the biblical that persists in spite of difference. I mean that we are actustory before the Samaritan arrived on the scene! ally not very far removed: the Several commentators on same forces that make Paolo Facebook did not like what homeless affect all of us too, Mr. Hillman had to say. They albeit some are of course even began to question his actions, more charged because of the and to speculate about his intersection of those forces motives: “[S]oon after, the with other forms of injustice bum sold the boots... he claims (including racialisation). But he’s “hidden” them... suuure when it comes to home, the dif“NYPD Officer Larry DePrimo has made the entire city proud ference is one of intensity, not buddy” wrote one. “I see the kind. We are all under pressure, with his generous act of kindness [link] NYC loves the NYPD” homeless man now wants a piece of the pie that his image under threat from the same un– Donald J. Trump, 27th November 2012, Twitter is creating, what a dick...” said balanced violent exclusionPicture by Foster, NYPD’s Facebook page another. And there is plenty ary power, as contemporary more on this vein. In not fitting housing crises show. with the paradigmatic view that was constructed for him, financial stability, and ontological security. I believe we Mr. Hillman immediately ceased to be the poor homeless need to question this binary. We need to ask why home The politics of life at the margins man worthy of charity and suddenly became an unworis something that has the potential of becoming a lack, So we need to challenge both the economy of homelessthy greedy trump like many “others.” ness, and the specific way that home is defined in a binary why it has the potential of being eradicated, why it can What this story shows is that our encounter with be displaced. with its lack. But what do we use to replace conventional To do this, we must look at the precarity that struchomelessness is always partial. Not only do we never understandings? This brings me to my third point, which tures both of these concepts together: home and homeoffers an orientation: to look within the light coming from encounter the full individual who is homeless, but our lessness. Both are founded on the same affective substrawithin and from below: from the margins of normative responses are overlaid with layers of normative social narratives. When homeless individuals like Mr. Hillman tum: something I call “lessness.” Lessness is a condition homing structuring. that is perceived by everyone, but at differing levels are presented – often by pure chance – as having agency As bell hooks argued, the margins are neither a place to make choices that run against social norms, they are of intensity. A rough sleeper is affected by lessness in nor a category to define a group. Instead, the margins are then portrayed as undeserving, as bad, even as enemies ways that most of us cannot imagine. Our bodies are not the site of a tensioned politics of resistance. Here, people of society. Academic and policy literature likes to think it exposed to the same degree of privation. But this does not have already developed a practical and effective chalstands outside this nasty version of the dominant framing, mean that we are different in kind, or outside of the same lenge to “lessness.” Here, people are dwelling in ways but that is not true. Too often we see the scholarly literaaffective game. We are also subject to housing precarithat break open the habitual status quo. Here, people ture calling itself “critical,” to then only end up repeating ty in less intense forms. The burden of debt that results are organising themselves (sometimes in very everyday 10

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ways) to oppose the precarity and displacement at the bottom of conventional ideas of “home.” Here, people are inhabiting the cracks of the world, which are also the places – to paraphrase Leonard Cohen and Gloria Anzaldua – where the light gets in. The task of the urban researcher is to feel that light, to take it on its own terms, to learn from it. I will give you two brief examples.

In a recent essay, Saidiya Hartman tells the story of Esther Brown. Esther is a young black woman living in Harlem at the time of World War I, who “hated to work, the conditions of work as much as the very idea of work.”

So Esther resists the discipline and the pressure of everyday life by strolling in the open. In describing her walking, Hartman tells us that the ways in which bodies move is about more than simply coming and going. In her movement, Esther constructs a differential modality of being. Conventionally, she would be defined as homeless or vagrant, but in reality she is contesting the dominant habitus, challenging the demand that her black body stays still, works, gets out of the way of white people.

The “[w]andering and drifting” of Esther – without organization, without declared politics, without recognition – is not just an embodiment of her precarity, but a precarious political form of embodiment.

The body of Esther Brown was not supposed to move in the way it does. By walking, she traces a ritornello, a refrain, which cuts through habitual racialized segregation and displacement in the US city. Yet, within the frameworks of both wider society and the academy, both Esther’s rebellion and, more fundamentally, Harlem’s everyday “choreography of the possible” are almost entirely ignored. The ways in which Esther inhabits the world – and therefore the ways in which she constructs an alternative version of “homing” the world – it is silenced. And this neglect is itself a form of discrimination, as Harman points out:

that expelled them throughout a history of socialist natalist policy, racialized confinement, and the total privatisation of housing under the dominant logic of the “new,” modernised and civilised Bucharest.

Conventional wisdom says that these people pose a problem to be solved. The “homeless” need to be institutionalized; the drug users cured; the urban hustlers restrained. But in the underground, a radical affirmation of difference was possible, an alternative truth was proposed. Ileana explained this to me, as she washed the collective dishes in a bucket, 3 meters below the surface of the road: “It’s a very good life here, we have food and warmth, and we have everything we need. […] No one is left behind to watch the others eating. We eat together; we are like a family.”

led on their terms. I met people who had lived in the underground for more than 15 years: they dreamt and loved there; fought and died there; harassed each other, but also cared for each other in ways that would have been impossible in one of the city’s homeless shelters. Just as Esther Brown inhabited the margins as a site of resistance through strolling, the community of boschetari of Gara de Nord refused to “fit,” and instead proposed and assembled a different kind of home. They dwelt in and through history, via horizontal alliances and grounded solidarity.

By taking this as a serious form of resistance, we can recognise the limitations of our existing economy of homelessness, and challenge the “lessness” at the heart of our individualistic, excluding and self-deprecating idea of home.

Buonanotte We need to get closer to housing precarity, to the places where it is lived and felt. We need to get closer to the place where all representations of that precarity, of the lived experience of life at the margins crumble, so that we can recenter the politics of home from the uncanny experiences and propositions of these in-between spaces.

Paolo passed away in September 2015. His last post on Facebook was a shot of a sunset taken from his hospital room. The text was simple: “Buonanotte ” (Goodnight). We spoke for the last time on the phone, a few days before. The traces that remain of his life, and many others like it, are fragile, and ephemeral. They cast a translucent light that science and policy have for too long silenced and cast away. But we can work together to re-encounter Paolo, Mr. Hillman, Ester, Ileana and so many others like them, in order to re-articulate home from below and from within despite its violent impossibility. And we can only do this by moving outside of established narratives, by being attentive to capitalised “the potentiality of and racialised histories, and their lives has remained by listening to alternative unthought because forms of living and breathno one could imagine ing resistance. That site of young black women resistance – the site where as social visionaries, home is made possible again Paolo was an atmospheric and collective subject that was somehow individuated, radical thinkers, and through solidarity and colbut impossible to contain in a single definition. innovators” (2018:470) lective labour – is the place Collage by Paolo A second example. to inhabit: the only shared A community living underfuture worth pursuing. ground, a few meters away from the main train station in Bucharest, showed me the ways that radical dwelling could be woven into the fabric of an apparently “homeless” existence.

They lived in the tunnels of Bucharest’s heating Michele Lancione is an urban ethnographer and activist interested in issues of system, a space which they called “casa” or “home,” marginality and diversity, homelessness, and radical politics. His without a shred of irony. This home was an assemblage works have been published in top international journals in the field of circulation: of bodies, of drugs, of materials for recyof Urban Geography, Housing Studies and Anthropology. His first edited volume is entitled Rethinking Life at the Margins, while his cling, which they sorted and sold in the informal markets non-academic works include a collaborative documentary around of the city. They were organised: they had electricity, 1 Including the following: “he went to him and bandaged his forced evictions in Bucharest, Romania (www.ainceputploaia.com). wounds”; “he put the man on his own donkey”; “he took out two light, a TV, a stereo, and a kitchen where they cooked Michele is also one of the founders and editors of the open-source denarii and gave them to the innkeeper”; etc.

Radical Housing Journal, an Editor of City, and Corresponding Editor communal meals. 30 or 40 people lived together in this 2 Hartman, S. (2018) The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a for Europe at IJURR. He is based at the Urban Institute and the way, for more than two decades, carving out a resistant Riotous Manner. South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3, 465–90.

Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, margin in a world that did not have space for them, and 3 Homeless, hustlers.

UK. You can get in touch @michelelancione.

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This lively “infrastructure of care” points to something more profound, more radical than “resilience.” The community had rearranged the status quo to sustain lives

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HOUSING AS A CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE Lessons from the Housing Crisis and Housing Movement in Germany

by Barbara Schönig

Traditionally, Germany was known for providing quality market-rate and subsidized housing for the majority of its population. But currently, the country is facing a severe housing crisis. Within the last decade, rents, and prices for residential property have steadily increased.1 This increase has especially, but not exclusively affected major cities and their surrounding regions.

How The Housing Question Got Lost in Transformation(s) Three major trends have added to this development: First, Germany, as many other western welfare states, has seen a deep transformation of housing policy. In line with the ordoliberal concept of a social market economy, West-German housing policy has, from the beginning, strictly limited state intervention into the housing market, except in situations of severe housing crisis. Therefore, national housing policy gradually withdrew from the 1960’s model of direct subsidies for social housing, in favor of more market-oriented instruments (individual housing subsidies, homeownership). This trend increased with the general retrenchment from national welfare state policies from the mid-1980s on. The number of newly funded social housing units decreased, and existing units, temporarily designated as social housing, foreseeably lost that status. By 2016, only 1.24 Million of the 2.87 Million units of social housing available in 1990 remained.2 In 1990 the nonprofit housing sector was practically dissolved by abolishing its tax privileges, a move that resulted in the transformation of affordable nonprofit stocks into market-rate housing. Secondly, this transformation coincided with changes in the housing market: large profit-oriented investors and financial players bought formerly affordable housing stocks, with the expectation of higher profits. Simultaneously, residential property became an important asset for increasingly privatized individual retirement planning, thereby putting additional pressure on the rental market.

Thirdly, these changes came about within a general move towards entrepreneurial urban politics and met little public or local opposition. Many cities sold their municipal housing stocks, focusing instead on inner-city urban upgrading and housing for the middle classes.

When the dynamics of housing price development intensified after the 2008 financial crisis, national housing policy and municipal housing strategies had already faded away.

The Housing Question Today Although from the early 2010s on, the Housing Question was on the table for a large part of the population, the crisis appears to be extremely polarized in spatial and social terms. Economically flourishing cities and urban regions experience housing shortages, while many rural and economically depressed areas experience a housing surplus. The amount and quality of living space per person increase for upper-income households, but decrease for low-income households, who also face the highest increase in housing costs.3 As affordable and social housing is scarce and mostly concentrated within the cities – socio-spatial segregation is enforced.

Despite this polarization, resistance against market-oriented housing and urban policy is growing all 12

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over the country and across social classes. While national and state governments intensified housing policy temporarily, general corrections to market-oriented housing policy remain out of sight. Such changes would necessitate a revision of the paradigm underlying housing provision in Germany.

Challenging the Rules Housing is a human right and is simultaneously a basic need and a market good. Its provision, therefore, has always been subject to social negotiations within modern societies, resulting in societal compromises – nationally specific “housing regimes” – framed by the particular national welfare regimes in which they were embedded.

Just as globalized flexible capitalism has permeated and radically changed our societies and personal lives, it has also transformed established national housing regimes and increased the dynamics of housing markets. But presently, thousands are taking to the streets to challenge market-oriented urban development and housing policy.

In Germany, a remarkable example of this is the socalled movement for the “expropriation” of large housing companies in Berlin: “Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen”.

This title, however, is misleading, as the initiative doesn’t object to expropriation. Instead, it refers to Article 15 in the Grundgesetz (German Basic Law) that has never been enacted. Article 15 explicitly allows for land property, natural resources, and means of production to be socialized if the title in question is to be deemed public property and part of the collectivized economy.

The petition seeks a referendum in the Berlin Senate that would appropriate all housing and land in Berlin held by for-profit companies with more than 3.000 housing units. According to the initiative, these companies possess strong market power and provide a basic good, but place greater value on profits than on housing quality, people, and neighborhoods. The petition also calls for all the potentially communalized units to be administered by a new public housing corporation that is to be democratically controlled by the public and its renters. Primarily, “Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen” seeks to buy back the housing stock previously owned by municipal housing companies, before their sale to large companies such as “Deutsche Wohnen.”

Within only three months, between April and June 2019, 77,001 people signed the petition – three times

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Barbara Schönig studied Urban Planning, German Literature and History of Arts in Berlin and Columbus, Ohio. In her Ph.D., she focused on Metropolitan Planning and Civil Society in the United States. Before becoming a professor for Urban Planning at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 2012, she taught at Technical University Berlin and Technical University Darmstadt. She is Director of the Institute for European Urban Studies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her research focuses on critical studies of planning and its role within processes and practices of space production. Fields of research include interdisciplinary housing research, social housing, participation in urban development as well as processes of spatial restructuring of urban, suburban, and rural areas.

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the amount that would have been necessary to force the Berlin government to pass the referendum. Although the constitutionality and admissibility of the referendum are still in question, the public pressure to pass the referendum is enormous. Understandably, the ever-increasing dynamic of market-oriented housing and urban policy is radically challenged by a public that is increasingly aware that the marketization of housing and urban policy is contributing to the housing crisis and social segregation in cities.

Towards Understanding Housing as “Critical Infrastructure” With this in mind, it might be helpful to add a new conceptual dimension to the debate on housing. Housing is not only a basic need but is moreover a critical piece of infrastructure that shapes our lives and our society. Just as water, energy, and streets: few of us have the means and knowledge to provide for it on our own. Once housing is built, it will be there to structure our individual lives, our cities, and societies for quite some time. If that is true, however, we must ensure adequate housing provision for all – and accept that the logic of the market has yet been able to solve the housing question.

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Indexes for rent rose from 81.9 pts (1995) to 109.7 (2017).

Statistisches Bundesamt. (2018). Entwicklung des Mietpreisindex für Deutschland in den Jahren von 1995 bis 2017 (2010 = Index 100).

Statista. Statista GmbH. Accessed: 2019/9/10. https://de.statista.com/ statistik/daten/studie/70132/umfrage/mietindex-fuer-deutschland-1995bis-2007/ Janson, M. (2018). Immer weniger Sozialwohnungen in Deutschland.

Statista. Statista GmbH. Zugriff: 10. September 2019. https://de.statista.com/infografik/12473/immer-wenigersozialwohnungenin-deutschland/ See https://www.armuts-und-reichtumsbericht.de [2019/09/10]

EX°ST

A film by Jonas Reuter and Radames Eger

Film Still EX°ST Radames Eger © Jonas Reuter

Radames Eger grew up in Brazil and moved to Frankfurt, Germany, with a dance scholarship. For years, the fashion designer has dedicated his work to those disenfranchised by the fashion industry: people without a permanent residence. With his multifunctional fashion, the designer, who has experienced homelessness himself, wants to help primarily houseless people to protect themselves from cold and theft.

In 2018, in order to give the subject of homelessness a platform, he planned a tour through all German state capitals, in which he exhibited one of his designs, the “tent-jacket”, at public places. For three weeks, he and filmmaker Jonas Reuter lived on Germany’s streets and in homeless shelters. The film portrays Eger’s work and their journey and tries to give a voice to those who are otherwise unheard.

Jonas Reuter: I am a 24-year-old photographer and filmmaker from Germany. Born in a small village near Frankfurt am Main, I moved to the city during my university studies in Motion Pictures, where for the past five years, I have lived among bankers and those experiencing homelessness. I love Frankfurt, Techno, and people. It was in a Techno club that I met Radames Eger, and after numerous lengthy conversations, our friendship grew. In 2018, we embarked on an unbelievable journey, which we documented in the film EX°ST.

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In 2008, the Los Angeles Poverty Department brought together Skid Row residents and groups to look at how art gets made in Skid R In 2009, LAPD and community partners started the Festival for All Skid R The goal of the festival is to celebrate the rich artistic heritage of Skid Row as well as to create a registry 2019-2018 Hayk Makhmuryan & studio 526 My name is Hayk Makmuryan, and I’m an art organizer in the Skid Row neighborhood – Eleven going on twelve years.

We’ve been with the Festival the first year so that makes it ten years and it’s really awesome to be part of something that you’ve seen grow and blossom and continue to be.

Something I’ve become a strong proponent of is long-term involvement and consistent involvement in whatever community work you’re doing, whether it’s in Skid Row or anywhere else. And a festival like this is a good example of that, a great example of that.

I get to have reunions with folks I know (hugs Chella). I get to see new people connect, but mostly it’s a reunion. It’s a way to be in a place you like, that I like, and to see people, other people that enjoy being here, to catch up, and to do something artful together, but just as much to catch up, to hug the person you haven’t seen for a year. I just saw someone that I haven’t seen for eight years. + I coordinate Studio 526, and today I’m at the festival, facilitating all the visual artist booths and working with the collaborative painting. I feel very strongly about having a platform that connects around people’s interests and what people like to share with someone else. Arts happen to be a really great platform for those connections to be fostered. The moment a person realizes that they’re not there because someone is going to tell them what they need to be doing or who and how they need to be interacting, conversations and projects and ideas just blossom. My background is in visual arts. Being in a space with fellow artists who are sharing their ideas, I get to jump in with my ideas and then we build on that together and that’s extremely rewarding. The fact that we are in the Skid Row neighborhood has everything to do with arts and cultural spaces. When we talk about the importance as a human right for anyone to have space for creative work, to connect with others who also feel they need to be around arts and culture. So it’s as much about community strengthening as it is about an art space.

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2017 THE TOILET LADY – Tom Grode – LAPD member / resident I was one of over 20 people who worked on a report that came out a few months ago called “No Place To Go: an Audit of the Public Toilet Crisis in Skid Row.” The point of the report is: there is a huge disparity between the number of public toilets available in Skid Row and the minimum hygiene standard for a United Nations Refugee Camp.

The report got a lot of media attention, and now with Hepatitis A, the issue is even more serious. One proposed solution is to bring in portapotties and hire community members to monitor them. That’s what San Francisco does in their Pit Stop program.

In Gladys Park, at the Festival, we set up a table next to five portapotties just to make folks’ portapotty experience a little more pleasant. We had some spray cleaner, toilet paper and paper towels, hand sanitizer, and in charge of the table was the Toilet Lady! We have air freshener, smells wonderful, and a fly swatter, flies like to be around the portapotties, and best of all are the mints. People loved the mints. They came back to the table again and again to get more mints. These were the best mints in the history of mints – next to a group of portapotties.

I had this white board and people could write on the board their answers to two questions: What Is The Biggest Problem With Toilets In Skid Row? and How Would You Improve The Situation? Forty people answered the two questions and I got to talk to them about toilets, which is my favorite thing in the whole world to talk about!So what was the number one answer? Fifteen people answered the first question this way: NOT ENOUGH! and the answer to question number two: BUILD MORE!

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Row. The resulting paper, "Making the Case for Skid Row Culture”, determined that in Skid Row, art-making comes from the ground up.

Row Artists to give a platform to all the independent artists in Skid Row. y of Skid Row artists, which to date numbers more than 800. Here is a variety of voices from the festival.

2017 Damitri Taylor I’ve come several times to the festival. However, I didn’t have the courage to sign up.

Today, I felt that it was necessary to sing the song that I did, which was Marvin Gaye’s, What’s Going On. There’s a lot of atrocities that are being done to everyday people. It’s not a black thing: it’s people, humanity. I’m ready to have all of the murders stopped that’s happening in the United States. I feel exhilarated having participated. I feel like I have done more of my duty as being a part of this community. It is to tap into a rich art, and I feel really good about being a part of today as well as yesterday, when I sang with the choir.

I have been a member of the community since 2000. I lived here homeless twice, in 2000 I had three girls with me. I was crying so hard because I did not want to come down here, but when I came down, I found such a different picture than what had been painted in my head about what is down here. I found that this is a city within its own city. This is a city rich in culture, rich in art, rich with lives. These are people that have come upon hard times. There are people who have mental health issues. There are people who just want to live down here because they want other people to see their lives, and there being hope.

I volunteered, and I’m still a part of The Downtown Women’s Center. This is the only center downtown that services women. They have very many resources there. I want to thank the community for embracing my family and keeping us grounded and welcoming us. It has been a very good learning lesson: it has expanded the thinking that I have about human beings as a whole. I learn more every day about the vastness of the richness of this beautiful city within itself. There is no city that is like this. It is a wonderful city. Instead of scratching the surface: come, dive in and come see what beauty that lies here in Skid Row.

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2016 Mark Montue I’m hanging out with Michael Blaze from the Skid Row Photography Club. Anybody who wants a picture, we take their picture, and we give it to them, free of charge, of course.

Carol Johnston I’m here to support Mark Montue and Mike Blaze. I’m also here to support Stephanie and the fellow artists at this spectacular festival and filming some live musical performances and doing some media marketing, getting the word out right now, while it’s happening. I heard about Skid Row the first day I arrived here in L.A. I was supposed to move in with a friend, and it didn’t happen. So, I found myself homeless, and I made some phone calls, and I found myself down at L.A. Mission. I went around to a few different shelters. In that experience, I learned all about the homeless population here in L.A. I was familiar with it in D.C. because I volunteer with a number of programs there. I had no idea it was happening out here in L.A. until I saw it first hand. Everybody told me not to come downtown. I’m glad that I did because what I found when I’m down here is not what a lot of people were telling me. There’s a bigger picture that needs to be seen by the whole world of what’s down here on Skid Row. It’s a beautiful community, it’s a lot of beautiful families down here, and it definitely needs to be shown, more than what the media portrays as being Skid Row. There’s a lot of resources down here. I’ve come across a lot of people that have asked me to help them, and they seem ashamed, but I tell them, I hug them anyway, “Look, don’t be ashamed to ask for help. It’s here, use it.” Understand this; Skid Row is about people. Here it’s about love and commitment and community. We’re all in the same boat. Nobody is greater than any other. Understand that if you find yourself here, you find yourself among love.

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THE THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED AND THE BAHIA HOMELESS MOVEMENT

In Brazil, the increase in homelessness is linked to Brazilian public policy and the capitalist economic system.

Without permanent addresses, unemployed individuals are unable to find jobs, earn an income or access public services.

As a result, these individuals fall outside the system and often suffer from physical or psychological illness. Those without a permanent address are not accounted for, because the Brazilian Institute of Statistical Geography relies on census data collected from household surveys. They do not exist! Therefore, there is no public policy to diminish or end this social situation because they are invisible.

When the document prohibiting the enslavement of blacks was signed in 1888, “former owners” of slaves essentially put black women and men out into the streets, half-naked and without any rights. Without documents or work, these people came to live in the city’s streets, homeless, and without support other than from religious charities. I have been working with the Theater of the Oppressed since 1986, when I first met Augusto Boal, as part of the ”Integrated Centers of Popular Education,” or CIEP project of the socialist government of Leonel Brizola in Rio de Janeiro.

In addition to providing educational opportunities, the project aimed to remove orphaned, abandoned children from the streets and place them with foster parents, often civil servants like firefighters and police, who lived with the children in the CIEPs. Unfortunately, public policy efforts to eradicate homelessness among “street boys and girls” in the state of Rio de Janeiro through adoption ended when the right-wing government regained power and canceled the program. Augusto Boal and I, along with five other popular educators continued this work on our own and created the Oppressed Theater Center of Rio de Janeiro linked to the Center du Theater de l’Oprimmé of Paris, France, which I had met in 1986.

In 2001, the MST (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement) National Assertive Theater Brigade was created with the contribution of Augusto Boal and formed over 40 theatrical groups and a theater production system based on the concept of AgitProp: Agitation and Propaganda. This legacy of revolutionary experiences in Germany and the former USSR, which implemented highly politicized artistic languages as a means to create dialogue with the people. Elements that have been systematized: Study + Organize + Propaganda + Agitate = AgitProp praxis.

The MST theater brigade, using the Leninist concept that guides the movement, began to research the theatrical forms of Agitation and Propaganda and the relationship between art and politics in revolutionary processes, such as the Journal Theater and the Invisible Theater that Boal would incorporate into the Theater of the Oppressed’s method. Theater can only reinforce the dominant ideology, not confront it. One must always question whether or not the theater we create is a weapon of oppression or liberation.

This depends on the relationship between Form vs.

Content: it is not enough to address issues that are important for class struggle and social movements. It is necessary to understand and use forms that break with the dominant way of thinking and world view.

In the 1960s, through the work of Augusto Boal, Worlds Of Homelessness

by Licko Turle Brazilian theater became increasingly activist. The emergence of Arena Theater, Dramaturgy Seminars, Popular Centers of Culture (CPC) at UNE Volante, and Peasant Leagues continued until the 1964 Military Coup, when the connection between artists and workers was violently interrupted, with arrests, murders, and exiles, including the expulsion of Augusto Boal. Work in activist theater in Brazil resumed following re-democratization and the rise of the Workers Party led by Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who was also a political prisoner. At the time, the CTO – Theater Center of the Oppressed, which I created with Augusto Boal following his return from exile, was among the leading representatives of Group Theater.

From 1992 to 1995, I worked with the MST SOL DA MORNING settlement in cooperation with the Legisla-

Workshop Theatre of the Oppressed © Licko Turle

tive Theater in Rio de Janeiro. After training, one of its leaders was integrated into the team and multiplied the techniques within the MST Movement. For the last three years, I have worked at the Federal University of Bahia in the city of Salvador, which, according to official data, is home to the largest black population in Brazil and outside the African continent. Samba, capoeira, bossa nova, and

Licko Turle was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. He is an actor, director, and professor with a master's, doctorate and postdoctoral degrees in Theater. He is a visiting professor in the Graduate Program of the Theater School of the Federal University of Bahia. In 1986, with Augusto Boal, he created the Theater Center of the Oppressed in Brazil; and created in 1999, with Amir Haddad, the Tá Na Rua Institute for Arts, Education, and Citizenship. He is the author of three books on Theater of the Oppressed and four on Street Theater. He has worked in Asia, Europe, Africa, North, Central, and South America and all Brazilian states. He has investigative interest in ethnic-racial areas, street dwellers, Popular Theater, Political Theater, Street Theater, and social movements. He coordinates the events International Conference Theater of the Oppressed and University; National Meeting of the Brazilian Street Theater Network, and Black Forum of Performing Arts. His current shows as director and co-director in Bahia are: "Essay for Democracy" and "Black Skin, White Masks." He accompanies the MSTB – Homeless Movement of Bahia, the Articulation of the Old Center of Salvador, the School of Theater in the MST-Perus, São Paulo, SP and the Theater Movement of the Periphery of São Paulo. He currently lives in Salvador, Bahia, where he wants to install the project "Escola de Teatro Negro."

#ARTISTPORTRAIT

the resistance of the black people against racism in Brazil, all originated here. I am a research professor of Black Theater, Street Theater, and Theater of the Oppressed in the Doctorate and Masters programs of the School of Theater. I also have two students who work directly with various social movements within the homeless population, including the Bahia Homeless Movement that fights for housing. I guide and supervise their research and work with the Theater of the Oppressed. As a result, I have been able to connect the university community with the homeless population through various events and training courses. One of these activities was the International Theater and Oppressed Days in 2018 and 2019 that bring together researchers and practitioners of Theater of the Oppressed from Brazil and abroad. This year, the Bahia Homeless Movement participated in activities at the university, and the university visited the Manoel Faustino occupation where they live. Together, the participants developed an artistic modality called MYSTIC. Mysticism is not just the performative act they do at the beginning of their assembly, but rather a method of self-recognition, an act of telling their own story, and a form of synthesizing collective struggle.

MYSTIC can be called the driving force that animates the fight and can manifest itself in the form of a march, a land occupation, in the solidarity of a gesture, or the beauty of a song at sunset after a day of work. Mysticism is an aesthetic organization to produce this collective feeling that animates the movement to fight, to excel, and to realize themselves as humans.

In this sense, it is an act of shared poetics and a way of evoking (materializing) the feeling/energy of the fight. Mystic stems from Mystery, a Greek ritual from the 6th century BC of initiation in the worship of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, both linked to agriculture and fertility.

By the Middle Ages, Catholics adopted the term. It is presently associated with Liberation Theology and shares its origin with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the Theater of the Oppressed.

Mystic poetically cuts historical moments with different narrative forms. Within the Epic Theater, the mystic evokes both present and past public events and handles elements of struggling utopia, that is, it projects the future. At the Arena Theater, Augusto Boal used the technique referred to as ‘ideological warming’ as a way to prepare the audience and introduce them to the theme of the play they were about to watch. In the Theater of the Oppressed, some wildcards maintain this dynamic, through mentioning events of violence and oppression that occurred in the previous week or month. The MSTB uses the techniques of Teatro Jornal to prepare their Mystics. ” A Work of the Oppressed Theater is only completed by the relationship with the public that analyzes the reality of the dominant culture that oppresses it. To take action, one needs to know how the oppressor and oppression work. Replace conservative work that merely reproduces contemporary events and themes with works that offer a view into the future, the new, tomorrow. A new Aesthetics for a new Ethics!

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WORLDS OF HOMELESSNESS – WORLDS OF HOPELESSNESS ?

by Alexander Hagner als expertInnen in der entwicklung von gebäuden verfügen wir mit unserem architekturbüro gaupenraub über werkzeuge, die in unserer umgebung dringend gebraucht werden. weil wir der überzeugung sind, dass nicht nur eigentum, sondern auch fähigkeiten verpflichten, stellen wir diese seit knapp 20 jahren auch unseren obdachlosen nachbarInnen zur verfügung. menschen, die jedoch ohne zuhause zu überleben versuchen, sind, je länger dieser zustand andauert, unserer erfahrung nach sehr schwer einzuschätzen und daher zählen sie zu unseren schwierigsten bauherren. um trotzdem am ende auch für sie zu einem hervorragenden architekturprojekt zu gelangen, braucht es daher in jeder hinsicht auch von unserer seite wesentlich mehr zuwendung. und darüber hinaus ist auch die realisierung solcher

VinziDorf Wien © Florian Albert

VinziRast Lokal – „mittendrin” © Kurt Kuball

über ein restaurant, von dem aus sich über die jahre ein florierendes catering- service entwickelt hat. die grundidee des projekts war und ist, dass durch gemeinschaft – und sei sie noch so durchmischt – innerhalb guter rahmenbedingungen stigmatisierungen überwunden werden können und dass gemeinschaft dann in der lage ist, einzelne wieder aufzurichten. darüber hinaus hat sich VinziRast-mittendrin aufgrund seiner lage mitten in der stadt und auch aufgrund seines hybriden raumprogramms in den letzten jahren als botschafterin für das gesellschaftliche miteinander über alle vorurteile hinweg und weit über seine baulichen grenzen hinaus entwickeln können. von den anfängen/der konzeption des raumprogramms über den oft partizipativen prozess der realisierungsphase bis hin zum heutigen alltagsleben im und um das projekt herum haben wir in der umsetzung viele antworten auf die frage, was architektur, also der gebaute raum dazu beitragen kann, gefunden. daraus haben wir viele learnings gezogen und damit inzwischen generelle ansätze für das künftige bauen für randgruppen entwickelt – und wir haben die erkenntnis gewonnen, dass, trotz zunehmender gentrifizierung und segregation gerade in großen städten, dennoch kein grund zur hoffnungslosigkeit besteht – sofern wir diese entwicklungen nicht einfach hinnehmen oder gar bedienen, sondern wirkliche alternativen denken und auch realisieren – auch architekten verfügen hier über geeignete werkzeuge.

VinziDorf © Kurt Kuball

projekte in höchstem maße schwierig, weil jede künftige nachbarschaft projekte für obdachlose menschen (fast immer) grundsätzlich ablehnt. bisher war nur eines unserer projekte davon ausgenommen -> VinziRast-mittendrin, das ich daher als exemplarisch für die bemühungen um ein gutes lebensumfeld in der urbanen gesellschaft hier näher vorstelle: dank mehrer zufälle hatten wir die chance, ein leerstehendes gebäude mitten in wien zu einem einzigartigen gemeinschaftshaus umzubauen und zu erweitern. seit 2013 wohnen und leben dort ca. 30 personen, die eine hälfte studierende und die andere ehemals wohnungslose menschen. sie teilen sich gemischte 2-er und 3-er WGs und viele von ihnen arbeiten auch im haus, da es noch über werkstätten verfügt, über veranstaltungsräume und 18

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Alexander Hagner (geboren 1963 in Deutschland) absolvierte eine Tischlerlehre, bevor er ein Architekturstudium an der Universität für angewandte Kunst in Wien aufnahm, das er 1995 abschloss. 1999 gründete er gemeinsam mit Ulrike Schartner gaupenraub +/- (https://architektur. se/) als offenes Büro für Architektur, Design und urbane Strategien, die sich zumeist mit außergewöhnlichen Themen befassen. Seit 2002 arbeitet Hagner unabhängig an alternativen Projekten für Obdachlose. Dazu gehören die Notschlafstelle „VinziRast“ (2004), die Wohngemeinschaft „VinziRast-WG“ (2010) sowie „VinziRastmittendrin“ (2013) – ein Haus, in dem Obdachlose und Studenten gemeinsam wohnen und arbeiten.

INTERMEDIATE SPACES

by Ana Elvira Velez Villa I am convinced that creative and conscious design can help identify new approaches to put forward responsible and comprehensive design solutions.

Homelessness and housing precarity is a worldwide problem, that is increasing exponentially, not only in industrialized countries but also in developing countries where public policies, accessibility, and economic restraints are the main questions discussed overall.

As in the entire global south, Colombia has a critical housing deficit in contexts of poverty and inequality. 32% of the Colombian population is houseless or live in a precarious house, meaning that there is at least a 3.8 million household deficit. (DANE, 2005).

During the last two periods of the national government, housing programs have advanced in order to reduce the deficit. However, these fast-running initiatives focus on the efficiency of housing as a product, regardless of its functionality, its relationship with habitat and the shaping of good neighborhoods and cities. This desire to reduce the quantitative deficit ends up increasing the qualitative deficit with dysfunctional and decontextualized housing.

To attend to the problem, we must migrate towards a holistic concept of housing and habitat, by understanding the constant relationship between the most private space (the domestic domain) and the most public space (the street) to build integral and quality living neighborhoods and cities that identify with our tropical environment. These concerns revolve around two issues: character and intermediate spaces.

Character has to do with how housing should build neighborhoods with socio-cultural and urban architectural identity by understanding its territorial context and environment. The identification of dwelling forms and their architectural elements will characterize each solution and build different places aware of its surroundings.

Intermediate spaces have to do with the sequence and gradations of spaces between the domestic domain and the street through a series of intermediate spaces. The design of housing cannot only be solved by designing the unit itself. Intermediate spaces are an additional and inseparable part of the solution. We find eaves of roofs, corridors, galleries, porches, balconies, terraces, patios, stairwells, bridges, all of which connect interior spaces with collective or public spaces allowing a clear relation between the interior and exterior and an appropriation of this area from the inhabitants. All of these spaces contribute to the building of sustainable communities and become the texture of our landscape.

But how can design engage and create thoughtful processes and reflect on what is essential for a decent life, a decent neighborhood, and a decent city? By reviewing 3 cases of social housing schemes in the region and posing the main questions to be tackled, we explore how intermediate spaces can contribute to the construction of integral and quality living spaces, inserted and connected to their context.

Ana Elvira Vélez Villa believes in conscious and creative design at multiple scales as a method of intervention able to contribute to equality in the building of the city. Since 2017, she is a consultant for Comfama, the biggest family compensation Corporation for Antioquia, where she leads several designs for urban and rural housing throughout the 125 towns of the region. Her main strategy is the design of intermediate spaces; these are the spaces that bond the private and public spheres and are capable of hosting the customs of collective and individual daily life, allowing the building of sustainable communities.

Worlds Of Homelessness

La Playa apartments, is a project located in the downtown area of the city of Medellin, enjoying all the facilities of urban conditions developed between 2000-2004 by a private developer under the VIS program to bring social housing in the downtown areas of the big cities. The questions raised were: • How can compact design allow a feeling of low density?

• How could a flexible design allow identity?

La Playa Apartments © Isaac Ramirez Marin

La Habana, is one of the three projects designed for the coffee town of Salgar after an overflow of the Liboriana creek destroyed 384 homes and 17 bridges in May 2015. The reconstruction was developed through a public-private-social partnership and the affected community. The questions raised were: • How can stacked row houses achieve the idea of a street house?

• What is the proper scale to rebuild a neighborhood?

La Habana © Isaac Ramirez Marin

Jardines-Curazaos, is the first stage (in construction) of a large social housing scheme in the banana region city of Apartadó, developed by Caja de Compensación Familiar Comfama (A non-profit private family compensation corporation entity whose objective is the improvement of the worker’s family’s quality of life).

The aim is to consolidate habitat and environment models suitable for social housing where the public and intermediate space guarantees social relations and the construction of neighborhood life, with an adequate scale and density for its context. The questions raised were: • How can the first stage of the project include all the principles of the total neighborhood scheme?

• Can we build a financial support program for the community that accompanies the philosophical planting garden scheme?

MMA

by Michael Maltzan I founded Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA) in 1995, as an architecture and urban design practice that works globally across a wide range of typologies, from cultural institutions to city infrastructure. Fundamental to our work is the paradigm of housing. Often thought of as having its own forms of technical knowledge, particularities of building code, and economy, housing has historically been one of the most expansive archetypes within the field, witnessing progress that goes well beyond technical and functional challenges. Housing manifests a complexity of architectural ideas, touching on social, economic, political, aesthetic, and urban questions.

We are dedicated to exploring how these ideas around housing reinforce the rest of the practice’s work and how that work, in turn, fuels the thinking around housing.

Housing is not a separate set of ideas, instead an integral part of a much larger whole. The typology is a deeply integrated and influential part of our practice.

Some of the firm’s most acclaimed work includes both small and large housing projects that embrace innovation in design, program, and construction, to create inspiring homes regardless of a resident’s socio-economic status. Fundamental to the design approach is the recognition that the planning and design of affordable housing has a profound impact on the social, cultural, political, and economic landscape of our cities. Successful housing must be engaging, innovative, and inspiring if it is to nurture residents and cultivate community. It can support individual and collective experiences in our communities regardless of the size of the development, neighborhood, or city. Architecture can, at its very best, create innovative, human-centered, uplifting spaces that are true foundations for people’s lives.

In 2003 MMA began working on multi-unit housing projects in Los Angeles with the Skid Row Housing Trust, a non-profit housing developer focused on providing housing for homeless individuals. Three of those award-winning projects are New Carver Apartments (97 units), Star Apartments (102 units), and Crest Apartments (64 units). These are Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) models that include vital social infrastructure for the inhabitants. Each building is oriented toward a particular homeless population. New Carver Apartments is for elderly homeless; Star Apartments is for people with chronic physical and mental disabilities; Crest Apartments is for formerly homeless veterans. Each community requires a complex set of services. Being out on the street in search of supportive services has led to high levels of recidivism and instability. Moving services, doctors, and caseworkers into the housing creates a greater likelihood of building stable lives for the residents. Consequently, each of these projects takes on greater programmatic complexity, effectively becoming a community within the city – the kind of community that its inhabitants have lacked for much of their lives.

Star Apartments © Iwan Baan

Crest Apartments © Iwan Baan

New Carver Apartments Courtyard © Iwan Baan

Jardines-Curazaos © COMFAMA

As architects, we can contribute to the definition of better homes, neighborhoods, and cities. “One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us and to which we belong.”

(Foreword, In the Praise of Shadow, Jun Ichiro Tanizaki) Worlds Of Homelessness

Michael Maltzan founded Michael Maltzan Architecture, Inc. in 1995. His projects cross a wide range of typologies, from cultural institutions to city infrastructure. His multi-family residential projects completed over the past decade, including Star Apartments, New Carver Apartments, Crest Apartments, and One Santa Fe, have gained international acclaim for their innovation in both design and construction. These projects have been featured in exhibitions and publications worldwide and are the focus of Michael's most recent book, "Social Transparency: Projects on Housing," published by the Columbia University Press in 2016.

#ARCHITECTURALMODEL

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INFORMAL STUDIO

A teaching experiment from Johannesburg bringing together formal and informal housing processes. The [in]formal Studio transplants academic training into real-life situations of informal urbanism, engaging in partnerships with residents as active agents of development. Developed by 26’10 south Architects at the University of Johannesburg these courses represent the culmination of the “Housing and the Informal City”, a research project by 26’10 south Architects in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg.

by Thorsten Deckler

Founded in 1886 when gold was discovered on a savannah plateau, Johannesburg quickly grew into an economic powerhouse on the African continent. Under Apartheid the city was strictly segregated according to race and eventually isolated from the world through global sanctions. With the advent of democracy in 1994, Johannesburg once again became an economic magnet for people from Africa and beyond and now, 25 years into democracy, it is known as the creative capital of the southern hemisphere. It is also known as one of the world’s most unequal cities, and it is where we live and work as architects.

Here the lack of public safety, decent schooling, housing and healthcare have presented amazing opportunities for the private sector with architecture used as a tool for sanitizing and securing the urban landscape for a few who can afford it. Despite ambitious upgrades of poorer neighborhoods, the beginnings of a public transportation system and the building of thousands of subsidized houses, the template laid down during Apartheid persists, leaving many citizens to their own devices in meeting their basic needs, including housing. In South Africa, a backlog of 2.3 million houses (Stats SA 2012) has resulted in people building their own homes and neighborhoods. Yet the formal system in which we have been trained as architects condemns these selfmade homes as illegal. Africa is home to ten of the fastest-growing cities in the world and it is estimated that 75% of urbanization will be informal.

Change cannot be conjured without suspending judgment of the perceived problem.

Thorsten Deckler

A group of community architects and Ruimsig residents who assisted students in measuring the settlement © Alexander Opper

Re-blocking map for Ruimsig showing remaining structures (in solid black) and re-located structures (grey) © 26’10 south Architects

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#ARCHITECTURALMODEL

The InformalStudio was created with this in mind and to investigate how the seemingly opposed realities of formal and informal could be brought into a more productive relationship. What started as a long term research project in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, culminated in the design and teaching of a university course on in-situ upgrading. The course was developed at the University of Johannesburg together with a number of lecturers as well as several NGO’s and CBO’s that form part of the South African Slum Dwellers International (SDI) Alliance. Most importantly, the studios were held in communities mobilized through the SDI methodology and involved residents working together with students and lecturers.

An aspect of the InformalStudio distinguishing it from many design and build initiatives led by visiting architecture schools is that it does not assume to be delivering development (usually in the form of a building), but rather aim to support a people-driven development process. The question of who is “the” expert was challenged early on and established a fundamental shift that acknowledged residents as legitimate partners and experts of their lived reality. This helped to mutually set a teaching agenda that balanced the learning outcomes for students and staff with generating useful outcomes to support each particular settlement.

Two seven-week courses were held in Ruimsig (in 2011) and in Marlboro South (2012), respectively. The main output of each course was the mapping of a hitherto “unseen” urban reality. These mappings became practical planning tools for residents, but also tools of agency enabling residents to speak the language of city planners and partake in the decisions affecting them.

The two courses are briefly summarized below: INFORMAL STUDIO: RUIMSIG Residents of Ruimsig, a small informal settlement west of Johannesburg, had just completed a self-enumeration and required an accurate map of their settlement. Through the studio, students and residents produced this map and also a re-blocking strategy which outlined proposals for immediate improvements which could be undertaken by residents themselves. The main objectives of re-blocking Worlds Of Homelessness

are: the equitable distribution of land, addressing overcrowding and the activities of slumlords, the adjustment of movement routes to suitable road widths for improved circulation and passage of emergency vehicles, and the eventual introduction of services. Re-blocking is motivated by minimal physical adjustments, thus respecting the organic logic of how people first settled the land.

After the course, residents, assisted by NGOs systematically began to tackle the physical upgrading of their surroundings, moving houses and fences and re-settling households from congested land and flood lines into better positions. This involved protracted discussions amongst residents themselves which were not always benign, yet were guided by the SDI methodology and with an achievable outcome insight.

Through the association with the university and the production of a re-blocking plan, Ruimsig has received increased attention from city authorities who even declared the area an ‘experimental zone’ in which certain municipal standards and by-laws may be re-defined in order to meet the spatial demands of the settlement. The effects of this have been a sense of security of tenure which has visibly manifest in improvements people have made to their homes and gardens. Perhaps most powerful, for us as architects, is the idea that an informal settlement is simply a young city growing up and the question is what do its inhabitants actually need to thrive? Even Manhattan started as an informally settled trading post!

INFORMAL STUDIO: MARLBORO SOUTH In 2012, the studio was invited to work in Marlboro South, an industrial buffer strip implemented during Apartheid to separate Alexandra, one of Johannesburg’s oldest black townships, from its more affluent white neighbors. Over the past three decades, approximately 1,500 mostly poor black households moved into the area in order to benefit from its central location. In the process highly organized communities established themselves in abandoned factories and warehouses making do with municipal services and living under the constant threat of eviction.

It was agreed that students, again assisted by residents, would produce an accurate land-use map of the existing situation. This research revealed a living and working neighborhood with schools, churches, crèches, restaurants, markets, and even a brass band. A spatial development framework and improvement strategies were developed with which the community and NGOs could counter the city’s protracted efforts to evict people from the area and ironically return it to its Apartheid-planned status as an industrial buffer.

As part of the deliverables to the Goethe-Institut, 26’10 south Architects produced a traveling exhibit that communicates methodologies and insights in the form of models, drawings, and maps. Popular media such as comics, a newspaper, and films make the information accessible to as wide an audience as possible. This has even resulted in the material making its way into the office of the South African Presidency, but that is another story...

CONCLUSION Working in the InformalStudios has taught us, as architects, a number of things. That change cannot be conjured without suspending judgment of the perceived problem.

We have learned that the problem contains the solution, but that it is hidden, firstly through our privileged outrage at the unfairness of the situation and secondly through our education as “experts” of a narrow field.

We have learned that working in complex situations requires crossing the boundaries that define our expertise and to bring together different experiences, insights, and readings of the city. An example that best illustrates this comes from a subsequent workshop on upgrading held in East London, South Africa, where various built environment professionals sat around a table together with the informal mayor of a small settlement occupying an area reserved for stormwater run-off. Much of the discussion circled around what is the role of a road? Why is it Worlds Of Homelessness

taking up so much space? Is it for cars, ambulances, and firetrucks? Is it to manage stormwater? Is it to distribute services? Is it a public space?

The answer is, of course, all of the above and more.

Similarly, we can ask what is a home? Is it a bolt hole to access the city economy? Can it be shared? If it is too small, can the city provide the rest? Is home in an entirely different city or even country? Can a home be a shop, factory, or office? Why can’t it be built with my own hands?

Working in Johannesburg has made us acutely aware of the limits of our influence in undoing deep structural damage. Working through the InformalStudio with over a hundred collaborators and as part of a network

of thousands more has revealed to us a new power that lies in observing, engaging and collaborating – not to fix a problem but to lean into it and discover existing systems that already contain the answers we seek.

The InformalStudio was developed and taught by Thorsten Deckler and Anne Graupner (26’10 south Architects) together with Alexander Opper (at the time director of the Architecture Master’s Programme, University of Johannesburg). Critical support and insights were provided by Steve Topham (National Upgrade Support Programme) and Andy Bolnick (iKhayalami).

The studio was, however, only made possible by the contribution and commitment of over a hundred other lecturers, students, residents of Ruimsig and Marlboro South, city officials as well as members of the Shack Dwellers International Alliance and their member organizations.

Adaptive Design © Tebogo Ramatlo

Site Analysis © Tebogo Ramatlo

Thorsten Deckler is a Johannesburg based architect and co-founder, together with Anne Graupner, of 26’10 south Architects. The practice works across architecture, urban design, and knowledge management with the aim to create spaces in which people can thrive. Besides building key infrastructure and housing projects, 26’10 has conducted long-term research on informal urbanism, culminating in the „Informal Studio” run in partnership with the University of Johannesburg and GoetheInstitut. 26’10 has received local and international recognition and has been selected as best emerging practice in South Africa (Backstage Award Venice 2012).

#ARCHITECTURALMODEL

Tebogo Ramatlo is an architect, lecturer, maker, and performing arts choreographer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was a participant in the InformalStudio Marlboro South, and he frequently collaborates with 26’10 south Architects. In his master’s thesis, he uses stopframe animation to narrate an urban future in which migrant women with children help build the city in which they seek shelter. He has participated in and run workshops in Peru, Turkey, South Africa, and Brazil, and in 2018, he collaborated with architect Nadia Tromp on an installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale, positioning the topic of migration as part of a global architectural discourse.

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Peace is yours – Mural by Lydia Emily and Showzart © Michael Jaffe

AMERIKA IST EIN HÖLLENVORBILD Mieten steigen, Haushalte müssen immer mehr von ihrem Einkommen für Wohnungen aufwenden, selbst Angehörige der Mittelschicht sind inzwischen teils von Wohnungslosigkeit bedroht. Die Soziologin Jutta Allmendinger forscht in Deutschland und in den USA zu Wohnungsnot und Obdachlosigkeit, im kommenden Jahr soll ihr Buch zum Thema Wohnungsarmut erscheinen – ein Konzept, dass die Armutsforschung bisher nicht beachtet hat. Allmendinger sagt, Politik und Sozialforschung müssten das Thema dringend priorisieren, denn unsere Gesellschaft drohe, daran zu zerbrechen. Am Ende stehe unsere gesamte Demokratie auf dem Spiel. Dieses Interview erschien in der ZEIT Online als Teil des Schwerpunkts “Mieten am Limit”.

Jutta Allmendinger interviewt von Simone Gaul und Ileana Grabitz

ZO Frau Allmendinger, Sie beschäftigen sich zurzeit intensiv mit Wohnungslosigkeit. Wie kam das?

JA Es ist etwa ein Jahr her, dass ich als Fellow für vier Monate nach Los Angeles zog, um dort am ThomasMann-Haus zu forschen. Eines Morgens fuhr ich an den Strand und sah dort Obdachlose. Das Bild kennt man ja, etwas aber war anders: Ich beobachtete, dass einige sich ein Jackett anzogen, sich einen Spiegel vors Gesicht hielten und sich kämmten. Ich war perplex und fragte sie, was sie da taten. Sie antworteten: Wir machen uns fertig für die Arbeit. Ich dachte spontan an Kurse für Arbeitslose. Aber nein: Es waren ausgebildete Lehrer! Sie verdienten nur so wenig, dass sie sich von ihrem Gehalt keine Wohnung in der Nähe ihrer Arbeitsstelle leisten konnten.

Deshalb schliefen sie in ihren Autos oder in Zelten.

Ich war erschrocken über mich selbst, über die Pyramide meiner Vorurteile. Ich hatte diese gut ausgebildeten Menschen als Outlaws betrachtet. Das hat mir einen regelrechten Schock verpasst. Und ich habe mich entschieden, über diese erwerbstätigen Obdachlosen zu forschen. Seither habe ich viel gelernt über Obdachlosigkeit in L.A., aber auch in Deutschland.

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ZO Was ist in Los Angeles anders als zum Beispiel in Berlin?

JA In L.A. sind diese Menschen sichtbarer. Sie leben oft in regelrechten Zeltstädten innerhalb der Großstädte.

Hier bei uns gibt es so etwas ja kaum. In den USA setzen die Städte weniger auf Notunterkünfte, die Obdachlosen werden dort aber auch nicht so entschlossen aus den Innenstädten verbannt. In Midtown L.A. beispielsweise findet man die Zelte direkt neben dem Theater District

JUTTA ALLMENDINGER Nach Stationen am Max-Planck-Institut in Berlin und an der Harvard University (USA) war Jutta Allmendinger zunächst Professorin für Soziologie in München. Nach einer Etappe als Direktorin des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (IAB) in Nürnberg wechselte sie 2007 als Präsidentin an das Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. Allmendinger ist zudem Mitglied im Herausgeberrat der ZEIT.

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oder der Philharmonie. Ich dachte, dass diese Sichtbarkeit Nähe und Identifikation schafft, die Hilfsbereitschaft erhöht. Aber auch diese Annahme erwies sich als völlig falsch. Viele Leute sind dort zwar sehr dafür, dass mehr für Obdachlose getan wird – aber nur, damit sie aus ihrem Umfeld verschwinden.

Anders als die meisten Städte in Deutschland ist L.A. aber immerhin bereits seit Langem bemüht, die Obdachlosen zu zählen. Da schwirren in einer Nacht schon mal 2.000 Freiwillige aus und versuchen, eine Zahl so genau wie möglich zu erheben. In Deutschland haben wir grobe Schätzungen zur Obdachlosigkeit, aber nur wenige Zählungen. Dabei brauchen wir diese Daten dringend.

VORURTEILE ÜBER OBDACHLOSE HINTERFRAGEN ZO Warum gibt es sie nicht?

JA Das Problem hat uns zu lange überhaupt nicht interessiert. Ich komme selbst aus der Armutsforschung und muss das selbstkritisch so sagen. Die verbreitete Ansicht war: Die trinken halt, die sind krank und wollen nicht arbeiten. Diesen Menschen fehlt jede Motivation, warum sollten wir uns um die kümmern? Sie können ja Worlds Of Homelessness

ins Krankenhaus gehen, zur Bahnhofsmission oder in die Notunterkünfte. Aber wenn sie lieber auf der Straße leben – why should we care? Mein Erlebnis am Strand in L.A. ist das beste Beispiel, dass man diese Vorannahmen hinterfragen muss. Aber selbst wenn all das zutreffen würde – ein Grund, das Thema Wohnen nicht systematisch an die Armutsforschung anzubinden, ist es sicherlich nicht. Im Gegenteil.

ZO Sozialverbände warnen seit Jahren vor steigender Obdachlosigkeit, gerade angesichts der hohen Mieten. Auch immer mehr Familien seien von Wohnungslosigkeit bedroht und eben auch Berufstätige. Wer sind diese neuen Wohnungslosen?

JA Grundsätzlich sollte man zwischen Wohnungslosigkeit und Obdachlosigkeit unterscheiden. Sprechen wir von Menschen, die ohne Dach über dem Kopf auf der Straße leben oder von jenen, die bei Freunden auf der Couch unterkommen? Wir wissen über beide Gruppen relativ wenig, es sind unterschiedliche Personen betroffen: junge Menschen, die aus ihrem Elternhaus ausziehen, aber kein Einkommen haben, das eine Wohnung trägt; Personen, die nach einer Trennung den Haushalt verlassen; Menschen, die aufgrund von Mietschulden ihre Wohnung räumen mussten; und natürlich sind auch Menschen darunter, die ihre Arbeit verloren haben und mehr konsumieren, als sie sich leisten können – die sich irgendwann vielleicht fast aufgeben, weil sie keine Perspektive mehr sehen.

ZO Und wenn wir speziell auf die Berufstätigen blicken?

JA In Deutschland sind das geschätzt knapp zehn Prozent der Wohnungslosen. Viel wissen wir nicht über diese Menschen. In den USA sind besonders oft Menschen betroffen, die wegen eines Jobs umziehen. Nur: Wer bei McDonalds oder Starbucks anfängt, bekommt zu wenig Geld, um sich eine Wohnung leisten zu können.

Das geht nur mit Zweit- oder Drittjob. Diese Situation ist inzwischen auch bei uns keine Seltenheit mehr. Die Menschen verdienen einfach nicht genug, um sich die teuren Mieten leisten zu können.

LETZTENDLICH STEHT DIE DEMOKRATIE AUF DEM SPIEL ZO Ist die Wohnungsnot in der Mittelschicht angekommen?

JA Absolut. In den USA sagen Angehörige der Mittelschicht schon länger: Obdachlosigkeit? Kann uns auch passieren. Sie sei one pay cheque away – also eine Gehaltszahlung entfernt. Was sie meinen: Viele Leute verdienen zwar sehr ordentlich, haben aber auch riesige Kosten, etwa Ratenzahlungen für Hypotheken. Oft bleibt dann vom Monatsgehalt nicht mehr viel übrig, gerade in diesen teuren Gegenden in Los Angeles. Und wenn dann eine Zahlung ausbleibt, bricht das gesamte Konstrukt zusammen. Auch aus diesem Grund sieht man in diesen Vierteln relativ viele “Zu verkaufen”-Schilder an den Häusern. Ich kenne aber auch Fälle, die sich nach einiger Zeit wieder in diese Villenviertel einkaufen. Dieses in and out besser zu verstehen wäre wichtig.

In Deutschland ist das noch anders. Wenige Mittelschichtsangehörige fürchten, dass sie wohnungslos werden könnten. Das hat natürlich auch mit unserem Sozialstaat zu tun, der ab einem bestimmten Punkt über Arbeitslosengeld und Wohngeld abfedert. Und trotzdem: In den vergangenen eineinhalb Jahren hat sich die Lage sehr verändert.

ZO Inwiefern?

JA Wenn 40 Prozent der Haushalte in deutschen Großstädten mittlerweile mehr als 30 Prozent ihres Einkommens für die Miete aufbringen, dann kommen wir langsam in eine schwierige Lage. Bei einem Einkommen von 2.000 Euro sind schon mal 600 Euro weg. Früher lag der Anteil für die Miete bei nicht mehr als 20 bis 25 Prozent.

Weil die Mieten immer weiter steigen, rechnen also Worlds Of Homelessness

mehr und mehr Menschen damit, dass sie ihre Wohnung unter Umständen nicht mehr halten können. Zu der Unsicherheit, die heutzutage viele bezüglich der Verlässlichkeit ihrer Einkommen haben, kommt also die Sorge: Kann ich mir meine Wohnung morgen noch leisten?

Muss ich vielleicht wegziehen? Viele Städte haben einfach nicht mehr genug bezahlbare Wohnungen. Allein in Berlin fehlen 310.000. Diese Akkumulation von Verunsicherungen kann man als dramatisch bezeichnen.

Zugleich nimmt die soziale Spaltung zu. Es gibt dicke rote Flecken auf der Landkarte, wo nur noch Wohngeldbezieher leben. Andererseits Viertel mit einem überproportional hohen Anteil von Immobilienbesitzern und Beziehern hoher Einkommen. Dabei brauchen wir durchmischte Wohnviertel. Sonst findet keine Begegnung mehr statt. In dieser Hinsicht ist Amerika ein Höllenvorbild.

ZO Welche Gefahr birgt diese Entwicklung für unsere Gesellschaft?

JA Letztendlich steht die Demokratie auf dem Spiel.

Weil eine Demokratie immer davon abhängt, dass sich Menschen zugehörig fühlen. Dass die kleinen Wirs der Familien miteinander verbunden sind und sich als Teil von großen Wirs fühlen. Dass das partikulare Vertrauen in Einzelne zu einem generalisierten Vertrauen in die Mitmenschen wird. Das aber setzt voraus, dass es Orte der Begegnung gibt. Die müssen wir wieder schaffen.

Begegnungen sind die einzige Möglichkeit, ein Übermaß an Stereotypisierungen und Stigmatisierungen zu überwinden, unter denen unsere Gesellschaft zunehmend leidet. Ich glaube, es kann keine demokratische Gesellschaft geben, wenn bestimmte Gruppen langfristig ausgeschlossen sind. Aber genau das geschieht gerade.

Ein Recht auf Wohnen im Grundgesetz ZO Was kann man tun? Wenn es der Markt allein nicht richten kann, ist dann der Staat gefragt?

JA Ja, das ist eine politische Aufgabe. Und sie wird immer wichtiger. Wir brauchen bezahlbaren Wohnraum, wir brauchen ein Recht auf Wohnen, das im Grundgesetz verankert ist. Wir brauchen eine präventive und eine reparierende Wohnungspolitik.

ZO Sie haben vor 20 Jahren schon einmal einen neuen Begriff in die Armutsforschung eingebracht, den der Bildungsarmut. Analog dazu haben Sie nun den Begriff der Wohnungsarmut erarbeitet. Was genau ist Wohnungsarmut?

JA Mir geht es darum, das Thema Wohnen systematisch in die Armutsforschung einzubringen. Genauso wie damals bei der Bildung. Wir müssen über Bildung sprechen, wenn wir über Armut sprechen. Fehlende Bildung schließt Menschen in so vielen Bereichen von der Gesellschaft aus. Das gilt selbst für Leute, die erwerbstätig sind.

Das gleiche Ziel habe ich jetzt beim Thema Wohnen.

Hierfür brauchen wir Informationen über die Höhe der Wohnungsarmut, über die Gruppen, die davon betroffen sind, über die Zeit, die die Menschen ohne Wohnung leben. Wir brauchen eine Unterscheidung zwischen absoluter und relativer Wohnungsarmut.

ZO Was ist der Unterschied?

JA Absolute Wohnungsarmut besteht dann, wenn jemand gar keinen Zugang zu einem eigenen Dach über dem Kopf hat, analog zur absoluten Armut, die bedeutet, dass die Mittel fehlen, um sich selbst zu ernähren.

Relative Armut betrifft jene, die weniger als 60 Prozent vom Median verdienen. Übertragen auf die Wohnungsarmut geht es hier also darum, wie viele Menschen weit weniger Wohnfläche als der Durchschnitt der Menschen zur Verfügung hat.

Wie bewegt man die Witwe, die auf 180 m² wohnt, zum Wohnungstausch?

ZO Ist eine Familie, die mit drei Personen in einer 60 Quadratmeter großen Zweizimmerwohnung lebt, wohnungsarm?

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JA Ich habe die Berechnungen noch nicht abgeschlossen. Wenn es drei Erwachsene sind und wir das Konzept der relativen Wohnungsarmut heranziehen, wahrscheinlich schon. Was ich mir von der Unterscheidung zur absoluten Wohnungsarmut erhoffe, sind daran ansetzende Leistungen. Eine Anpassung des Wohngelds, ein höherer Mindestlohn, mehr sozialer Wohnungsbau. Und auch mit Wohnungsreichtum müssen wir uns auseinandersetzen; schließlich auch mit fehlenden Passungen aufgrund der gestiegenen Mieten: Wenn eine Witwe allein auf 180 Quadratmetern wohnt und sich nebenan eine vierköpfige Familie 50 Quadratmeter teilen muss, wie lösen wir das? Viele Senioren würden gern in kleineren Wohnungen leben, aber die anzumieten ist oft teurer, als in der großen zu bleiben. Wir müssen also über Mobilität über Wohnungsgrößen hinweg sprechen.

ZO Wie lässt sich diese Mobilität erreichen?

JA Dazu brauchen wir auch hier zuallererst Daten.

Wer lebt eigentlich wo und wie? Wenn man einen Überblick hat, kann man Matching-Verfahren anwenden.

Der Witwe beispielsweise müsste man helfen, ihr konkrete Wohnungsangebote machen. Dafür brauchen wir so etwas wie Wohnungsmakler, die kommen und sagen: “Wir hätten eine Wohnung für Sie nicht weit entfernt.

Wir renovieren sie für Sie. Könnten Sie sich vorstellen umzuziehen?” Heutzutage überlassen wir diese Suche den Menschen selbst, und die sind überfordert.

ZO Aber selbst wenn Mieter zum Tausch bereit sind, scheitert es am Ende ja meist daran, dass mit neuen Verträgen beide Wohnungen teurer wären.

JA Das ist genau der Mechanismus, an dem Berlin gerade knabbert. Das Problem muss man unter Kontrolle bekommen, durch eine Art Mieterhöhungsregulierung.

ZO Wie der Mietendeckel, über den Berlin gerade streitet?

JA Zum Mietendeckel kann ich mich nicht äußern, die rechtlichen Fragen sind noch nicht geklärt. Aber eines ist klar: Irgendeine Form der Regulierung muss es auf jeden Fall geben.

ZO Und wer würde das Matching der Kandidaten für einen Wohnungstausch übernehmen? Ist das Ihrer Vorstellung nach eine Art städtische Agentur?

JA Idealerweise würden diese Matchers die Organisation gleich verbinden mit der Frage des selbstständigen Wohnens im Alter. Wir müssen in eine Mietpolitik einsteigen, die alle assoziierten Fragen, etwa die Durchmischung von Stadtteilen, von Anfang an mitdenkt. Wien zum Beispiel ist da ein gutes Vorbild. Wohnen muss auch bei uns eine der zentralen Kategorien der Politik werden.

Und für die Durchmischung wiederum spielen auch Schulen eine große Rolle. So lässt sich zum Beispiel beobachten, dass die Segregation in dem Moment, in dem eine gute Schule in ein eigentlich heruntergekommenes Gebiet kommt, gebremst wird. Dann wandern weniger der gut situierten Menschen in andere Bezirke ab. Durch eine gute Infrastruktur können wir ganz viel beeinflussen.

ZO Berlin will ja nun immerhin eine erste Obdachlosenstatistik erstellen. Mit einem ähnlichen Verfahren, wie Sie es aus L.A. geschildert haben.

JA Ja. Freiwillige werden in einer Nacht im Januar die Stadt durchkämmen und die Obdachlosen zählen. In einem Onlineportal kann man sich eintragen, ich werde selbst auch dabei sein. Langsam kommt Berlin nach vorn.

Einerseits, weil die Stadt an einer engen Abstimmung des Umgangs mit Obdachlosen und Wohnungslosen über die einzelnen Stadtteile hinweg arbeitet, andererseits weil erstmals substanziell über Prekarität diskutiert wird. Hoffentlich wird bald auch das größer werdende Problem der Zwangsräumungen angegangen. Finanzielle Armut, Bildungsarmut und Wohnungsarmut fallen oft zusammen oder gehen ineinander über. Es ist dringend notwendig, alle Stränge zusammen zu betrachten.

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THE HOME AND HOMELESSNESS

by Hilary Silver

What comes to mind when you think of “home”? “Home” conjures up so many warm and positive connotations that, even if we leave home, it remains a touchstone for our lives. It is ours, the place of our family, community, origins, where we belong. Home meets human needs for safety, security, privacy, attachment, and when it does not, it is no longer home. To be homeless, then, is a form of social dislocation, to move alone in the world, a refugee in search of shelter. It is painful to contemplate the loss of a home. The term “homeless” is emotionally evocative, as well as descriptive of those who lack physical shelter.

No wonder there are so many novels, films, and ethnographies of homelessness! There is the thriving media of homeless street newspapers publishing poetry and articles by people experiencing the condition. Although social scientists and governments around the world have devised various ways to define, measure, and count homelessness (Van Dam 2019; DuPont 2000; Zufferey & Yu 2017; Tipple & Speak 2009), perhaps only a cultural or humanistic approach can adequately render how it feels.

Home and Homeless The idea of “home” is found in virtually all societies.

To be sure, the meaning of home varies over time and place (Rybcynski 1986; Somerville 1992). Although Ghana lacks an explicit word for homelessness, it officially refers to “only the most destitute, without any form of shelter or roof, and without kin or friends anywhere, however remote, to take responsibility for them” (Speak and Tipple 2006, p. 174). The common connotations of the term “home” contribute to understanding what those experiencing homelessness have lost. Consider first the association of home with warmth, family, and social security. One becomes human through social attachments.

Home is a site of acceptance, solidarity, and inclusion.

Some scholars of the home maintain that there is an inherent human need for “ontological security” that can only be fully attained in the home (Saunders 1989). Indicators of ontological security include constancy, daily routines, privacy, and having a secure base for identity 24

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construction. Mentally ill homeless adults who received Housing First identified their subjective meaning of “home” in these terms, even as they were anxious and insecure about “what’s next” (Padgett 2007).

Home is also a place where individuals can exercise personal autonomy. Household members control the home and the activities within it. The legal ban on “search and seizure” excludes the State from intrusion and surveillance. And excluding others from the home affords a sense of protection and security during vulnerable moments such as sleep.

Home is the site of private life. Liberal societies usually guarantee a right to privacy, a sphere of life protected from the gaze of others. Part of the “Civilizing Process” (Elias 1969) and the rise of possessive individualism (MacPherson 1962) entails permission to exclude all or most people from observing certain acts. Defecation, urination, dressing, lovemaking, and so on are quarantined from public exposure. Admission is limited to one’s intimates. Privacy is thus preferential. But the homeless are often forced by necessity to conduct private life in public (Waldron 1991).

Home offers a sense of place identity, a “home town” and a “homeland”. Where one lives conveys information to others about the self. How people live, their “habitus” (Bourdieu 1977), displays their distinctive values and ways of life, their habits, skills, dispositions, and perceptions, patterns of thinking, and placing one’s body.

Hilary Silver is Chair and Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and Public Policy at the George Washington University, and Professor Emerita of Urban Studies and Sociology at Brown University where she rose through the ranks since receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her film “Direction Home” (2015) follows seven Rhode Islanders experiencing homelessness over seven years until they all have secured housing.

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“Leaving home” is a declaration of independence. Migration establishes one’s own home and way of life. Thus, “home” implies permanence and belonging, their “home base.”

When viewed through a class lens, home is a “retreat” from market exploitation, a place of calm, respite, and physical ease. We arrange our homes for comfort and coziness, “nesting” in a private place removed from worldly concerns. It is a site of consumption. Conveniences like indoor heating, water, and toilets contributed to now taken-for-granted creature comforts of home that few of today’s homeless enjoy (Rybczynski 1986).

Home is the site of domestic life and thereby, carries some gendered freight. Sometimes it is assumed that the home is only a place of leisure, rest, consumption, and reproduction, but it is also a site of production, especially for women. In some places and at certain times, domestic work contributed to making the home a sex-segregated domain, with a gendered division of labor and inequality.

Homelessness is everywhere concentrated among men.

Yet, having a home should not be confused with homeownership. There are those who point to the additional benefits of owning one’s home – property rights that bestow control over the use and disposition of the dwelling, continuity of tenure, and the possibility of accruing wealth (Saunders 1989; McCabe 2016). Homeownership is often a misnomer, though. People purchase homes with loans from banks that then own part of the property. Mortgage debt can actually impose external discipline, surveillance, and immobility. Many of the personal and social benefits associated with homeownership come from residential stability that rent regulations offer tenants as well.

Nor should one exaggerate the stability of home. There is variation in “tenure,” and eviction is common. The State can recognize usufruct rights of a longstanding tent city or encampment. Improvements to one’s dwelling have been used to establish an officially recognized settlement or “slum” with protection to remain in place. Increasingly, international organizations are committing to end Worlds Of Homelessness

An informal stall from where food and houses are sold in Diepsloot, a post-Apartheid settlement with 75% informal households © 26’10 south Architects

housing insecurity, upgrade slums, and ensure a “right to the city.”

Somerville (1999) offers a good summary of the contrasts between home and homelessness. He enumerated many meanings of “home” – security, shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode, and paradise – and juxtaposed them to meanings of “homelessness” – insecurity, material deprivation, and physical exposure or rooflessness, coldness, heartlessness, instability, lack of privacy, vulnerability, rootlessness, placelessness, and even purgatory.

Conclusion The terminology of “homelessness” is thus imprecise in many ways. Nevertheless, it serves as a contemporary euphemism preferable to older stigmatized labels like “bums,” “tramps,” “vagrants,” and “hobos.” Given people’s positive emotions towards, and shared attachments to home, the term “homelessness” can create public empathy with the plight of those whose dwelling places exclude them from mainstream society. It is a discourse that can promote the support needed for housing policies that bring people into the warmth of home.

Homeless with a Home Understanding homelessness with reference to the home nevertheless rests upon a negative definition, delineating what people lack. The focus on deficits obscures the fact that – in the sociological sense of home, as a place where one belongs socially – many people currently without shelter do have a “home.”

For example, people lacking shelter have a home or house somewhere else (Dupont 2000). Pavement dwellers in India and China may be recent urban migrants who will readily acknowledge they have a “home” back in their family village. Runaway youth and victims of domestic violence can be said to have a “home,” but one that is nevertheless untenable. People who live in recreational vehicles (RVs) are in fact homeowners, but they often lack rights to the land where they can park (Deener 2012; Sullivan 2018). Even if periodically displaced, people living in tents and shanties still return “home,” personalizing and beautifying their abodes and identifying their unofficial address through landmarks and intersections.

The social fixing of one’s home in space is also a function of neighbors. Home is not only an individual abode, but also a place in a community. How far that community extends beyond walls and into the street differs across cultures, but even when people who have experienced homelessness receive an apartment, some return to their familiar neighborhood and established social relations on the street.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Deener, Andrew. 2012. Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dupont, Veronique. 2000.

Mobility Patterns and Economic Strategies of Houseless People in Old Delhi. In Delhi: Urban space and human destinies. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers.

Elias, Norbert. 1969. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

FEANTSA. https://www. feantsa.org/download/ fea-002-18-update-ethoslight-0032417441788687419154. pdf MacPherson, C.B. 2011 [1962].The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press, Reprint edition.

McCabe, Brian. 2016. No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community, and the Politics of Homeownership. Oxford University Press.

Padgett, Deborah. 2007.

There’s no place like (a) home: Ontological security among persons with serious mental illness in the United States. Social Science & Medicine 64: 1925–36.

Rybczynski, Wytold. 1986.

Home: A Short History of An Idea. New York: Viking.

Saunders, Peter. 1989.

The meaning of ‘home’ in contemporary English culture.

Housing Studies 4, 3: 177–192.

Saunders, Peter and Peter Williams. 1988. The constitution of the home: towards a research agenda. Housing Studies 3, 2: 81–93.

Somerville, Peter. 1992.

Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Rooflessness or

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The limitations of interventions for homelessnessSuzanne Speak and Graham Tipple Speak, Suzanne and Graham Tipple. 2006. Perceptions, Persecution and Pity: The Limitations of Interventions for Homelessness in Developing Countries. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, 1: 172–88.

Sullivan, Esther. 2018.

Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tipple, Graham and Suzanne Speak. 2009. The Hidden Millions: Homelessness in Developing Countries. London: Routledge.

Tipple, Graham and Suzanne Speak. 2005. Definitions of homelessness in developing countries. Habitat International 29 (2005) 337–352.

Van Dam, Andrew. 2019.

The surprising holes in our knowledge of America’s homeless population. Washington Post (September 17). https:// www.washingtonpost.com/ business/2019/09/18/surprisingholes-our-knowledge-americashomeless-population/ Waldron, Jeremy. 1991–92.

Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom. UCLA Law Review 39: 295-324.

Zufferey, Carole, and Nilan Yu. 2017. The Many Faces of Homelessness: A Critical Introduction. Pp. 1- in Carole Zufferey and Nilan Yu, eds.

Faces of Homelessness in the Asia Pacific. Taylor & Francis, Routledge.

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VIVENCIAS PRECARIAS Y DESIGUALDADES URBANAS EN BOLIVIA Y LAS FILIPINAS por Cristina Cielo En sus recientes protestas contra las medidas de austeridad, las clases trabajadoras y desposeídas de Ecuador, Haití, Irán, Francia y otros lugares, desafían las políticas económicas neoliberales que les perjudican. En Ecuador, por ejemplo, las movilizaciones de octubre 2019 protestaron la reducción de los subsidios a los combustibles, política que incrementó súbitamente los precios de los alimentos básicos: de la noche a la mañana, un quintal de maíz subió de USD $18 a $40, los guisantes de $20 a $40 y las cebollas de $14 a $26.

Las personas que viven en situaciones precarias –en las calles o en condiciones inseguras y marginales– conocen de primera mano las estructuras desiguales que dificultan sus vidas. Pero ¿cómo comprenden lo que pueden hacer para oponerse a estas injusticias? ¿Cómo se constituyen sus experiencias vitales de las desigualdades y sus posibilidades políticas para desafiarlas?

Gran parte del trabajo y de la vivienda de los pobladores urbanos de escasos recursos se considera informal, a veces ilegal, más no siempre ilegítima. Según las formas en las que los ciudadanos precarizados se organizan para satisfacer sus necesidades, sus posiciones materiales, subjetivas y políticas pueden variar mucho. Vemos estas diferencias al comparar experiencias en barrios marginales de Cochabamba, Bolivia y Manila, Filipinas. Las diversas experiencias de las desigualdades se deben, en parte, a la constitución histórica de las visiones de desarrollo y de la economía del suelo urbano en cada país.

VISIONES DEL DESARROLLO Y ESTRUCTURAS DE LA ECONOMÍA Tanto Bolivia como Filipinas se consideran países de ingresos medio-bajos. En 2018, el ingreso per cápita de los filipinos era de USD $3.830 USD anuales y el de los bolivianos $3.370. En ambos países, más de la mitad de sus ciudadanos habitan viviendas precarias.

Los residentes más pobres de Cochabamba viven en la Zona Sur de la ciudad, sector que creció a partir de las migraciones inducidas por las políticas de ajuste estructural de los años 80. A las partes más alejadas, áridas e inhóspitas de esta zona siguen llegando familias sin otras opciones de vivienda. En grupos, instalan sus carpas sobre las duras tierras, para eventualmente ir construyendo chozas de adobe. Queda lejos aún el acceso al agua o alcantarillado, caminos, transporte o electricidad.

Rara vez compran los terrenos que ocupan, menos aún poseen títulos de propiedad. Pero a medida que persisten en trabajar juntos para habitar la zona, comienzan a afirmar su derecho a permanecer allí. Consideran que su sudor, su tenaz y agotador trabajo para mejorar la tierra, constituyen un “pago” legítimo por su ocupación de sus terrenos, tal y como nos dice una vecina: “Hemos sufrido, nos ha costado tanto trabajo... Todo esto lo hemos hecho 26

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Asi participamos © Centro Vicente Cañas archives, 2008

Contraportada © Centro Vicente Cañas archives, 2008

Cristina Cielo teaches in the Sociology and Gender Studies Department of the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences in Quito, Ecuador. In her classes and research, she seeks to understand the ways that global economic structures, from histories of development to contemporary commodity flows, are experienced in our daily lives, as seen in the ways we organize ourselves with those around us, and in how we learn to care – or not care– for each other. She is currently working on the book Diverse Commons: Property, Water and Politics in the Urban Andes.

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nosotros mismos. Me ha costado mucho”. Sus reclamos no solo son de propiedad, sino también territoriales.

Los grupos indígenas latinoamericanos comenzaron a coordinar sus luchas por sus territorios en la década de los ochenta. En Bolivia, las comunidades indígenas bolivianas exigieron el reconocimiento formal de su ocupación territorial con la Marcha por la Dignidad y el Territorio de 1990. Los residentes de los barrios periféricos de Cochabamba se inspiran en estas luchas indígenas, así como en las reformas agrarias latinoamericanas, en las que se afirma que “la tierra es de quien la trabaja”.

En Manila, al contrario, los filipinos precarizados enfrentan enormes dificultades para presentar cualquier tipo de reivindicación alternativa de propiedad.

La política económica filipina está fuertemente influenciada por el marco neoclásico angloamericano, en el que un mercado libre autorregulado depende de la clara definición y regulación de la propiedad privada.

Manila se ha posicionado como una ciudad global para atraer inversiones extranjeras, con una amplia reurbanización y el aumento del valor del suelo. En este contexto, los residentes urbanos de escasos recursos han sido cada vez más incapaces de acceder a las viviendas formales. A medida que la inversión privada para el desarrollo urbano de Manila ha aumentado, también han incrementado sus asentamientos informales, tanto en términos absolutos como porcentuales.

La integración de las economías locales en los flujos globales del comercio e inversión concede un rol central al suelo urbano como recurso de poder, impidiendo que asentadores informales proclamen la legitimidad de su ocupación frente a la propiedad titulada. Y la privatización de la planificación impide la intervención de los residentes informales en las políticas que les afectan.

LA ORGANIZACIÓN SOCIOPOLÍTICA DE LOS SECTORES URBANOPOPULARES Así las cosas, los filipinos de escasos recursos en Manila carecen del poder político que reclaman los sectores populares bolivianos.

Incluso la terminología es reveladora: los squatters o urban poor –como comúnmente se llaman sectores informales y marginados en las Filipinas y otros lugares– se autodenominan en América Latina los “sectores populares” o “urbano-populares,” términos que resaltan su derecho mayoritario a la ciudad.

Por supuesto, los movimientos sociales filipinos también han resistido la desposesión, famosamente en el People Power Revolution de 1986. Tras la destitución del dictador Marcos, el nuevo gobierno filipino y sus simpatizantes internacionales buscaron construir un Estado y sociedad civil liberal. Fomentaron las Organizaciones No Gubernamentales (ONGs) y los filipinos marginados Worlds Of Homelessness

comenzaron a ver en ellas una posibilidad de canalizar sus demandas, una alternativa a la política tradicional de patronazgo.

El término “sociedad civil” en las Filipinas suele referirse sobre todo a los actores y a las acciones de las ONGs, reconocidas internacionalmente por su dinamismo excepcional*, y cuyo papel se institucionalizó en la Constitución de 1987, el Código de Gobierno Local de 1991 y otras políticas y planes de desarrollo nacionales.

Hasta hoy, las poblaciones más pobres de las Filipinas rara vez participan directamente en la conformación de políticas municipales. Son representadas por ONGs; su dirección por activistas profesionales y de clase media debilita la participación política directa de los sectores urbano-marginales.

Las ONGs también trabajan en toda América Latina, pero allí no son los más importantes mediadores entre las poblaciones precarizadas y las políticas institucionales, sino que comparten ese lugar con los movimientos sociales, indígenas y sindicalistas. La amplia influencia de los sindicatos en Bolivia se puede atribuir a la centralidad económica de la minería en el país y a los sindicatos mineros que allí existen desde los años 40.

El poder del discurso y de la experiencia sindical ha dado forma concreta a la unidad y a las prácticas organizativas de los barrios periféricos de Cochabamba. En muchos de estos barrios, los vecinos están obligados a asistir a grandes asambleas semanales e integradoras, bajo pena de multa. También se requiere su incorporación al trabajo comunal y a las movilizaciones y protestas. Hay asentamientos en las que se buscan títulos colectivos de propiedad de tierra en lugar de títulos individuales.

Esta participación corporativa crea un sentido de pertenencia desde lo colectivo, proporcionando una experiencia alternativa a la ciudadanía individualizada del modelo liberal. Un líder comunitario describe “la concepción andina de libertad que no es individual sino colectiva. La gente que piensa de forma individual dice, yo decido... Pero nosotros decimos que quien no participa está perjudicando al grupo”.

El poder de los movimientos populares en América del Sur en las últimas décadas surge de estos tipos de reivindicaciones colectivas y del protagonismo de las poblaciones urbano-marginales. En países como las Filipinas, en cambio, la importancia de las inversiones privadas y los modelos representativos de participación ha atenuado la participación política de sus sectores urbanos precarizados.

Las desigualdades urbanas van en aumento. El 75% de las ciudades del mundo tienen mayores desigualdades de ingresos que hace veinte años. Para cambiar el rumbo de esta tendencia, no sólo requerimos políticas que aborden las necesidades básicas de los sectores más necesitados. Es también imprescindible el fortalecimiento de las posibilidades políticas de poblaciones precarizadas para impugnar las condiciones estructurales que les marginan.

1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

Vanessa Silva, “Precios en el Mercado Mayorista de Quito se alteran”, El Comercio (6 octubre 2019).

World Bank Data, https://data.worldbank.org/income-level/lowermiddle-income (consultado 20 oct 2019).

UN Habitat, The State of the World Cities Report 2012/13 (New York: United Nations, 2013).

Citas y trabajo de campo en Bolivia son de Cristina Cielo, The City Effect: Urban Institutions, Peripheries and Political Participation in Bolivia (UC Berkeley tesis doctoral, 2010).

Gavin Shatkin, Collective action and urban poverty alleviation: Community organizations and the struggle for shelter in Manila (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Jana Kleibert “Exclusive Development(s): Special Economic Zones and Enclave Urbanism in the Philippines,” Critical Sociology 44, no 3 (2017): 471– 485.

Mary Racelis “Civil Society, Populist Politics and the State Philippine Democracy Today.” Presentado en la Universidad de Humboldt, el Instituto para las Relaciones Internacionales Culturales y la Unverisdad de Hamburg (Alemania, abril del 2005).

UN Habitat, “Widening urban divide” capítulo 4 en World Cities Report 2016 (New York: United Nations, 2016).

Worlds Of Homelessness

ONE LAST PERSONAL NOTE

by Charles Porter My name is Charles Porter. I have worked in the Skid Row area of Downtown Los Angeles, for more than 20 years, with United Coalition East Prevention Project (UCEPP), a program of Social Model Recovery Systems.

UCEPP is a prevention program that targets factors contributing to substance abuse and its related problems. Our work is grounded in community assessment, organizing, and mobilization for change. My comments on homelessness are shaped by the experiential wisdom gained from participating in this process partnering with unhoused allies, colleagues, and friends.

In Los Angeles, homelessness does not affect everyone equally, and Black people are at the greatest risk.

This has been consistently documented by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) annual homeless count, which aligns with national trends. This disparity is a concrete measure of institutional racism that resulted in the formation of LAHSA’s ad-hoc committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, which issued a timely report earlier this year (2019). Skid Row is a predominantly Black neighborhood and the experiences of community members are rooted in historical trauma that spans back 400 years. Many argue, it was Jamestown, VA, in 1619, where the foundation of institutional racism in North America was laid. Racism is one of the root causes of homelessness in Skid Row, along with poverty, inaccessible and inadequate housing, and the lack of health and safety protections.

Poor people do not have the luxury of privacy, and the lives of our unhoused neighbors are lived publicly.

This makes them vulnerable to being profiled as addicts and criminals, and related exploitation and harassment.

This results in practices and policies that often criminalize the unhoused and fuels a narrative that dehumanizes unhoused neighbors as threats to safety and public health. The reality is that there is rampant drug usage, both legal and illegal, by varying segments of society in this country. Additionally, mental illness in our community is usually the result of the negative societal experiences and traumas. This directly correlates to other failed systems with similar racial disparities; criminal justice and child welfare. Successful community engagement efforts to prevent substance abuse and improve the neighborhood, also positively impact mental health and challenge the narrative that Skid Row is a lawless open-air asylum.

Remedial interventions must address the following essential needs: community connectedness/sense of purpose, agency/autonomy, shelter/safety, and wellness/healing. A strong sense of community connectedness helps to meet many psycho-socio needs and facilitates the sharing of resources. This also helps to foster a sense of ownership, attachment, care, and accountability. It also validates one’s humanity and sense of purpose.

Agency and autonomy speak to the power of choice and self-determination, including efforts to make sure those with lived experience inform the development and implementation of policies and procedures designed to assist them. There were two major battles for inclusion and civic participation “on our own terms” related to the formation of a Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Our efforts were unsuccessful, but the community continues to advocate for autonomy and representation in the face of inequitable development and gentrification. Another example centers around efforts to create and expand employment opportunities in Skid Row while simultaneously addressing immediate local needs. The Skid Row Community ReFresh Spot was designed in 2017, by the Skid Row Community Improvement Coalition, to address years

#KNOWLEDGEPRODUCTION

of neglect and related horrific public health conditions.

Community vision coupled with City resources resulted in a project that created dozens of living-wage jobs for currently and formerly unhoused neighbors, and provides essential resources and access to public toilets, showers, laundry services, and drinking water 24 hours a day. In its busiest month, resources were accessed more than 22,000 times (averaging 700 per day). The project incorporates peer connection, culture and serves as a respite for unhoused neighbors. It has been so successful, due to its grassroots beginning, envisioned and designed by the impacted community.

Shelter and safety are interrelated, and encampments/ informal settlements address some of these concerns by forming communities of mutual support. Law enforcement and security are often threats to the unhoused and exacerbate institutional trauma. Strengthening peer connections and engaging the community through positive activities has been an effective approach to expanding safety and accountability. We have seen safety consistently demonstrated at large community events and festivals in Skid Row via engagement and mutual respect.

Lastly, I would like to discuss wellness and healing in Skid Row. Statistics show that living on the streets greatly shortens life expectancy. Despite this, there have been profound efforts to expand wellness, healing, and quality of life. Culturally-tailored interventions must be paramount in any approach seeking to expand long-term wellness in the context of institutional racism. To this end, spirituality, music, dance, philosophy, indigenous thought, and performance permeate all facets of public life in Skid Row. We celebrate this rich heritage, including the diversity of the African diaspora. We also acknowledge Skid Row as a recovery community, where people find purpose, safety, and essential support and services.

We cannot discuss ending homelessness without a commitment to expanding access to affordable and accessible housing, and meeting people where they are with compassion and concern. We should not force integration into institutional systems that do not support their existence, well-being, and sense of agency. We must utilize the valuable experiential wisdom of those with lived experience in addressing the issues that confront them, including project/facility design, policy development, and expanding opportunities for employment. The Skid Row that I know is wise, caring, vibrant, and resilient. Our unhoused neighbors are powerful advocates for long-term community change, safety, and recovery from addiction and mental illness. We must continue to ask ourselves what we can do with them and not for them.

Charles Porter is the Prevention Coordinator for United Coalition East Prevention Project, a program of Social Model Recovery Systems. His efforts are also focused on expanding neighborhood wellness and safety by connecting grassroots vision/approaches to needed resources.

Extrabl.a.tt No5

27

ARTISTS 2019 FESTIVAL FOR ALL SKID ROW ARTISTS The 10th Festival for all Skid Row Artists took place on October 26 & 27, 2019 in Gladys Park, Los Angeles.

Say What! TENth Annual –can you believe it! How Time Flies! How a community vitally sustains itself! You better believe it!

Here is the Artist List of 2019

GARY ANDERSON YVONNE MICHELLE AUTRY STEPHANIE BELL GARY BROWN WALTER FEARS AUSTIN HINES LEE MAUPIN MATT MIYAHARA PATTI BERMAN KANIAH CHAPMAN ANDREW KANG UNKAL BEAN CHELLA COLEMAN CLANCEY CORNEL MIKE MAHANEY CHARLES PORTER LYRICAL STORM LEEAV SOFER MACK FLOYD KEITH JOHNSON ALFI A. PRICE BROTHER JOSEPH WARREN GERALD ALEXANDER KALEB HAVENS CRUSHOW HERRING JAMES NEWMAN MARK PHILLIPS OLUSHEYI BANJO RITA BARRER JAMES BIRDSONG BLAC BLOSSOM JEFF CHILDS

TIFFANY CHUNG DARRELL DENNIS MARCEL DEVON SALVADOR DILLANUEVA DARIUS DOBSON FRANCE EMMANUEL STEPHEN FOLDS CAROL GERARD OSCAR E. GOMEZ VIJAY GUPTA LARONDA HARTFIELD DANIE HILL MATT HORNS MARY JACOBS L JONES DARNELL KILLBURN ESSILFIE KOBI ART LOPEZ DANIEL MARTINEZ LEYLA MARTINEZ WILLIAM MAYS PERAL MERD BRITTANEE MICHELLE BRENT W. MILLER REBECCA MOLINERE LOVE ONE REGINA "CLOUIS" PATTERSON CASSIUS PAXTON ALICE PING DIANE PROZELLER RAYMOND RIDENFS [SP?] BIBI ROSALIA

Crushow Herring, aka Showzart is a virtuoso artist born in Kansas City, MO, where he first attributes his passion for community and making a difference to his mother, Sherita J. Herring of the Kreative Images Foundation; in which she instilled early in his life that it’s important to inspire and support others.Secondly, he credits his father Gerrie E. Herring, also an artist, with his illustrative abilities. Actively working from the streets of Skid Row in Downtown LA, to sitting in the boardrooms of City Hall, Crushow has consistently been instrumental in fighting for equal rights for everyone and creating programs and services that aid not only the disenfranchised but creates opportunities for all races, religions, and nationalities.

See p. 13

A PROJECT OF

MARIA ROSAS DIEGO RUVALCABA CHARLES SCHIAVO DUSTIN SEO SARAH SIMMONS OLIVIA ST. JOHN TAR ADRIAN TUMAGE DEARLINE VICTORIA MICHEAL – WATERMAN HUBMAN DEMETRA WILSON KENNEDY WROSE DEVON FUSIONA TBONE ELZIE ALEXANDER GERALDO DIAZ MYSON CARNES GERALDINE HUGHES THOMAS EVANS KENNEDY WROSE BOBBY BUCK EMANUEL-OG MAN-COMPITO ANGELINA HARPER CHARLES JACKSON MELVIN JOHNSON RICCARLO PORTER ANTHONY E. STALLWORTH QUEEN MAMA TABIA ANTHONY TAYLOR LEILANI (SASHAE) ZACKERY

Fabian Debora was mentored by many Chicano artists and muralists and was introduced to creative expressions of all forms, from graffiti and murals to sketching and fine art painting. He has served as a counselor and the Director of Substance Abuses Services & Programming as well as a mentor at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles for a decade, as Community Connection Director at Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network. He is currently a teaching artist for ACTA Alliance of traditional Arts; bringing the arts to adult correctional facilities, and leading Somos LA Arte- Homeboy art academy perusing and developing his vision to continue to serve the greater Los Angeles area and abroad.

See p. 16

IN COOPERATION WITH

NIGIN BECK, REALITY IS NORTH, FAKE HOPES ARE EAST, EMPTY DREAMS ARE WEST, WE ARE SOUTH (2019)

“I

’m a born wanderer,” says photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi, “I wander the streets, observe people and capture what I see in my photography.” Photography especially has a way of bringing to light that which had previously gone unseen. After introducing himself to workshop participants at Savvy Contemporary, Akinbiyi led a walking tour through Berlin’s African Quarter, in Wedding. As we roamed the streets with our guide, Akinbiyi identified the relics of Germany’s colonial past standing silently in their modern surroundings.

“I expected something more exotic...” says one of the workshop participants in a round of reflections the next morning. But the origins of the neighborhood are not so foreign, in fact they’re definitely German. “To call it the ‘African Quarter’ - or Afrikanisches Viertel - is the wrong terminology,” says Mnyaka Sururu Mboro, cofounder of Berlin Postkolonial, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. “The terminology which really says what it is, is: Colonial Quarter”. In the early 1900s, German animal collector Carl Hagenbeck envisioned the African Quarter as a zoo, housing not only animals but also humans, exhibited in ethnological expositions, otherwise known as ‘Völkerschauen’.1 The streets were named after German colonists and African countries and, although the zoo was never realized, the names remain to this day. Relics of European colonial practices and attitudes are not always immediately visible, but when they become apparent they are, more often than not, hidden in plain sight.2 Colonialism hasn’t disappeared, it’s just changed forms.

The artificial hierarchy of “us” and “them” is wearing a new disguise. Continuities and relics of colonial pasts are as plentiful as they are overlooked, resulting in a cultural amnesia that gets neatly depoliticized and tucked away behind a sense of European cultural superiority and buried deep in the foundations of our day-to-day. If a critical reappraisal of the past is needed to better understand the conditions of the present, then what role do cultural institutions play?

As facilitators of history, culture and social values, our cultural institutions have a responsibility to respond to and address postcolonial discourses in a reflexive and nuanced manner.

Berlin’s postcolonial projects have been gaining momentum in recent years. Activist organizations like Berlin Postkolonial have sought to change the street names of the African Quarter in an attempt to rethink the histories we choose to honor and uphold.3 A precedent was set in 2010 when Kreuzberg’s Gröbenufer was changed to MayAyim-Üfer to honor the Afro-German activist and poet rather than a colonial slave trader. The change was meant to represent Berlin as a city that honors resistance to racist violence, rather than the perpetrators.

The controversial Humboldt Forum in Berlin Mitte, scheduled to open in September this year, has sparked a heated debate about the role of postcolonial discourses in cultural institutions. At a cost of more than €600M for the construction of a symbolic facsimile of an imperial palace, the forum is to become the new home for the collections of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and Museum of Asian Art. In addition, it will house several hundred artifacts of questionable provenance, namely human remains from the victims of genocide and

HANNAH HÖCH, OHNE TITEL (AUS EINEM ETHNOGRAPHISCHEN MUSEUM) (1929)

THE IMPERIAL MUSEUM Colonialism has changed forms, disguising the artificial hierarchy of “us” and “them”

by C H R I S PA X T O N

a collection of Benin Bronzes which were looted in 1897 by British imperial troops and sold to collectors.4 “I want to know how much blood is dripping from each artwork” In 2017, Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy publicly left the scientific advisory board of the Humboldt Forum, claiming that the forum was ill prepared to carry out the necessary research to establish provenance.

“Without this research no Humboldt Forum and no ethnological Museum should open”, said Savoy in ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • FEBRUARY 2020

2017. Her dramatic exit caused a public firestorm of resistance from academics and experts, leading to questions of who really has the authority and power to “explain the world to the world”, as the forum’s mission states.

In 1883, Adolf Lüdernitz, for whom the African Quarter’s Lüdernitzstraße is still named, purchased land under false pretences from the Nama people in present-day Namibia, laying the groundwork for the colonization of German South West Africa.

In 1904, the Nama and Herero people revolted against German troops but were brutally crushed.

30

AKINBODE AKINBIYI, BERLIN, WEDDING (2005)

Survivors were forced into the desert to starve or die of dehydration, while others were worked to death in concentration camps. It's estimated that up to 100,000 Nama and Herero were killed in what scholars consider to be first genocide of the 20th century. The skulls of the victims were brought back to Germany and donated to Charitè for racial research in an attempt to scientifically prove white supremacy, a notable foundation for Nazi ideology.

Although Germany has never officially apologized for the genocide, some of the remains were returned in 2018 to Namibia. Similarly, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro has called on the Humboldt Forum to return the skulls of people executed by German troops in Tanzania. Many scholars have additionally proposed the return of stolen artworks and slowly governments are starting to take note.5 Just last year, France pledged to return artifacts stolen from Benin in the 19th century in addition to a €20M loan for the construction of a museum to showcase the resituted items.

Whether through the renaming, reassessment, or restitution of collections, the project of decolonizing cultural institutions is not historical revisionism or an anachronistic imposition of contemporary morality but rather an inquisition of the cultural memory we choose to commemorate. The events that occurred during Europe’s “scramble for

Africa” did in fact happen, and the resulting trauma of invasion, occupation and apportion of Africa’s people and resources should never be forgotten.

The assumed right of European institutions to display and represent African cultural heritage undermines the agency of self-representation of these diverse cultures, something always afforded to (white, cis-het, able-bodied and male) Europeans. In much the same way as the ethnographic expositions of the early 20th century, today’s European cultural institutions continue to mediate other cultures from a position of expertise rooted in a history of violent domination, subjugation and control. For these reasons, the existence of institutions like the Humboldt Forum must be intensely scrutinized if we are to find more equitable models of cultural mediation.

Returning for the workshop with Akinbiyi, we visited his photography exhibition “Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air” at the Martin Gropius Bau. In a room dedicated to the African Quarter, street names are brought back into focus through his discerning lens, revealing the subtle, yet daily encounters between Berlin’s African diaspora and Germany’s colonial past. At the entrance of the exhibition stands a photograph of curator Okwui Enwezor († March 2019), whose career-long focus ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

on postcolonial perspectives through the creation of discursive public platforms provides a potential way forward in unpacking the complex emanations of colonialism.6 Our cultural institutions have a responsibility to engage seriously with discourses of power and representation. Once this happens, maybe then we can finally begin to exhume the sediments of colonialism from our cultural foundations and lay out a level groundwork for a future rooted in mutual respect and solidarity.

1 A hugely popular and commonplace exhibition practice at the turn of the 20th century, ethnological expositions were meant to showcase people in their “natural” environment and could be found in nearly every major city across Europe and North America. For case studies see: Sarah Baartmann, Ota Benga, or more recently, the 2005 African village controversy at the Augsburg Zoo. 2 Interestingly enough Edeka, a popular German grocery chain, takes its name from the abbreviation “EdK”, short for “Einkaufsgenossenschaften deutscher Kolonialwaren” (EN: “German Colonial Buying Cooperative”) 3 See also: No Humboldt 21, No Amnesty on Genocide, Urban Narratives and the podcast Decolonization in Action.

4 Lars-Christian Koch, director of collections of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin at the Humboldt Forum has said the Benin Bronzes are planned to be returned to Benin in the form of a temporary loan.

5 See: Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy, Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, 2018. http://restitutionreport2018.com/ sarr_savoy_en.pdf 6 See: Documenta 11 and the 2015 Venice Biennale, both curated by Enwezor.

CHRIS PAXTON is an artist and curator living in Berlin. His work focuses on mediation strategies in arts and cultural institutions.

TIME

CAPITAL

&

ITS LIMIT

playlist by JA M E S G I N Z B U R G THIS PLAYLIST contextualises a set of music that comes from or draws upon traditions that evoke, explore and express a transcendent movement from mundane time into sacred time (or atemporality). The playlist is framed by two works that examine the anthropogenic-industrial imposition onto environmental and ecological time-frames â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an imposition that threaten the survival of the species and, consequently, its historical timeline, while extending the consequences into a supra-human timeline: a mimicry of transcendence.

1. Ecker and Meulyzer - Melting Refuge - Carbon This piece by Belgian composers Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer was recorded on the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard in and around the Svalbard seed vault, set up to preserve the genes of a wide variety of plants critical for agriculture, which is now under existential threat from rising global temperatures that are rapidly melting the permafrost that naturally cools the vault.

2. Catherine Christer Hennix - Blues Alif Lam Mim In the Mode Of Rag Infinity/ Rag Cosmosis

C C Hennix is a Swedish composer and mathematician whose work subverts temporality by creating long durational pieces that evoke the endless dynamism of the present.

3. Laraaji - I am Sky - Celestial Music 1978-2011 Laraaji is a New-York-based mystic and musician whose musical work and spiritual practice are indistinguishable. He has both worked within the commercial music industry via his release "Day of Radiance" release on Brian Eno's ambient series in 1980, as well as selling huge volumes of home-recorded musicians directly during street performances.

4. Madjid Khaladj - Hayy / the Living - Anthology of Iranian Rhythms, Volume 2, daf (mystical drum)

Madjid Khaladj, a master of Iranian percussion, performs a piece on the Daf drum, an instrument with religious and ritual significance throughout the middle east.

5. Ellen Arkbro - CHORDS for Guitar - CHORDS Ellen Arkbro is a Swedish composer whose interest in "harmonic music," or music that is composed focused on precise relationships between perfect intervals that invert linear causal listening, creates an immediate experience of sound as atemporal architecture.

6. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Allah Hoo - Qawaali Masters Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a musician and singer of Qawwali, a form of Sufi devotional music, and a member of the Patiala Gharana extending an unbroken chain of masters of vocal Hindustani classical music to over 600 years.

7. J. S. Bach - Art of Fugue - Contrapunctus I - Glenn Gould Bach's Contrapunctus I performed by Glenn Gould is a piece of music that is both in motion and static.

8. UCC Harlo - Ceres - United UCC Harlo is a project by composer and academic Annie Garlid who is a classically trained vocalist and viola player, as well as being active in Berlin's electronic music scene. Her music is a dreamlike reimagining and transmission of her deep relationship to baroque music fused with her immersion in electronic club music, creating a personal abstract grammar that she could communicate her experiences through.

9. Bwiti Harpist, singers - Harp Song of the Road of Death and Destruction (2)

- Music from an Equatorial Microcosm Music from the Bwiti spiritual discipline originating from Gabon and Cameroon that takes a central part in the rites of the tradition. The music serves both a religious function and as a means towards the resolution of personal pathological problems and an agent of social cohesion.

10. emptyset - Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station - Snowdonia, Wales 17.12.12 - Material The final track is one of my own works made in collaboration with Paul Purgas as "emptyset," that was recorded in a Welsh nuclear power plant that was in the process of being decommissioned, a process that will ultimately take one hundred years, while the nuclear waste will need to be stored safely for ten thousand years. The power plant, located in Snowdonia national park, only produced electricity for twenty-six years.

JAMES GINZBURG is a British-American artist, musician and writer based in Berlin.

He is one half of the project Emptyset and runs the experimental record label Subtext Recordings.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 â&#x20AC;˘ FEBRUARY 2020

DISPATCHES

AROUND THE INDIAN GATE OF

32

SAHEEN BAGH

T

he following essays by Santhosh S. and Skye Arundhati Thomas offer two perspectives on recent political events in India: the protest against the legislation of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the violent Hindu nationalist anti-Muslim pogroms, which followed. Both pieces shed light on the urgency and steadfastness of the protest movement as well as their inventive and hopeful acts of solidarity. In the weeks since these texts were written COVID-19 has reached India, sparking fears that the Hindunationalist government and its proxies will use the pandemic as an excuse to further erode democratic checks and balances and further fuel anti-Muslim sentiment. - Boaz Levin

Take Your Freedom

by Skye Arundhati Thomas

"Ye lo Azadi”, a lone shooter exclaimed after opening fire at an unarmed, peaceful, protest outside of the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi on January 30, a month into 2020. The phrase, which translates from Hindi to “Here, take your freedom”, was a pointed attack, with a chilling implication when accompanied by the shooter’s loaded gun. Since early December 2019, people of different faiths, generations, castes and classes, from over a hundred Indian cities and towns, have taken to the streets—daily, or at 24/7 sit-ins. They have been actively protesting two new discriminatory and Islamophobic citizenship laws and a revised national population register. In a country where many citizens are undocumented, these new laws—which require a host of documents to prove citizenship—are effectively an act of war.

beating them hard and without respite, hauling them out of their seats. This brutality was a clumsy response to the impetus the nationwide protests were gathering. Despite it being over a month since the footage was released, no arrests have been made. This is symptomatic of a corrupt, bungling judiciary, which regardless boasts of facial recognition software being used to arrest agitators of violence. Many attackers are clearly identifiable in the footage, and yet they still roam free.

This state-sanctioned violence has continued to intensify. At the end of February, for over four days, unrestrained mobs attacked Muslim neighbourhoods in North-East New Delhi. Muslim homes, businesses and mosques were set on fire, and Muslim residents were pulled to the streets and beaten, burned alive or lynched. More than 40 people were reported to have been killed, including an 85 year-old woman who had survived the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The police, who broke CCTV cameras and taunted injured Muslims, wholly abetted the mob. It is important to call this violence a pogrom, and not a riot or a clash. A single religion was targeted; mobs were allowed to act as violently and brutally as they pleased, while the police aided their actions. The pogrom coincided with President Donald Trump’s lavishly prepared state visit to India, where he was famously served Wild Atlantic Salmon fish tikkas, but no beef (which has been banned in many states in India on religious grounds by the BJP).

“How we feel about the news should not just be reactive—it should be strategic”, wrote writer Raghu Karnad on social media recently, in defense of hope. For this, we must turn to the protests. The protestors—labeled as “anti-national agitators” by the right-leaning media—are united in a way that is unprecedented in a country with a history of brutal, immediate violence in response to instigations along religious divisions. At one of the early demonstrations on a December afternoon in Mumbai, Hindus held hands to form a wall protecting a group of Muslims offering prayer. The protests are a social collaboration that inherently critiques the nation-state: they show how borders and body politics are emotional structures of community, not just abstract legal frameworks that may be manipulated to suit political agendas. In protesting we are defending our right to love and to care — our right to community. We take to the streets despite threats of detention, despite the facial recognition software and the military surveillance, despite the tear gas and rubber bullets. We do it by knowing we are a living, breathing history and agreeing, together, that nothing can ever be the same again.

SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS is a writer based in Mumbai. She is contributing editor at The White Review.

At the protests, which have come to be powerful gatherings of community, resilience and friendship, crowds light candles and chant slogans that are now a part of everyday conversation: We will seize it, what you won’t give us, we will have it, it is our right, it’s more beloved than life, our beloved— Azadi. Azadi is a Persian-Urdu word for freedom, long associated with the independence movement of Kashmir, whose military occupation was further compounded in August 2019 when the Indian Home Minister, Amit Shah, deployed 30,000 additional military troops into the region and arrested many prominent Kashmiri leaders. New bills were passed in the courts that stripped Kashmir of its autonomy. Roads were sealed off, telephone wires cut. The territory was put under curfew and the Internet shut down for seven long months, in what has been the longest Internet shutdown imposed in any democracy. The national call for Azadi is a reminder of the protests that are forbidden in Kashmir, as much as it is a mark of the united opposition against the Hindu-supremacist ruling central government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Photo Courtesy of Santhosh S.

In equating his bullets to the "Azadi" protesters have been rallying for, the Jamia Millia shooter’s words shockingly normalised the escalating violence that has been used against protestors, and against Muslims, especially in New Delhi. The shooter, who later claimed to be a minor, managed to hit a student in the hand. Two images went viral from the scene: the first of a large group of policemen simply standing by, their arms folded, as the shooter charged at the crowd, and the second of the injured student having to climb tall barricades to exit the protest and find medical help, unassisted by any police personnel.

Just over two weeks after the incident, on 16 February 2020, CCTV footage was released from Jamia Millia of police entering a campus library on 15 December 2019 in full riot gear, armed with fiberglass and wooden batons.

They charged at students that were quietly reading or finishing coursework: ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

A Case for Precarious Monuments

by Santhosh S.

33

On December 15, 2019, the Delhi police unleashed brutal violence inside the Jamia Millia Islamia university campus as a crackdown against students who were protesting the repressive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that was recently legislated by the Government of India. In response to the police atrocities, protests erupted across various parts of India.

One protest camp was set up that very night right in the middle of one of the major highways that connects commercial hub Noida (in neighboring state Uttar Pradesh) with Delhi, nearly three kilometers away from the JMI campus, in Shaheen Bagh. Ongoing for nearly a hundred days, the protest has been primarily organized and led by Muslim women, sustaining their will-tobecoming-political-of-the-world, withstanding extreme weather conditions, and the severely hostile conditions produced by government mechanisms along with physical intimidations and threats from Right-wing political groups. This note, then, is also an attempt to trace the emergence of a politics of interjection—of creative, critical, and bodily responses.

With its ever-evolving morphology, the protest site at Shaheen Bagh resists existing architectures of political imagination. In the terms of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, it is an aesthetical moment, producing unforeseen possibilities of the division of knowledge. Shaheen Bagh is an interference in the order of sensible experience, bringing social positions, tastes, attitudes, knowledges, and illusions into correspondence. Exceeding many recent political formations, actions, and events, it opens up the creative moment of politics.

At Shaheen Bagh artistic production has continuously transformed the nonspace of the middle of a highway into a heterotopia of articulative as well as phatic and ineffable expressions. The unconcealment of the potential of these spaces is worked out through acts of renaming, reclaiming, transforming. The logical stability of statist distribution is upstaged through a tactical redeployment of the mimetic potential of the sensorial. This is evident, for instance, in the way in which India Gate (a war memorial and popular tourist destination today) has been recreated twice at Shaheen Bagh. Reproducing the visible/affective traces of the original monument, and the way in which the structure has acquired a new monumentality despite its irresolute character and con-temporariness, marks it as a memorial to precarity—of the everyday lives of the citizenry.

On the contrary, the protest site at Shaheen Bagh necessitates the expansion, deformation, and contraction of this spatio-temporal logic. A politics premised on anti-mimetic repetition is central to the heterotopic spatial and temporal dimension and dynamics of the site. On the one hand, it addresses the border politics of the nation and its symbolic economy, and on the other, it enhances the porousness of borders by unconcealing the inherent precarity of any monument. This precarity is evidentially present in the very actualization of the monumentality of the ‘India Gate of Shaheen Bagh.’

This moment marks an epistemological mutation wherein, as Michel Foucault has written, “history has altered its position in relation to the document”. This is crucial as the entire political movement is a resistance against the state’s attempt to reduce the heterogeneity of human existence into the evidentiary logic of the document.

The theatricality of this documentary universe of nationalist desire which is premised upon archival, museological, and conservationist logics that constitute the symbolic life of our national belonging, is reversed through the reclamation of the precarity and mobility of the monument itself. In that sense, it also marks a peculiar historical moment wherein a new relationship of the document and monument has emerged. This ‘mutation’ is especially important because, rather than merely placing all of the historical weight onto the domains of the empirical and the transcendental, it brings forth the contingencies of history into prominence.

The author would like to thank Sneha Ragavan, Shveta Sarda, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Bhagwati Prasad for their camaraderie, conversations, interjections, and the collective experience that formed the building blocks of this note.

1 Jacques Rancière, “Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge.” Parrhesia 1.1 (2006), P.6.

2 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, pp. 11.

3 For a more elaborate discussion, see ‘Politics as Pedagogy’, in e-flux Architecture, volume on Architectures of Education, March 2020.

4 Foucault, 1972, pp. 6.

Santhosh S. is a cultural theorist based in New Delhi, India. He teaches at the School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi. Drawing on his training in art history, his work critically examines the structural dynamics of the institutionalization of culture from a minoritarian perspective.

He often writes on contemporary cultural politics in India, with an emphasis on deconstructing technologies of visuality and the affective dimensions of the political.

This statist monument was reproduced twice. In the first instance, the resemblance was achieved mostly in terms of the basic architectural structure and form. It carried the names of martyrs of the anti-CAA protests across India, in scribbles and scrawls. And then this monument, rebuilt by a group of artists, grew as a ‘site within site’ to become the ‘India Gate of Shaheen Bagh.’ This version of the monument was not only more accurate in terms of formal and structural approximation, but also in capturing the tactile quality of the monument in terms of its density and materiality. This artistic act of replicating and approximating the monument very soon became a rallying point for people in/visiting the protest site. It embraces the anonymity of the secondary but pushes it to an extreme, turning the generic into the imperceptible, and the clichéd into the collective, because of which we encounter an “epistemological mutation.”

Photo Courtesy of Santhosh S.

This aspect of multiple forms of repetition is a recurring phenomenon at Shaheen Bagh. For instance, walking into the protest site, one encounters people rehearsing the art of sloganeering, and witness that the topology of rehearsing itself is the creative moment of the protest. They are acts of spontaneous extensions, de-formations, and re-inventions. There are aspects of repetition, but they defy the protocols of mimesis. Here to repeat something is to begin again, to renew, to question, and to refuse remaining the same. The reclamation of political symbols of national importance, the re-citation of revolutionary idioms, the re-distribution of the word aazadi (“freedom”), and so on, only exist within this specific context.

This site has made amenable to the senses not only the inherent insularity of liberal utopias and their confining logic of the ‘politics of the possible’ but also the normativity that such political movements produce in terms of spatial imaginations. Popular and designated protest sites in New Delhi such as Jantar Mantar, Mandi House, India Gate, and so on, are classical examples of these liberal utopias where our desire to being political is ‘actualised’ through a spatio-temporal capsuling of participation.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

34 KOCAMAN KESKiN BiR ÇELiSKi

by D i D E M YA Z I C I

S

anat ve kültür endüstrisinde çalışmak, çoğunlukla ucu açık, belirsiz ve kısa süreli kontratlar üzerinden yürüdüğü için temelde geçim sıkıntısı olmayan, eğitimli-kentsoylu sınıfın içinde dönen bir meslek alanı olarak görülmüyor mu? Biliyoruz ki müzeler, sanat kurumları, galeriler, dergiler, sergiler, bienaller, festivaller ve geçiçi projelerde, çalışma alanları kısıtlı, iş şartları zorlayıcı ve üst kademe yönetici değilseniz ödenen ücretler düşük.

Eğer ki sanatın eleştirel ve dönüştürücü gücüne gönülden inandıysanız ve başka türlü yaşayamayacağınıza kararlıysanız, ister burjuva, ister orta sınıf isterse işçi sınıfından olun, sanata duyduğunuz tutku işvereniniz tarafından istismar edilmeye müsaittir. Dünya görüşünüzün merkezinde olan sanat tutkusu, size hayatınızı devam ettirme gücü verse de öte yandan sizi savunmasız ve güçsüz hale getirebilir. Nasılsa sizin için önceliğin maddi ve manevi doyum değil, hayatı idame ettirmek ve sanata olan inancınız olduğuna karar verilmiştir. Bu yargı o kadar yaygın ki, haklarınızı arayacak olduğunuzda inandırıcı duyulan fakat özünde geçerliliği olmayan argümanlar dinlersiniz. Verilen temel mesaj, işiniz olduğu için şükretmeniz gerektiği, daha iyi çalışma koşulları arayanların bu sektörden bihaber olduğudur. Son dakika verilen ve istenilen vakitte tamamlanması imkansıza yakın görevler, yoğun baskı altında çalışma atmosferi, her güne yeni bir kriz, yolunda gitmeyen en ufak bir durumda çalışanların suçlanması, motivasyon yerine suçluluk duygusu pompalama, duygusal taciz, mobbing, nasıl olsa bu işe mecbur varsayımı ile çalışanların KASRA RAHMANIAN, KOCAMAN KESKiN BiR ÇELiŞKi (2020)

istismarı, psikolojik baskı ve manipülasyon ile hakların ve özgürlüklerin yok sayılması, ne tatil ne de ücret olarak geri dönen fazla mesai, diğer bir deyişle modern köleliğin farklı uygulamaları ve sanki bunların hepsi normalmiş gibi kurulan bir çalışma biçimi... İster köklü bir sanat kurumu ister bağımsız bir sergi projesi ya da bir sanatçı atölyesi ya da grubu olsun, emek sömürüsü en beklenmedik anlarda ortaya çıkabiliyor. Söylem ve pratiğe bakınca siyasi, çevre ve feminist bilinci yüksek, temel insan haklarına duyarlı, her türlü ayrımcılığa - ırkçılık, cinsiyetçilik, homofobi, transfobi, sınıfçılık, yaşçılık, yabancı düşmanlığı ve engelli ayrımcılığı karşıtı olarak görünenler aslında içten içe hiyerarşik güç yanlısı eğiliminde olabiliyor. Otoriter ve maskülen olmanın marifet sayıldığı dünyada benmerkezci davranmanı güçlü olma anlamına geldiği yanılgısı var. Sözde sosyo-politik hassasiyetle sergiler yapan, kendini insancıl, açık görüşlü, eleştirel olarak tanımlayan birinin gündelik hayatta aldığı kararlar, birlikte çalıştığı insanlara karşı küstah ve ezici davranış biçimi, bütçelendirirken öncelikleri ve emekçi gözetmemesi, tüm bunların hepsini tek tek bakınca kocaman keskin bir çelişki beliriyor. Çelişkilerden beslenen esnek düşünceler gibi değil, birbirinden bütünüyle zıt ideolojik ve eylemsel bir tutarsızlık gibi. İçselleştirilememiş ve sadece sanatsal ya da küratöryel tavır adına araçsallaştırılmış bu sözde siyasi bilincin maskesi ne kadar dayanır? Bağımsız ya da kurumsal, böyle biriyle çalıştıysanız, işin iç yüzünü bilmenin ama bunu dışarı yansıtıp yansıtmamanın etik soruları ve ikilemi doğar. Üstelik buna benzer kişilerle çalıştıkça, yapının içine girdikçe ve ister istemez parçası oldukça, eziyetin normalize olduğu şartlara giderek uyum sağlama tehlikesi belirir. Sağlıksız çalışma ortamı ve iletişim koşullarına dayanmak için ister istemez daha hızlı, az dinleyen, dikkatsiz, biraz ruhsuz, hoyrat ve farkında bile olmadan güç ve iş düşkünü bir rolün içine düşüverirsiniz.

Sistemin ikiyüzlülüğü ve samimiyetsizliği kendine yabancılaşan, çalıştığı koşullardan memnun olmayan çalışanlar üretiyor. Bu çarpıklığı destekleyen ve karar verme yetkisi olan insanlar benzer karakteristiklerde buluşuyor. Kim bunlar? Biz kendimizi bu filtrelerle nasıl sorgulayabiliriz?

Gözlemlediğim kadarıyla ‘zehirli insanlar’ aslında genellikle kendileri etrafında dönen monologlardan besleniyor. Sempati duygusu uyandırmak için kendi sorunlarını abartarak ve hatta acındırarak dillendiriyorlar. Bu tek taraflı bir iletişim stratejisi. Eleştiriye hiç açık değiller. Başkaları hakkında konuştuklarında çoğunlukla alaycı ve yeren ifadeler kullanırlar. Kendi perspektifleri dışından bakmayı sevmezler. Her bireyin kendi perspektifi olduğunu bir kenara koyup, sanki herkes her şeyi onların penceresinden baktığını farzederler. Kendi görüşlerini sorgulanamaz gerçekmiş gibi konumlandırılır. Kimi zaman açık açık kimi zamansa gizlice kendi görüşlerini dikte ederler. Empati yetenekleri çok düşüktür. Şüpheci ve tedirgindirler.

Kendilerini vazgeçilmez sanırlar. Ne zaman onları kendileriyle yüzleştiren bir durum olsa, sadece kısa süreli ruhsal çöküntü yaşarlar. Emek sömürüsünü ve saygısızlığı kendine hak gören bu insanları iyileştirmek elbette çalışanlarının görevi değildir.

Sessiz kalmak işe yaramaz. Ne pahasına olursa olsun yaşanan deneyimleri söz ve eyleme dökmek özgürleştirir. Siyahi, lezbiyen, anne, savaşçı ve şair Audre Lorde (1934-92) sessizliğin insanı koruyamayacağına inanır. Bir sonuç cümlesi yerine Lorde’un yazı, konuşma ve şiirlerinin derlendiği Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Sessizliğin Seni Korumayacak) kitabından, The Transformation of Silence (Sessizliğin Dönüşümü) adlı konuşmasından bir alıntı: “Henüz sahip olmadığınız sözcükler hangileri? Söyleme ihtiyacı duyduğunuz şey ne? Günden güne sineye çektiğiniz ve giderek kendinize ait olan, usandığınız ve sizi sessizlik içinde öldüren zulüm ne? Belki de bugün aranızdan birileri için korkunun yüzü olabilirim. Kadın olduğum için, siyahi olduğum için, lezbiyen olduğum için, kendim olduğum için – işini yapan siyah savaşçı şair size sormaya geldi, siz kendinize düşeni yapıyor musunuz?”

DiDEM YAZICI is an independent curator and writer based in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her curatorial work is inspired by thinking across disciplines in and outside of art, the potentiality of exhibitions as sociopoetic spaces, the legacy of intersectional feminism and globalexhibition histories. She earned her B.A. in Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul (2008) and an M.A. in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt (2012).

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

35 LAMENTS FROM A SALTED CORPSE

by N I E L S B E T O R I D I E H L & B A R B A R A K . P R O KO P

T

he impulse to annihilate anyone acting in disregard of the ever-shifting conventions of pseudo-progressive decorum—that which we call cancel culture—started to be openly addressed in art world circles only once it became clear that even those saying all the right things and reading all the right books from the right bookstores would not be safe any longer. But cancel culture is nothing new. Its current theatrical manifestations are only the peak of a fermentation process set off by a generalised sense of impotence and despair, an emptiness perceived, which however remains largely unaddressed.

Vast swaths of what used to be a truly diverse and impenetrably intricate system of thought have disappeared behind thick fog. For those old enough to be able to think back to a fairly recent past, today’s art world must appear like a tedious, scorched planet, which one navigates out of habit. In droves, artists seem to have vanished, together with the objects of their enquiry. But neither did they die nor did they stop making art, nor has their work necessarily regressed to the point of becoming undeserving of any attention: it simply doesn’t lend itself to being retroactively embellished with the necessary identitarian pathos and the usual grievances du jour.

Curatorial efforts at establishing a dialogue between works produced only one or two decades ago with more contemporary works promptly result in failed attempts at harmonising two distinct disciplines: art before and after its forceful “compensatory functionalization [...] into an instrument of the practical-political realization of utopia”, as Juliane Rebentisch has aptly put it.1 The quality of a work of art is now determined solely on the basis of its compatibility with current discourses.

Unless young artists are addressing the limited range of issues deemed relevant, they are cancelled before their careers even start. For this erasure, no one in particular is to blame. It is the result of a long process of colonisation of every sphere of intellectual life by ideology.

The destruction of what used to be an exciting, intellectually diverse and deviant place for experimentation is almost complete. Art is now— more than any other field of cultural production—a catalyst for mediocrity, something you are comfortable with only if you are able to directly profit from it. It is not surprising that within such a highly toxic environment, people would recur to a sublimated form of violence such as cancel culture.

It represents the last permissible excitement left, the last thrill, the last hardcore thing to do. Equally unsurprising is the fact that resistance to cancel culture and its motives is conveniently shrouded in a nimbus of right-wingery, so that its disgraced

victims are additionally muzzled in their protest by fear of being stamped as “free-speecher” bigots.

The hegemony of an anti-intellectual monoculture that has allowed for censorship and self-censorship to become the norm has caused irreparable damage. Art’s degradation to a didactic tool for the dissemination of academia-driven obsessions over identity has left nothing but an eviscerated, mummifying carcass on which nothing can grow.

It would almost come as a relief if cancel culture were motivated solely by personal vendetta or the desire to clean the field of competitors in an overcrowded

Communist Party, to the neo-Leninist and workerist Autonomia and to the optimism of the ageing sixtyeighters. Their ante-litteram social media platforms were free radio stations broadcasting phone-ins from ordinary people, while montages of newspaper clippings were used to “spread false news that produce real events”2, functioning like Dadaistic memes. Their mockery of serious militancy and their opposition to any ideological system, fuelled by the old anarchist adage ‘‘A laughter that will bury you all’’, makes them the innocent precursors to today’s 4chan trolls—the target of their disparaging sarcasm being ultimately the same.

As Richard Rorty already noted in 1998, the adherents of the modern Left “have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to the public debate.”3 The old anti-authoritarian, libertarian and hedonistic Left has emerged as the main casualty of the primacy of this punitive and identitarian cultural Left, and is therefore virtually absent from today’s culture wars.

With the citizens of almost every Western country increasingly turning towards rightwing populism, it seems high time for a reckoning.

This is why the radicalisation of cancel culture comes as a blessing in disguise: the fact that it will not be stopped anytime soon is irrelevant, since things actually have to get much worse in order for a different culture to emerge, and for that culture to be embraced by more and more disgruntled and damaged dissidents. Fighting cancel culture means ridiculing its puritanism relentlessly, KASRA RAHMANIAN, LAMENTS FROM A SALTED CORPSE (2020) triggering ever more unhinged reactions and market. Although it can be very effectively weaponised relying on the revelatory potential of its escalating to remove the undesired from positions of power madness. Change will only be accomplished through or to strip them of their status, the main driver of implosion. The coming insurrection will see an cancel culture is ideological hysteria, not careerist alliance of unlikely fellows, an anti-ideological opportunism—which makes for a much darker leaderless movement operating with unrestrained scenario. Most willing executioners of cancel culture and joyously unapologetic ferocity. must be seen as victims of their own ideology, not as enemies. Little to no real agency is to be found The future belongs to those who’ll dance on graves. in cancel culture, just intimidated conformists following their authoritarian instincts, anxious to fall into line. The most rabid representatives of cancel 1 Juliane Rebentisch, Realism Today: Art, Politics, and the Critique culture can be easily made out, but a large, rather of Representation, 2010, https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/realism-topassive mob tags along with feverish zeal. Since day-art-politics-and-the-critique-of-representation-2231 there is no outside within this hell of boredom that 2 Patrick Cuninghame, ‘‘A laughter that will bury you all’’: Irony as proand language as struggle in the Italian 1977 movement, 2007, art has become, the place of real agency can only test https://libcom.org/history/laughter-will-bury-you-all-irony-protestexist beyond these circles of compulsive conformity. language-struggle-italian-1977-movement-1 Twenty years before the internet took off, a loose amalgam of marginalised youth known as the “Metropolitan Indians” shook Italian society in 1977, with their radical challenge to the austere, humourless authoritarianism of the Italian ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

3 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 1998 NBDBKP are NIELS BETORI DIEHL and BARBARA K. PROKOP. Not everything they do is art, but everything they do is influenced by the way they think as artists. They work together because they have found fighting and disagreeing to be productive. Their practice is a critical practice based on constant reexamination and readjustment.

It is understood as an ongoing exercise in dismantling consensus.

NBDBKP stays outside the glass house because it has become unlivable. When they throw stones, it is just to let some fresh air in.

36 SPRICH NICHT MIT FEINDEN. UNTERWERFE SIE. von K L AU S S P E I D E L

L

ikes, Sterne, Herzchen: Während unterschiedlichste, auch ganz neue Formen der Beurteilung weltweit in allen Bereichen massiv zum Einsatz kommen, hält sich die professionelle Kunstkritik seit vielen Jahren mit Bewertungen zurück – jedenfalls wenn es um die künstlerischen Inhalte geht.

Was dagegen massiv kritisiert wird, sind Personalentscheidungen. Gerade weil es aber mehr Künstler_innen als Platz in Ausstellungen gibt, wären Diskussionen über Kunst wichtig. Denn vielen Ausstellungsmacher_innen fehlt es offenbar an Orientierung: Auf eine wichtige und bewegende künstlerische Position folgt regelmässig so obskurer Bullshit, dass mir die Kunstvermittler_ innen jedes Mal leid tun. Die Kunstkritik_ innen unternehmen nicht dagegen. Im Gegenteil: Wir produzieren allzuoft konzeptuellen Mehrwert für lahme Kunst.

Für Crit Cross. A Forum on Art Criticism, eine Diskussionsgruppe von Verein K, die ich seit zwei Jahren in Wien leite, habe ich letzten Monat etwa 40 Besprechungen von Ausstellungen in der Wiener Secession der letzten Jahre durchgesehen. Darin wurde kräftig beschrieben, viel im Werk der Künstler_innen kontextualisiert und manchmal sogar interpretiert. Eine Verortung der Ausstellungen in einem grösseren gesellschaftlichen Kontext, welche zeigen könnte, dass Kunst auch über die Kunstwelt hinaus noch relevant ist, kam höchstens vier oder fünfmal vor und beschränkte sich auf den Artikelanfang. Bewertungen der Ausstellung wurden höchstens ganz vorsichtig angedeutet. Eine klar negative Bewertung gab es nur von Almuth Spiegler in der Tageszeitung Die Presse.

Dabei ist Bewertung das Einzige, was Kunstkritiken von anderen Texten über Kunst unterscheidet. Die Kunsthistoriker_innen üben sich in vornehmer wissenschaftlicher Zurückhaltung und Katalogbeiträge zu verfassen akzeptiert man nicht, wenn man die Kunst nicht gut findet. Leider ist es inzwischen wohl auch bei Kunstkritiken so und manche Magazine fragen mich, was ich gut fand, um darüber zu schreiben. Ich würde gerne glauben, dass es andere Gründe dafür gibt als die Tatsache, dass wir die Hand nicht beissen, die uns füttert. Aber anders als Filmkritiker_innen und bei Zeitungen festangestellte Kritiker_innen – freilich kaum noch vorhanden – würden die freien Kunstkritiker_innen nicht über die Runden kommen, wenn sie nicht gelegentlich Ausstellungseröffnungen machten oder Katalogbeiträge und Pressetexte für Galerien schrieben und Kunstmagazine leben von der Werbung der Kunstinstitutionen. Dass viele Kritiker_ innen – darunter auch ich selbst – auch Ausstellungen kuratieren, macht die Situation nicht einfacher. Müssen wir nicht befürchten, dass eine negative Bewertung uns interessante Möglichkeiten raubt? Ob die Befürchtung berechtigt ist, weiss ich gar nicht. Ich übe jedenfalls

KASRA RAHMANIAN, CONTEMPORARY ART BE LIKE (2020)

kaum bewusst Selbstzensur und die Gründe, warum eine kritische Besprechung abgelehnt oder bis zur Unkenntlichkeit editiert wird, sind selten transparent.

Nur wenn zufällig drei Monate lang ein Banner für eine Ausstellung auf einer Website geschaltet wird, die zuvor den Verriss genau dieser Ausstellung abgelehnt hat, werde ich zum Indizienleser.

Zur soziologischen Dynamik kommt eine rein psychologische: Um zu zeigen, dass eine Ausstellung besonders irrelevant ist, müssen wir uns ausgiebig mit ihr beschäftigen. Gerade dann wollen wir nämlich nicht falsch liegen. Aber wer beschäftigt sich schon gerne freiwillig mit Dingen, die er nicht mag?

Besonders wenn nur Undank winkt.

Fakt ist: In “Kritiken” werden Inhalte nur noch selten evaluiert. Dazu kommt mangelnde Diskussionskultur– vielleicht ist es auch andersherum. Denn damit über Kunst diskutiert werden kann, müsste erst einmal jemand öffentlich Position beziehen. Und wenn das geschieht, müsste jemand antworten. Das sind viele “müsste”.

Ich setze mich hier natürlich nicht für die KunstweltVersion des Facebook Likes ein (die gibt es schon zuhauf), sondern für das, was Noël Carroll in seinem Buch On Criticism “begründete Bewertung” nennt.

Die Bewertung darf natürlich auch positiv sein und die Begründung, meint Carroll, solle sechs Aspekte umfassen: Beschreibung, Klassifizierung, Kontextualisierung, Erläuterung, Interpretation und Analyse. Was das im Einzelnen ist, wird bei Carroll ausgiebig beschrieben. Besonders originell ist das Kriterium der Klassifizierung. Damit bezeichnet Carroll die Feststellung der Kategorie eines Kunstwerke, auf der die nächsten Schritte aufbauen. Für ein konzeptuelles Kunstwerk gelten nicht die gleichen ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

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Interpretations- und Bewertungskriterien wie für neo-expressionistische Malerei.

Wenn Fans politischer Kunst abstrakte Malerei ablehnen weil sie zu unpolitisch ist, haben sie eigentlich das Thema verfehlt.

“Positioniertheit” falsch verstanden produziert schlechte Kritik.

Beobachtungen zur Institution oder zur Person der Künstler_innen gehören unter Umständen zur Kontextualisierung.

Sie sind damit bestenfalls ein kleiner Teilaspekt von Kunstkritik. Dennoch stehen sie im Mittelpunkt der brutalen Dispute in der aktuellen Kunstwelt.

Vielleicht, weil es so viel einfacher ist, als sich intensiv mit künstlerischen Inhalten auseinander zu setzen? Oder weil zu viele davon irrelevant sind? Die Orte des Streits sind leider nicht jene der intensiven Auseinandersetzung mit der Kunst (und umgekehrt). Diejenigen, welche aufmerksam beschreiben, klassifizieren, kontextualisieren, erläutern, interpretieren und analysieren bewerten nur selten und andersherum beruhen die entschiedensten Bewertungen meist auf den oberflächlichsten Beobachtungen. Insofern die Kunstwelt noch kritisch ist, beschäftigt sie sich mehr mit Personalien als mit Inhalten. Sind genug Frauen im Programm? Hat die Malerin die richtige Hautfarbe? Ist die Ausstellung divers genug? Wenn eine Institution sonst alles richtig macht, lässt sich vielleicht wenigstens ein falscher Sponsor finden, oder ein falscher Aufsichtsrat?

Zumindest ein Künstler wird doch unmögliche Tweets geschrieben haben? Wenn ja, wird nicht diskutiert, sondern gecancelt. Man schreibt einen offen Brief und versucht zu verhindern, dass die Leute hingehen.

Der Vorteil: Man selbst kann zuhause bleiben und erspart sich so viele irrelevante Ausstellungen. Im Dezember hat Stephanie Bailey bei Crit Cross mit Morgan Quaintance über seine harte Kritik an ihrer Besprechung der Biennale in Athen diskutiert. Sie hat immer wieder gefragt, ob er die Ausstellung denn gesehen habe, bis er schließlich irritiert antworte: “Nein, aber darum geht es auch nicht!” Worum es ging, waren Textnachrichten von zwei Künstlern.

Vielleicht ist das das Hauptproblem der aktuellen Kunstwelt: Es geht immer um etwas anderes als die Kunst selbst. Es geht nicht um Argumente, sondern darum, wer besser mobilisieren kann. Jede Ausstellung ist ein Gefecht im grossen Krieg der Kulturen – und mit seinen Feinden spricht man nicht.

Man unterwirft sie.

KLAUS SPEIDEL is an image and art theorist, academic philosopher, art critic and curator. He studied philosophy and art history in Munich (LMU) and Paris (Ecole normale supérieure) and got his PhD from the Sorbonne. He teaches at Vienna University, Ecole Estienne in Paris, the Salzburg Summer Academy for Fine Arts and the New Centre for Research & Practice. Aside from academic publications on art, narrative, depiction, style, drawing and digital, Klaus Speidel writes about art and images for newspapers and magazines, and in catalogues. In 2015, he received the AICA France Prize for Art Criticism.

Gerechtigkeit ist gekommen, um zu bleiben.

Die Arbeiterkammer setzt sich seit 100 Jahren für die Rechte der Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmer ein.

Sie steht für soziale Gerechtigkeit in Österreich.

Damals. Heute. Für immer.

ARBEITERKAMMER.AT/100

AK 100Jahre 217x310.indd 1

#FÜRIMMER

02.04.20 11:30

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ver the past ten years I have been working in the field of contemporary art in Germany and Turkey in recognized art spaces and established institutions. I have worked in different positions on various platforms, from being an intern to project coordinator and from curatorial assistant to curator. In 2010, shortly before I moved from Istanbul to Frankfurt to continue my studies, I had been working as coordinator of an artist-run nonprofit gallery and as a contributor for a center-left daily newspaper in Istanbul. Apart from a number of internships, these two positions were my first professional experiences in my early twenties, right after university, where I could learn and experiment but also understand what it means to be a cultural worker. What these two positions had in common is that they did not offer me any type of contract before

cultural sector is the same, but the ways in which it is handled are different – often subtler and more manipulative. I never forgot how I received my first contract in one of the most respected largescale organizations in Germany. My research-based internship was coming to an end and I knew that they needed to hire people to coordinate the projects. The head of the department was satisfied with my work and she wanted to keep me on the team. One day, the CEO came to our office and asked me to come out to the corridor to talk to him privately. The first thing he said to me was “I heard that you want to stay.”

How could I possibly respond as an international MA student who was thankful to get this internship, who could speak English and Turkish but almost no German and who had very little clue about working conditions in Germany? He already set the power tone. I got a contract with the lowest payment possible. For one year, I worked day and night to

WORKING CONDITIONS IN THREE ACTS Letter from a Turkish Curator I started working. At the time I thought this was normal. The common sense thinking was that you should be happy to have found any job at all. On top of that, I was lucky to have found a job where I could learn and work on my own initiative with passion – so why would I speak up? After all, I was the one inexperienced enough to agree to work without a contract. After about a year I was considering working less to have more time for my studies and there were also other issues I was planning to communicate openly about to the artist group that ran the art space – my employers. After a few mobbing phone calls and texts I emailed them about my discontent, which led to my leaving. Whether I quit or got fired was never mutually and properly stated. Apparently, it didn’t have to be clarified since there was no official working contract.

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For secular Turkish people, Europe is believed to have higher standards in basic human rights and proper living and working conditions. I thought that the working conditions would be fairer in Germany.

They partially are, but the problem continues in various other forms. The level of abuse in the

by D i D E M YA Z I C I

realize two main projects in this well-established and prominent art exhibition, worked closely with artists and curators and coordinated the project I was assigned from beginning till the end. At a certain point after working for some months and growing friendships with my German colleagues in the office, I realized that I was getting paid significantly less than they were, although our titles were all the same: Project Assistant. Perhaps that was because I was young, inexperienced or foreign – I didn’t know.

A colleague advised me to talk to my boss, but we were already under high pressure as the grand exhibition opening was approaching and I didn’t want to add additional stress to anybody. Today, I would answer this white male CEO differently by saying, “True, I want to stay and I heard that you want to keep me, too.” I would negotiate for a fair contract that would pay for my labor. Towards the end of my contract, when the stress-level normalized for everyone, I finally spoke to my boss, and they agreed to pay me symbolically a little bit more at the end. It was not at all close to what I should have earned, but nevertheless I was glad to be heard.

After this experience, I had the privilege to work in two other institutions in Germany for five years with people who had a sense of justice and fairness.

I felt heard and appreciated. If the contracts were ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

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not temporary I probably would have stayed longer but, as contracts in the arts sector are typically limited to two or three years, I had to find something else again. Although these two jobs included long working hours and short deadlines, I was happy with my working conditions – until my next position.

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I was about to sign a new contract with another German art institution. My – now former – boss came to my office and sat down by the table next to me, friendly and sneaky. “There was an unfortunate misunderstanding regarding the income,” she said.

In the interview, I was told I would get paid more.

So in the end I was not going to get paid what I was promised. This was uncomfortable but still fine with me as I found the artistic program of this institution critical and consistent. I was there to learn, to collect more experiences and move further with my curatorial work. But after that first “misunderstanding” came the topic of unpaid overtime hours. I was told that it is impossible to get reimbursed for overtime, nor was it allowed to take holidays in return. When I had to work late, I was allowed to get in a bit later the next day but never take a day off. I found this confusing, as in my last job I could count my overtime hours and take extra holidays in return. Here, there was no compensation at all for overtime. How was I supposed to function?

Like a robot? The explanation I was offered was simple: This was a smaller institution with a smaller budget, so there was no money for that. Later on I found out that the budget was not that tight at all. The conversation went on. My former boss also recommended not to demand extra payment or holidays for overtime as apparently the person who worked in the position before me complained about it to the board and it backfired. As this was an uncomfortable and difficult situation for everyone, I was advised not to open up the topic again. In my experiences, it was always so easy to make you believe that you were not worth fair pay and that you shouldn’t stand up for your working rights.

After two years of working there, I didn’t stay any longer. I didn’t want a further extension of the same contract with the same role. I will remember the excellent exhibitions and good times, but mostly I will remember the crisis-management, exploitation and exhaustion. Being passionate about your job shouldn’t mean that your labor is charity. I know many assistants, curators, coordinators, trainees and cultural workers who all face similar conditions.

These experiences in different organizational structures tell us the same thing: No matter where we come from, no matter where we stand in the classical hierarchy, no matter what they tell you, we should never give up our self-worth and selfgovernment, and the need to continue to fight together for structural changes.

DiDEM YAZICI is an independent curator and writer based in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her curatorial work is inspired by thinking across disciplines in and outside of art, the potentiality of exhibitions as socio-poetic spaces, the legacy of intersectional feminism and globalexhibition histories. She earned her B.A. in Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul (2008) and an M.A. in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt (2012).

39 NO ARTIST LEFT ALIVE

Speculations on post-pandemic struggles of cultural workers within, against and beyond capitalism

by M A X H A I V E N

S

ome of my best friends around the world are artists, and I’m deeply concerned about their economic wellbeing during and after the isolation and lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. I find myself vexed by the language of some of the calls I have seen to “rescue art,” at least when taken in isolation from wider struggles.

I categorically support artists, in the immediate moment, getting money by any means necessary.

But there is more at stake in the long term.

If these calls are tied to broader demands for the radical redistribution of social wealth and the fiscal decapitation of the super-rich by any number of direct or indirect means, then they resonate with the kind of politics that could facilitate artists and everyone else (except perhaps the decapitated elites) coming into a much better position post-pandemic.

But many calls to support artists specifically, in the absence of universal provisioning and a radical reimagination of value, risk once again making the image of the artist (as opposed to artists in their many actualities) a pawn in the machinations of capital’s reproduction.

An honest assessment of the financial fates of many of the world’s independent and critical galleries and arts institutions also depends on the largess of finance capital and its functionaries. Sometimes this is direct, in the sense that the super elite sit on the boards of, make donations to, and otherwise, in a million tiny ways, help sustain these institutions even state-funded institutions, let’s be honest. Other times it is less direct. We all know (I hope) that collectors, gallerists, and others use their influence over even independent and critical galleries and venues as machines to add value to works of certain artists in whom they are invested. We know that even the most eccentric and anti-market art spaces are compelled, by no fault of their own, to participate in generating the upward churn of sub-market “dark matter” (as Gregory Sholette has called it)1: the hidden mass of aspiring but unsaleable work on top of which the tiny fraction of marketable work depends. We are also all too familiar with the way the most esoteric and outsider margins of the art world function, against their will, to pull to its centre new provocative and antagonistic works that will be tomorrow’s art market bonbons.

Ultimately, what is likely best for artists is what is best for all workers: universal high quality free public services and the abolition of the wagediscipline of capitalism. These demands seem surprisingly possible today and are in a strange way an actually existing fact in the emergency. If artists make common cause with others, we might be able to preserve and extend these, and so abolish capitalism as such.

Whether we care to admit it, a huge proportion of the global art world is essentially funded by family wealth: artists, gallerists, critics and others who can sustain unsustainable careers only thanks to the hidden largess of trust funds, parents and partners.

Then there are all the rest, who sustain themselves waiting tables, teaching, doing sex work, surviving on a trickle of cash from distended graduate degrees, doing discounted labour for arts organizations, or otherwise hustling unto death.

Going down with the ship

What remains contemporary now?

The agonizing reality is that, after the pandemic, any resurgence of the hegemonic “art world,” let alone the art market - and here I have in mind the field of visual art, even when it has exceeded “the visual” - must be seen to index the restoration of finance capital’s hegemony (which enriches the lion’s share of the collectors and benefactors), and therefore as catastrophically bad for humanity.

I don’t blame individuals, rich or poor, for the choices they make to pursue their passion in a sick and abusive economy. But for those art-adjacent people who want to abolish that economy and create a world in which everyone can pursue their passions, the time for collective honesty has come.

There is, frankly, nothing more boring to me than the sanctimonious sniping about art’s entanglement with money that, today, so often passes for criticism or, worse still, for art itself. I’m curious what else might emerge if we, collectively, directed our critical acumen, our creative energies, our social talents, and our collaborative dispositions towards supporting the creation of and the fight for a new post-capitalist economy?

We must admit that “contemporary art,” all theoretical pleasantries aside, is the plaything of the world’s financialized super-rich. This can be observed at art fairs or auctions in the world’s metropoles, and in the careers of the roughly 250 global art stars whose work hangs in the yachts and penthouses of the world’s oligarchs. Any “return to normal” in the art market simply means that the proverbial boss is back from his luxury disaster-bunker vacation and has money burning a hole in his pocket.

Insofar as “contemporary art” is sustained by and ultimately for the pleasure of capitalism’s superelite, it necessarily demands a certain latitude of ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

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freedom from direct capitalist command. The art commodity’s value derives precisely from the fact that it is unlike any other commodity: it bears at very least the illusion of unalienated labour.2 Though how we can sustain this illusion in an era where art stars employ legions of precarious mini-makers in factory-like studios is a bit rich, if you’ll excuse the pun. To impose direct capitalist discipline on art would be to destroy precisely that which gives it its unique, supernatural value. Thus art retains some degree of “play,” if not autonomy, under capitalism.

Recently, I and a number of critics, including Marina Vishmidt, Suhail Malik, David Beech and Leigh Claire La Berge, have each argued that the financialization of the capitalist economy is based on processes that don’t simply suppress or thwart creativity and the imagination but actively seek to excite and harness it, and that “contemporary art” is in some senses a laboratory for these methods.3 This is especially important in an age of the socalled creative economy, in which every worker is increasingly exhorted to imagine themselves as (a mythological version of) an artist, eagerly plunging into a world of risk and uncertainty to leverage their passion, moxy and creativity towards growth in market share of their own personal brand.

In other words, far from demanding all artists produce propaganda, capitalism makes the artist themself (regardless of the content they produce indeed, the more provocative the better) into a figure in it's own propaganda.

Work or die, redux But maybe that age has ended.

In the post-pandemic economy it is doubtful that capitalism may have need of such propagandistic illusions. During the pandemic, governments, at least in the (post-)imperialist Global North, are being forced to intervene to relieve the pressures that otherwise blackmail workers into working, offering a raft of social welfare provisions that have been demanded by social movements for decades: a hiatus on rents, some form of de jure or de facto basic guaranteed income, free public transit, and the provisional (re)nationalization of infrastructure.

We are, in a strange way, living through a kind of temporary dream version of the abolition of work itself as government orders prohibit many forms of economic activity, though, of course, millions continue to be compelled to work, notably front-line health and service workers, farmers, and caregivers.

Many of us in isolation are, against our will (and

40 with terrible effects on our mental health), now being compelled to live like a distorted images of the quintessential romantic artist: impoverished, unemployed, agonized by romanticized isolation, detached from the world, gripped by ineffable nostalgia and a sense of squandered potential.

In the aftermath, it is not unlikely that capital will demand states use every tool in their arsenal to compel us to “return to work,” to get back to “business as usual.” In such a situation, and in a moment where unemployment threatens to make us compete for a dwindling supply of bad jobs at depressed wages, the bullshit about “doing what you love” and “embracing the inner artist” is likely to be thrown out the window. Work or die, bitches.

“Fuck you, artists” In such a moment, artists may be encouraged to stridently claim that their work is work, that it deserves to be compensated. There may be demands for something like the US depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA), which paid artists to do community-facing work as part of a broader economic stimulus spending package, but also as a form of social uplift. Artists, if they are organized, might be able to make some modest gains in certain jurisdictions. Yet what will become of contemporary art’s thus-far constitutive claims to a hostility (or at least an inhospitality) towards capitalism when it is explicitly (rather than implicitly) put to work towards that system’s rescue and restoration?

I certainly don’t think artists and their friends should forgo struggling to defend whatever legal and economic gains they have been able to make in various jurisdictions when it comes to wages, securities, and working conditions. Yet as tactically important as these may be, I am skeptical of the broader strategy. We are very likely to emerge from this pandemic in a profound global depression. The money that states have already borrowed and that they will continue to borrow to keep the economy afloat and provide disaster relief will be repaid to the world’s financial overlords. Perhaps unlike other sectors of capital, finance is driven by competition into a kind of frantic inability to see their own disastrous collective mismanagement of the very system they superintend and benefit from.4 This will likely mean, sooner or later, drastic and brutal austerity, unless social movements mobilize to refuse to repay the debts. We should anticipate that state arts funding, where it has even survived until now, will be early on the chopping block. In spite of Richard Florida and company’s now canonical claims that investments in culture return in long term economic growth, in lean times when states play Russian Roulette to see who will take the bullet for the global economic meltdown, art will be a hard sell.5 Frankly, a large percentage of the population, forced to work longer, harder and, ultimately, for less, might celebrate an attack on the arts with a misplaced revanchist loathing. “Fuck you, artists: Work to death to bail out the rich like the rest of us.”

The abolition of the artist as an economic figure Even if this somewhat dismal prediction doesn’t come to pass (which would require, let’s be clear, a profound and coordinated rejection of neoliberal economic thought on the part of governments and might even demand the nationalization of major sectors of the economy, notably finance), artists in the post-pandemic economy will still be faced with a choice.

On the one hand, they might continue to advocate for themselves, along with other arts intermediaries, as artists, which is to say as the special unicorns on capitalism’s storm-tossed arc. Accordingly, because they are unlike any other workers they need special rights, allowances, compensation, and protection.

There is something correct and justified about this approach: like agriculture, health care, and the patriarchal family, capitalism cannot actually sustain those fields on which its reproduction depends.6 It requires the state, in large or small ways, to help keep these fields alive so the whole system and the society on which it depends doesn’t crumble.

Art may get some bailouts precisely so that it can continue to produce nice things for the resurgent financial elite, who would otherwise be content to let artists die, like blithe aristocrats feasting during a famine.

On the other hand, there will be an opportunity for artists to make common cause with other workers (semi-)abandoned by capitalism, like a pampered purebred escaping the mansion to join the feral mongrels. Artists should in this moment be joining radical and ungovernable movements to demand, at very least that the emergency responses of the pandemic, which removed the economic coercion of capital, be extended widely and forever: basic incomes, rent suspensions, free high quality public services, the nationalization of critical infrastructure, and more.

Further still, artists, both during and after the pandemic, have a lot to offer in terms of allowing us to dream of and practice new social relationships, new economic paradigms, and new structures of care. This has already been one of the most exciting tendencies in “art” in the past decades: a little platform by which radical activists in the belly of the beast license themselves to misappropriate resources and dream dangerously in public.

To call for the abolition of the artist as an economic figure, distinct from other workers, still has radical potential in this moment. I don’t mean it in a nostalgic fashion, but precisely as a way of highlighting the stalemate of capitalism’s politics of work. In this sense, what will serve artists best in the months and years to come is what will serve all workers and poor people best: universal services, the destruction of the system of wage labour, and the abolition of work.7 No one should be an artist as a “job” or get paid to do it, either by public funds or in a private market.

Instead, we should (and we can) abolish “work” and “jobs” as such, by which I mean labour coerced by a relation to wage. Everyone should get what they need to thrive regardless of what work or ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

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job they do or do not do. If there is shit-work (as David Graeber calls it8) that needs to be done in society that no-one wants to do, it should be fairly distributed throughout society, not left to the most marginalized. (I also think my own very nice job as a professor should likewise be abolished, but that is an argument for another time).

We are in a historic moment when a massive, relatively peaceful economic shift might actually be possible. Once that is achieved, even in part, I would expect to see the flourishing of autonomous and collaborative human creativity in many forms, from the Artist Formerly Known as Artist, and from everyone else as well. And then we can figure out if landmark galleries, museums, and the other traditional institutions of yesterday’s “art world” are indeed the best vehicles for supporting, elevating, celebrating and enjoying the greatest cultural and creative achievements of our species. My suspicion is they will not be, and will need to be abolished as such, but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

The needs of most other small, independent, and radical arts organizations are best met not by offering them more funding, though I’m certainly not against that, but (also) by eliminating those needs they have trouble meeting. If rent were abolished, and if people (employees) could survive without the blackmail of the wage, if audiences had the time and energy to actually engage with work and ideas, I imagine these organizations and those who dedicate their time to them would be more capable and ambitious than ever.

Obviously I’m not suggesting an all-or-nothing strategy here: artists and arts organizations are in for a fight of a lifetime. But survival and success within a suicidal, revanchist capitalist system is pointless.

1 Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter : Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London and New York: PlutoPress, 2011).

2 David Beech, Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) 3 Max Haiven, Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (London: Pluto, 2018); Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Decommodification of Labor (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019); Suhail Malik, “Critique as Alibi: Moral Differentiation in the Art Market,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 7, no. 3 (December 2008): 283–95; Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2019).

4 For an excellent explanation of why, see Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London and New York: Verso, 2013).

5 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class : And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004).

6 See Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London and New York: Pluto, 2017).

7 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011).

8 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

MAX HAIVEN is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University. His books include Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization and Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and The Settling of Unpayable Debts.

STASI THERAPY or the Charm of Analogue Networks

by Q U I N N S L O B O D I A N

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t is strange to have information that could ruin someone’s life. The feeling is familiar to historians like myself who have worked in the archives of the East German intelligence service, better known as the Stasi, where redaction of names is patchy (you can see the impressions of the ballpoint pen beneath the smear of the felt marker) and stories of betrayal are everywhere. The files are compiled according to individuals and if you get a fat folder, you know the story is long and sordid. In one life I followed, a young man flipped to informing in high school out of socialist conviction in the 1960s. Committed to secrecy by threat of being charged with treason, he was bound to his youthful choice for decades until the regime’s end. After becoming an academic specialist on the topic of China, he wrote long flowery letters to colleagues and close friends in Czechoslovakia and Poland, copying all responses to Stasi headquarters, often seeming to draw out comments critical of the regime through what looked like elaborate performances of intimacy.

The Stasi sinologist was rewarded, in the bizarre fashion of the day, with virtual medals and invisible honors, none of which ever took physical form.

Nobody wants to have a merit badge for betraying one’s closest friends hidden in the drawer of the vanity set. As I read the files, my reconstruction of the timeline tipped into vertigo. Which was the real him? The one that wrote in fanciful often sparklingly funny prose to his friends, or the one who bluntly corresponded with his superior inside the intelligence services? I always checked my instinct to judge with the thought that he might be trapped himself, or that he might be playing a double game, revealing bits of his friend’s lives while concealing the more damning ones. What is clear is that his deception was never made public. He found employment in his field after the Wende. His Google search results remained mercifully sparse. For Herr M., The analogue state of the Stasi seemed to have shut its all-seeing eye after the Wall’s fall, his deception slipped off into the dusty abyss of printed folders.

NEÏL BELOUFA, GLOBALAGREEMENT (2018). film still

The Stasi has been on our collective mind in the last decade or so, from the Oscar-winning Lives of Others (2006) to its endless invocation during the “summer of Snowden” seven years later. The artist Simon Menner published a coffee table book of Stasi disguises the same year, Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives (2013), showing agents mugging in mustaches and fur hats, smirk-worthy doubles of the contemporary Warhol’s screen tests and forerunners of snapchat filters to come. The commonsense reading is that we are attracted to the history of East German surveillance because it shows us where our own system might be heading. It’s a cautionary tale about life in a panopticon. But what if the opposite is true? What if we are drawn to the East German example as a palliative perversely comforting example of the limits of surveillance in a pre-digital world?

What if our Stasiphobia is actually Stasi Therapy?

Tommaso Tanini’s H. Said He Loved Us points in this direction. The artbook from 2017 is comprised almost entirely of photographs: the sepia-stained title page of George Orwell’s 1984 in German translation with a tender inscription in tilting handwriting; skeins of dead tree branches in winter against grey concrete; tree stumps grown into chain-link fence;, the dented aluminum saucer of a surveillance lamp; the blurred black and white of surveillance street photography (Red Winogrand?); vines approaching balconies with their roots thrust into stucco; the latticework of lace in apartment windows; patterns of ferns raised in relief on water-stained wallpaper.

In Tanini’s world, wires are everywhere yet there are no wires. I was reminded of the birdhouse mounted high in the corner of a room in the museum in the former headquarters of the Stasi in Berlin-Lichtenberg; a second glance shows the black circle of a camera lens in the aperture for the bird’s entrance.

Another room reveals a tape recorder inside of a log, hollowed out and perforated to eavesdrop. If these once felt like instruments of terror, they now appear bucolic, recalling the picnic, the lover’s stroll. The developed film could yield outtakes from Jean Renoir’s Partie de Campagne (1936), Roger Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer’s Menschen am Sonntag (1930), Eric Rohmer’s La Genou de Claire (1970) or the most lasting East German hit, Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973). Tanini offers the fantasy of a world where all information is captured. Every vine ends in a quarter-inch jack. It is a looking glass version of our own post-Snowden world—but with a difference: the Stasi tools are ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • FEBRUARY 2020

mimeograph, gelatin silver processing, and reelto-reel. The once-feared instruments of Big Brother scan as camp, more at home in the Etsy shop or the Wes Anderson film. It’s Orwell-Lomo, complete with buttonhole spycams.

A couple of years after East Germany’s demise, Frederic Jameson wrote of conspiratorial thinking after the Cold War that “it would be a mistake to reduce the menacing object-world of allegorical conspiracies to that first, fresh fear of spy systems and informants in the 1960s, when right-wingers discovered a whole new generation of just the right gadgets and someone was listening to you, but only to you personally.” “J. Edgar Hoover would make a most anachronistic mascot for late capitalism,” he observed, to which we could add that GDR spy chief Erich Mielke would too. Decades before location services, click-tracking, and eavesdropping smart speakers, Jameson remarked that “what has happened to the objects of our object-world is neither youth nor age, but their wholesale transformation into instruments of communication.” Moving within the Internet of Things, as we do now, Stasitherapy’s socalled dystopia seems twee, even quaint. It offers us a place to indulge in the charm of analogue networks— to reminisce about when a paste-on mustache might be enough to change identities and a new passport might be no further away than skill with scissors and glue and a steady calligrapher’s hand.

At the same time, Stasi Therapy reminds us that the future paradigm is always developing within the present one. The CCTV camera was a Stasi favorite, coming into widespread use in the 1970s. Yet that very decade, West (not East) German intelligence developed the first computer-aided databases of personal information to seek out political criminals through the use of correlation. They became the pioneers of the “dataveillance” that drives the social sorting of corporate and military surveillance today. While the Stasi were arranging their toupees and gathering scent samples in jars, in other words, the West German Bundeskriminalamt were crafting our future, where observation precedes suspicion.

In one of the filmmaker Harun Farocki’s last appearances before his death, he described how exciting the advent of security cameras had been for filmmakers. They seemed to realize a long-standing goal of avant-garde cinema: they filmed nothing. He spoke about visiting the control room for the closed-circuit cameras of the newly built (and now recently closed) Internationale Congress Centrum in what was then West Berlin, and seeing a screen marked “chair.” But the chair had been moved so the camera now only dutifully recorded empty space, the floors and the walls—or more properly, the light reflecting off those surfaces onto magnetic tape turning slowly in the apparatus. By contrast, Farocki said, the “signal intelligence” of the BKA and NSA was always gathering something: the restless movements of our cursors; our hesitations, double-backs and lingering in the supermarket aisle; the numbers we block and the ones we hang up on. These are all positive data points— they may appear to be meaningless but they are not nothing. Computers can’t look into the void the way the ersatz-eye of the camera can.

If our objects are all “instruments of communication” and our signals wireless, the blurred outline sharpens, the vines vanish. We look around nervously for signs of what is to come: if the computerized database slipped into the era of the birdhouse camera, what future technology hovers in the era of the database? We are no longer afraid of the world of the Stasi; we are comforted by it. Herr M. vanished, but can we?

QUINN SLOBODIAN'S most recent book is Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018). He teaches history at Wellesley College.

42

KATHERINA OLSCHBAUR, TROUBLE IN PARADISE (2018). Teil der Soloausstellung Horses, Nicodim Galerie, Los Angeles, 2018.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 â&#x20AC;¢ APRIL 2020

П

онятие травмы было принципиальным для русской кухонной и институциональной психологий и вдохновляемой этими дискурсами интеллектуальной деятельности как минимум с девяностых, но с переводом работ Ланда и Негарестани философский вопрос о травме оказывается задан вновь — вопрос о том, насколько травма (травма капитализма) как источник энергии интенсивной и разрушительной может быть средством преодоления ситуации, рассматриваемой как невыносимая. Во вдохновленном Фрейдом понимании травмы мыслители этого круга видят ее как что-то, что расплавляет и уничтожает все, неспособное от нее питаться, как разделяющее организм, психику или мир на ту часть, что черпает из этой безумной энергии силу, и ту, что отмирает, поскольку на ее поддержание сил уже не остается – поскольку экстренная интеграция этого внешнего вмешательства оказывается возможной лишь путем радикального упрощения энергетической схемы. Вопрос Фрейда – “Почему желание успокоиться – это не то же, что и желание умереть?” – позволяет вводить различия, объясняемые с помощью понятий системы, энергии и энтропии. Отличие от структуралистского или филологического подхода к интерпретации этой теории, столь важного для мысли ХХ века и современных

43 почему этот жестокий подход считается (и, к сожалению, является) более эффективным, чем, скажем, (кропотливое и бессмысленное, доходящее до абсурдной формальности) “разностороннее развитие” детей, которых готовят к американских колледжам, восходит к советской образовательной системе, но сейчас находит свою поддержку в той специфической травме, с которой мы столкнулись, оказавшись в постсоветском мире, и которая резко отличается от травмы, о которой говорят постгуманистичекие мыслители. Травмой постоянно навязываются ложные решения, выборы из двух невозможных вариантов; субъект постоянно требует от себя “вот сейчас окончательно наконец решить”, говоря, что никакая настоящая деятельность до такого решения невозможна, и в итоге погружается в нервные, бессмысленные процессы. “Оставить деньги, идеи, вдохновение на обустройство себе или давать их коррупционерам?”, вопрос, в который быстро обращаются этические

фантастического субъекта во что-то, о чем можно задавать вопросы вроде “какие мыслители там сейчас важные и актуальные” с намеком на то, что поток мысли может либо течь от них к нам, либо, когда мы наконец сможем, от нас к ним. Те случаи, когда необходимость как-то сочетаться с философским Западом совсем уж навязывается самому себе теоретиком, теоретическая работа превращается в построение абстракций над историей и обстоятельствами мысли: справа – под лозунгом геополитики (обещающей столкновения с Реальным, но в итоге навязывая территориям банальные геометрические абстракции, в которых и нам находится важное симметричное местечко), а слева, вместо симметрий, ожидаемые арифметические прогрессии, в которых, замечая любую последовательность из пары шагов, исследователь пытается прыгнуть чуть дальше. Вся такая теория, пытающаяся быть актуальной наравне с “западной”, пытается начать с поиска своего места в абсолютно воображаемом, абстрактно структурированном мире, что особенно хорошо видно в еще одном невозможном выборе – “колониальные мы или колонизированные?” – как будто бы эти западные понятия и этика, из них следующая, действительно должны быть к нам однозначно применимы; институты и издания, пытающиеся поймать модную волну, игнорируют кропотливые

АКСЕЛЕРАЦИЯ РУССКОЙ ТРАВМЫ В А Л Е Н Т И Н ГО Л Е В прогрессивных движений вроде критики колониальности, заключается в том, что язык больше не рассматривается как основное проявление этого процесса, и все происходящее с языком лишь следует за экономической катастрофой, которой и является травма и о которой можно говорить языком физических процессов. Этот физический язык – не менее общее место уже давно ведущихся русских кухонных разговоров, чем травма; и две враждующие этические-эпистемологические позиции, которые занимают Ланд и Негарестани, тоже имеют свое проявление в вопросе, который куда менее необычен для нашего общества, чем для их – “Не довести ли нам травму до крайности?”. Ответ Ланда – объявить, что “травма” капитализма – это не некое событие, а самая первичная истина об энергии мира, которой не дает раскрыться множество устаревших пережитков культуры, которым пора отмереть – общее место русского подходов к воспитанию. От математических школ до русского балета настаивание на резком, жертвующем другими частями личности развитии шизоидных или аутических черт; нарочито пограничноистеричный подход к современному искусству; абсурдный и калечащий человека и его близких культ гения или одаренного ребенка – вещи абсолютно в России обыденные и институционально закрепленные в первую очередь в местном подходе к социальной мобильности, которому разносторонность человека, обилие и разнообразие его связей с окружающим миром служит обычно ограничивающим фактором. Причина,

KASRA RAHMANIAN, АКСЕЛЕРАЦИЯ РУССКОЙ ТРАВМЫ (2020)

размышления буржуа с интересом к комфортной жизни, облагает их в итоге двойным налогом – украденным со стороны коррупционеров и еще одним: на ни к чему не приводящие расследования этих преступлений. “Быть теоретиком для внутреннего пользования или для запада?”, забавно обнаруженный как наболевший в недавной дискуссии о том, надо ли публиковаться в зарубежных журналах, обнаруживает в первую очередь темпоральное измерение “актуальности теории”, без веры в возможность которой такой вопрос бессмысленен – а за ней следует превращение Запада из чисто ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

исследования применимости этих понятий в пользу поиска позиции - как будто бы это мы одни, политически невежественные русские, никак не определимся с самими собой в мире, в котором каждый якобы отлично и однозначно понимает, белый он или нет и что ему с этим делать. Проблема травмы не в том, как поэффективнее ею воспользоваться, а в том, что сколько ни настаивай на отмирании всего, не вписавшегося в ее экономику, оно все равно продолжает жить и настаивать на своем существовании. Именно это неумирающее – та часть, которой “больно”, и как ни ускоряй ее отмирание, ему все равно не произойти. Никакое происходящее в условиях травмы внутреннее насилие не оказывается окончательным, и каждый раз, сталкиваясь с ним, мы надеемся замкнуться и закрыться от всего, но все равно в итоге продолжаем, по необходимости и по выбору, существовать в том же организме. Ни та, ни другая сторона никакого “окончательного” выбора не защитит нас; изоляция невозможна, а ускорение никогда не убьет своих жертв окончательно, они всегда будут выживать, продолжая принимать на себя каждый удар. Все решения, которые навязывает нам травма, это решения о разделении внутри себя – жизнью в этой концепции называется невозможность их принять.

VALENTIN GOLEV is an artist-researcher and writer based in Berlin, interested in the continental philosophy of technology and psychoanalysis. Currently, he’s reading a course on Algorithmic Literacy at The New Centre for Research and Practice, and making a project on light and CGI for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Arts.

44 DURCHDREHEN/ WEGGEFAHREN von JA N E B E R L D I N G

U

nd ewig sucht was eh nichts findet. Sucht überall. Sucht ununterbrochen. Im Licht des Sonnenaufgangs ratlos die Tasse Kaffee in der Hand. Die Tasse ein Pappbecher, darauf dein Name geschrieben steht. Jon. Du in Buchstaben. Abstrakter Platzhalter. Smileyface. Super Latte Sugar Sugar und so weiter. Heute gelacht und morgen schon im Müll erstickt. Aller Rohstoff aufgebraucht, Eisschmelze Feuersbrünste Artensterben Panzerwagen. Zurückgelacht. Echo in den leeren Felsschluchten. Suche.

Sucht ununterbrochen. Sucht am Mittag, sucht Beschäftigung, sucht Bestätigung, sucht ununterbrochen.

Abstrakter Platzhalter. Findet nichts, sucht, aber merkt nichts von der erfolglosen Suche. Ausser manchmal dann eben doch. Dann eben schon am Mittag, da plane Ebene, uneingeschränkte Sicht, unverstellter Blick. Der den Mut nimmt. Kein Ende in Sicht. Gesucht, gedachtes gefunden. Leider aber Fehlanzeige, Falschannahme, und der Wunsch keimt auf, nichtmehr von der Wahrheit überrascht zu werden, verkrampft dann und es wird Abend. Am Abend dämmert geteiltes Leben. Hat mir so irgendjemand mal erzählt. Es war eigentlich sehr nett. Sonst alles normal, mittlere Temperaturen, kaum bemerkte Umstände also. Auf einer großen Terrasse, Sonnenschirme und um klebrige Tische herum trinken wir Bier aus hohen Gläsern. Kleine Runde. Geträumte Teile und vereinzelte. Geteilte Räume und vereinzelnde.

Trotzdem – Ich weiss es von mir, aber wie steht's um dich? Du weisst es also schon, ich ja noch nicht. Bier, Wein, Danke! noch ein Glas – Cheerio!

In der anderen Möglichkeit bricht die Nacht an. Spür wie ähnlich leicht alles wird. Dein Körper, sich wieder freier bewegt, schwebt fast. Was macht der Kopf da den ganzen Tag eigentlich, was hat der gegen seine dicke Hülle? Warum wehrt der sich so arg?

Aber schwer wird jetzt leicht von oben runter und der ganze unangenehme Krams sinkt gemütlich mit der Sonne in die Nacht rein. Und bleibt auch dort. Freu dich. Wird erst später nochmal wieder rausgeholt und durchgenudelt in den Träumen. Schwarze Sonne die am Horizont aufsitzt und da ewig

festhängt. Frag mich nicht. Ich träume. Ich träume beiger Fluss der träge fließt. Ähnlich unerklärlich. Die Tastatur an meiner Armbanduhr ist nicht kaputt, die lässt sich im beigen Fluss nur schwer bedienen. Ich stecke in einem Schwimmreif. Nichts strömt.

Die Tasten sind zu klein und die Autokorrektur spinnt total. A E I O U. Check ich einfach nicht. Dicke Finger.

Kommunikation kaum möglich.

Within schon sich grüßt essen ist wird sicher nichts nzww.keden.

Buchstaben Salat. Übel wichtige Nachricht drängt. Am Bahnsteig wartet schon jemand den ich kenne, zusammen mit jemandem, den ich nicht kenne. Eine Schranke lässt sich herunter. Wir befinden uns auf dem Dorf. Wie so oft nur wenig drumrum und dazwischen eine Bahnstrecke. Es gibt Verbindungen, nur wie viele ist die Antwort? Ich weiss die Frage nicht.

Vom beigen Fluß zurück ins Unterbewusste. Alles weg und trotzdem weiter träge. Am Abend wie alles leicht wird also. Leicht bedeutet nur die Suche ruht. Nach was Jon, nach was. Was wird gesucht?

Keine Ahnung, leider bleibt nur das. Das was leicht wird abends.

Das weiter unklar bleibt. 2 x Das. Aber am Abend entspannt sich alles irgendwie – vielleicht weil der Tag mit der Sonne auch seine laute aufmüpfige Art verliert und nichts mehr von dir fordert.

Wahrscheinlich. Es ist grün draussen und Wolken. Die sind irgendwie auch grün. Es ist Abend und ich bin farbenblind. Alles gut. Auf dem Weg in die Küche zurück, dachte ich mir noch kurz, vielleicht bin ich die Zukunft.

Einsam sein.

Auf dem Herd spuckt und brodelt ein Topf. Es gibt Kartoffeln und Fisch.

Allein in der Fremde lerne ich viel.

Ich habe jetzt ein Netflix-Abo. Denke, dass ich vielleicht wieder Rauchen sollte. Es misst die Zeit. Erst in kurze Abschnitte, dann in Päckchen.

Im Rauchen selber sieht sich die Zeit beim Verstreichen zu und ich würARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

de schweigend bei ihr sitzen und tiefe Züge rein und dicke Ringe raus.

Tick Tock. In die Zukunft. Schwarze Lunge. Nach paar Wochen alleine trage ich zu Hause eine Mischung aus Stirnband und Turban. Ich kann mich mit dem Stirnband im Spiegel sehen wenn ich daran vorbei gehe. Manchmal finde ich mich schön. Die Falten sind neu. Dazu paar einzelne weisse Haare oder andere Sachen. Ich bleibe kurz vor dem Spiegel stehen. An Hunde denken und dabei sich selber sehen.

Finde mich süß auch irgendwie. Was sich seltsam anfühlt. Frage mich, wie ich sicher wissen kann, dass ich das bin. Hinweise verdichten sich. Kenne die Theorien. Unter den Augen ganz schwarz alles. Dicke Lieder. Das däm-

hacken, rumschreien und drüben den Nachbarn den Hund im Zwinger umbringen, nachts, irgendwas noch mit seiner Leiche machen, schreckliches, malen, zeichnen, sich selber als Roboter im Gehirn einer Gans die ganze Welt steuernd und dadurch interpretierbar, nicht nur für Analytiker*innen, sichtbares Zeichen gestörter Existenz von außen lesbar auch für andere sein.

Ist aber nicht so. Ist ja niemand hier.

Bleibt eh unsichtbar. Normal unverkrampfter Kiefer, freundliche Augen, die Augen eines jungen Hundes, hell, süß, unerfahren, unersichtlich, drunter dicke dunkle Lieder, drüber Stirnband, aber ohne die Kameras auch nicht als Filmreferenz lesbar. Einmal komme ich überraschend vor dem Spie-

KATHERINA OLSCHBAUR, HORSE CREEP (2018). Teil de

liche Stirnband. Zersauste Haare, fettig bisschen.

Der Wahn spiegelt sich schon seicht dadrin. Glänzende Konträrfarben. Ich hänge mir meine beiden Kameras um. Jetzt wie Dennis Hopper mit dem Stirnbad vor dem Spiegel. Nur meins ist grau nicht rot und ich habe weniger Kameras. In der Einöde durchdrehen.

Wobei das Schlimme ist ja dann nicht ausrasten, das passiert ja nicht, nicht so aktiv jedenfalls, wie die Möbel zerIssue 11 • APRIL 2020

gel vorbei mache laut wuhuehuheuuh wuschle mir mit den Händen durch die Haare die übers Stirnbad rausschauen.

Alles ruhig. Es ist noch Sommer.

Tick Tock. Klimakatastrophe.

JAN ERBELDINGS künstlerische Praxis ist textbasiert und vermittelt sich vor allem durch seine Performances und Lesungen. Ausgangspunkt der Texte sind meist Beobachtungen der unmittelbaren Umgebung oder persönliche Erlebnisse: körperliche Empfindungen, Emotionen, Alltags- und Naturbetrachtungen, Tagträume und Imaginationen, Versatzstücke von Dialogen, Gedankenströme, Kunstgeschehen. Zusammen mit Leo Heinik und Maria VMier organisiert er die Publikations- und Veranstaltungsreihe „Ruine München“.

45 O

r more precisely, we are imagining a sane world after the virus, one where, instead of just trying to put things back the way they were, we act on what we've learned. For instance, a huge proportion of office work, especially administrative, managerial, marketing, legal, finance, consultancy and the like have shown themselves to be pure bullshit. If they disappeared, it would either make no difference or the world might even be a slightly better place. The proof is that during the crisis, most of them did disappear and the world kept spinning. So imagine for a moment we are sane and don't just go back to pretending there's some reason to have all these

up. This will be good because it means there will be less energy use to keep them heated, cooled and so forth, which will reduce carbon emissions. But surely we wouldn't want to blow up all of them.

After the French and Russian revolutions, the royal palaces were turned into state museums. That might point to one sane way to use them. But there's also a crazy way: a return to "normalcy". The model for this might be what happened after the large-scale deindustrialization of western metropolises, when former factories and warehouses were turned into private art centers, offices and condominiums for the kind of people

put on the table is if the state takes over everything, either in the form of state socialism (which is basically just state-monopoly capitalism) or its right-wing "national-socialist" variant (in whatever updated 21st century form).

In that future, those empty offices not used to house bureaucrats or secret police will be turned into state museums: conservative, elitist institutions whose general ambiance balances somewhere between that of a cemetery and that of a bank. We would like to insist on the possibility – perhaps not the likelihood, but at least the possibility – of sanity. Imagine that the experience of lockdown and

they are not "caring" institutions.

What they provide is not care because real care is directed not just at supplying material needs, not even just to allow others to grow and thrive, but also, to maintain or enhance their freedom. Imagine we jettison the idea of production and consumption being the sole purpose of economic life and substitute care and freedom. What would we do with the buildings then?

In a world built around care and solidarity, much of this vast and absurd office space would indeed be blown up, but others could be turned into free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter. We could call them

THE MUSEUM OF CARE Imagining the world after the pandemic

by N I K A D U B ROVS KY & DAV I D G R A E B E R

er Soloausstellung Horses, Nicodim Galerie, Los Angeles, 2018.

people bluffing to make us think they work all day but instead got rid of the bullshit jobs. Well, one question would be: what would we do with all the buildings where they used to work? Obviously, those actually useful workers who kept us alive and cared for during the epidemic – doctors, nurses, cleaners, couriers, electricians, farmers – don't need giant glass buildings to make them feel important. Some can be blown

who worked in them. Many find it hard to imagine this won't happen again, if there is rapid de-bullshitization of work, but no real change to the financial system, or structures of wealth and power more generally.

Empty offices would be bought up by investors, who would turn them into expensive condominiums or private art spaces whose presence will give the real estate additional market value. The only alternative usually ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what's referred to as "an economy" is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control.

Prisons, after all, provide food, shelter and even basic medical care. Still, Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

‘Museums of Care’ — precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.

NIKA DUBROVSKY is an artist and writer.

DAVID GRAEBER is an anthropologist and writer.

Both live in London.

46 A Late Morning

I

t was in Paris when they saw that Roman Ondak piece for the first time, a note on a string hanging with capitals: DEADLINE POSTPONED UNTIL TOMORROW. Then, they asked themselves whether there was another version of it: TODAY IS CANCELLED. They once missed their Pre-Internet brain again, everything was used to be much more organised there. Now every cell seems to be connected to the Internet, since so long, but also to the junk. This was the mood of the day, week and the previous weeks: CANCEL TODAY! After checking their feed, they stopped at a post; they recognised that it was the second time it appeared on the screen, and when they noticed it in the morning the hangover was the winner. Finally some other people might be also revisiting this text. AI with us was remembering unresolved cases from the past for a better immune. To start a day in Neukölln mostly means first a walk with coffee at the Feld.

Today is still too cold, or not in the mood again... They made coffee. They mostly drink coffee black. Today, they added some soy milk and brown sugar.

NEÏL BELOUFA, GLOBAL AGREEMENT (2018). film still

Twitter nowadays has more fun reading. Another tweet to send to their curator friend: “#Hamburgerbahnof #udokittelmann What’d a museum wall tell us? Berlin is home to 250k Turks/ Kurds as largest community outside. No Berliner from Turkey was ever nominated for Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst since2000 #nevinaladag #vironerolvert #ahmetogut #mehtapbaydu” There was a picture of a wall with the chronological order of the last 20 years‘ candidates, and yes, there was no one from Turkey. They went online to Google those names. Artists related to the Turkish context. Some they know. Vert. Der Sling mit Gebetsteppich ist geil. The next was a cynical one. In a hot-collector’s car with leopard print car seats, some Kunstverein Directors were posing and a hearted “BFF” emoji was just pasted on their faces with some useful information: “#Germany approved two arms sales to #SaudiArabia in the first six months of the year, worth a total of €831... according to #Economy #Ministry figures. #meanwhile #german artjetset on #researchtrip” They saved only the image from the last Tweet, they kind of felt for the Global Princess of the Art World on the Vogue cover. She was hot. Her face has a curious look but with a very deep meaning in her eyes… Le mal de vivre but also euphoria. She is interesting... Maybe she would be up for a non-binary experience? They already started daydreaming…

In the Middle of Sahara…

They just came back to reality with the ring of the phone.

The melody of Ultimate Connection for Now. Ah! It is the Curator Friend who received all on Twitter and now wants to talk over… It was all about the petition organised against the Grand Duke of the German Art. It was dicksoup on the menu again. They hated these white men who think that they know everything. The petition was for him talking bullshit at an artist talk event while he was in conversation with young generation prize winners, and an artist who was also a panelist got offended. They remembered him from years ago. It is still such a clear picture with him dancing at Karlsruhe after a symposium with few other curators and artists. At that time, the dude looked fun and opa-cool.

THEY Bully Strategy, Cancel Culture and The Why-don’t-you-invite-me-Market

by M I S A L A D N A N Y I L D I Z

Curator Friend: I do not know whether we can approach ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

47 him with our current contemporary dynamics of sociality. You know he still sends handwritten postcards. He is very sweet. I don’t think he was aware of the fact that anyone at any time can become a target of political correctness, or facebook activism, or anything! Anything that circulates, goes public, or transports today will definitely hit into these new filters. Some of these filters are critical.

Also the young generation is totally into it. They are organised. They are moving collectively. They are fun. So, there is no chance to win over them. I talked with him on the phone in the morning. He is sad.

Apologetic. He lost his partner some time ago. Most probably, he realised much later that going into a podium discussion on a few drinks was not a great idea at this time of the day. I got pretty sad for the artist. I am sure she would have liked to receive the prize with a meaningful discussion or celebration event. Is any one doing something for her?

They: I am sure that she will get a few residency and biennial offers this week. You no content-butalways-contemporary people suck. Scandals are okay for big guys in the art world, or only function for more establishment?

Curator Friend: I don’t think she will. But… Fuck you!

Sometimes they annoy friends with a blunt tone.

They thought to make a carrot cake for later to bring to the curator friend. He was sweet, but also annoying with his interior never ending patience, understanding and empathy for his contemporary art people. With everything, even your mother, cat or lover, it needs a critical distance.

An Early Afternoon Some time passed and they found themselves -thinking of him. Why? What is it going on in my head? They did not know why but all day long later they could not get the petition out of their head.

Few years ago, a tall lady that they used to support during her transition started to yell at them and later a stranger who was influenced by her hate speech spit at them at a party. It was about an unfortunate night when the police raid scared them and they thought they helped their friend. They felt guilty for days, weeks and months. They knew that they did not mean to damage their friend. The police were already there in the building. They did not want the police to get aggressive. They went inside the room, and brought the passport, they were really scared that they would harm their friend. How could they know that the decision of bringing that passport to the police will change their lives forever. They now even do not want to touch anyone's passport.

After that night, they became the target of the gang.

They were the family first. They lived together.

They danced together. They cooked together; they slept together. Now they were the gang against

them. They excluded them from conversations, did not let them use the kitchen or bathroom, finally managed to kick them out from the house. The gang was pretty organised. They managed to cancel their contribution from an event that they were going to take part after the poster was released. They wrote hateful and hurtful posts about them on social media. They did not know what to do when their own community judges, decides and penalizes their own members without listening… There was no fair hearing. They still do not know.

What a Nice Evening The cake was ready. They took the cake to an actress friend after she sent them a nice message to catch up for a drink.

Actress friend: Gay people are the most hard core.

They are the biggest gay police. I mean for both man and woman, gay. You know me. I am gay too.

But like… Wtf! People become cops for each other to decide who is more ethical than others… I do not know… It makes me sad to see people doing what they criticise at the others and enjoy their guilt pleasure, constantly a game between each other. Ay, let’s change the topic. Are you symptoms-free?

They: No, because I am a professional cough-er. I have smoked for years and I cough every morning.

Now I can not go on any date. If I will cough, or sneeze, it will end. This will end everything. When did you have good sex last time? No, great sex?

Actress friend: You mean on the stage or real? I read that it is the virus who needs to decide whether it wants to get spread over more places, people and bodies, or go deeper, kill better and take over, but less bodies... Interesting… It is like us and our relationships. Are we becoming our predators?

They were walking home. They were alone. They just felt for another drink and changed the walk towards their favorite bar. Then, they got in and immediately wrote “NO BULLY” on the window, which was misted over. The temporality of the water drops were really nice. The artist friend was inside.

He started to talk as he was never going to finish.

Artist friend: These are symptoms. For instance, there is this ongoing position for being the victim.

They are always the victims. For whatever happens, God sake. They are used to get every grant through the articulation of how they are victimised.

Artist Friend: What? Whatever… Third, they don’t produce art, they are always busy with applications.

Applications take forever, and after the excel file for the project is confirmed, the next one starts.

They: I think the institutions should be more critical, responsible and selective. Through their collector, one can become a blue chip gallery artist overnight and sell out the hot-critical content to the Hungry Museum that wants immediate headache pills.

Artist Friend: They are stuck within the same social circles, and also that key sentence: Why don’t you invite me?

They: Sounds very colonial.

Artist Friend: The beginning of the story was a bit different. There still felt a room for politics, commons and a new language for art. Who would say that we would find ourselves like Alice at the Wonder Gardens of the Oligarchy. In the old days, there was still a bit of hope, I mean with the educational turn, new institutionalism, radical curating; we got excited. There felt a bit of necessity to bring the critical inputs into this scene. Feminists, queers, decolonising experiments and ecological thoughts were invited… What we felt softly and nicely was only the honey on the finger of NeoLiberal Wave? Early 2000’s… Everything that looked new, experimental and alternative is now very established, mainstream and…

They: You mean like Spotify?

A beautiful dawn On the way home, they were happily drunk and were still thinking about the beer in their bodies. It seems that it is not possible to differentiate our bodies from our geographies… What we do to our lands, waters and air and what we do to our bodies are both interconnected.

Excluding by including, or including by excluding.

Or, acceptance, understanding, reflection. That night, they finally slept like a baby after days, weeks and months. They had a dream. They had an orgy with all the trans-non binary-queers, queens and kings, guys next door, sugar babes and daddies, otters and chasers… lovers of the planet. There were red, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, purple chi coming out of every one. Oh no! Also some indigo, turquoise, violet… It really felt warm, so warm… Everyone was kissing each other and touching their bodies with love, passion and intimacy….

They: You mean they fuck with White Shame.

Artist Friend: White Guilt. White Shame. White Whatever. White SM. Secondarily, they become very close to anyone 5 min after meeting them. Hi, Hans! Bye, Klaus! What’s up Udo! They: Now ice-cream‘d be good… You mean they deserve each other?

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

MISAL ADNAN YILDIZ is a Berlin based curator. He was the Director of Artspace Aotearoa in NZ until June 2017. Previous to that he held the position of Artistic Director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in Germany. He is a PhD candidate at Hafencity Hamburg. His proposals “Time Challenger” (2009) for HISK, Ghent; “There is no audience” (2009) for Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz; “Correct me if I'm critical” (2010) as a multi-venue project in Berlin for Swedish Embassy; “A History of Inspiration” (2013) for Palais de Tokyo, Paris as part of “Nouvelles vagues” (New Waves); “Mutterzunge” in Berlin for Curate Award were selected through open calls or curatorial competitions and manifested.

48

HFT THE GARDENER/BOTANICAL PRINTS/RANK 4: GOOGLE • US • SOFTWARE & COMPUTER SERVICES (2014-2015) Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art London and P.P.O.W. Gallery New York

SUZANNE TREISTER (b.1958 London UK) studied at St Martin's School of Art, London and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

T

he Solar Hijri calendar differs from the Gregorian Calendar used throughout the “West” which is based on rules implemented around the incorrect time that Jesus was born. Though similarly structured, the Solar Hijri, used throughout Iran and Afghanistan, is calculated most attentively to the earth’s rotation around the sun. Thus the sun signs of the Zodiac, similarly ancient and determined by early mathematicians align perfectly with the Solar Hijri and fit quite awkwardly inside the Gregorian (giving rise to the myth of “cusp” signs).

Astrology is an infinite logic of relationships and coincidences and what I love most about this field of knowledge is the animus in which Serious People dismiss these attempts at complexity and nuance. Once a Sagittatius told me he was in fact an American. As the most bizarre and terrifying thing descended during the rebirth of the Zodiac, the stars will offer a guide for interpreting the actual weirdness that is our lives.

49 minder as to why the ancient ones believed disease was divine sanction for our collective sin. I fear Leo that your spirit remains the last wild thing in a world that welcomes domination. As you roam the range of your confinement, abandon the performative and embrace the authentic. The only way out— ask the escape artist— is to dig deeper.

Jungfrau / Shahrīvar / ‫رویرهش‬ The Revolution already happened, untelevised and honestly pretty unorganized. Now that we find ourselves in the aftermath, we survey our survival packs, who we deemed essential and that which we ruled unsustainable. Sometimes Berlin looks like someone threw a party or started a war and refused to clean it up.

The spring brings us the wise Pink Moon in Virgo and asks us to take only what we need and to leave the rest.

HOROSCOPE

by H A L L I E F R O S T Widder/ Farvardīn / ‫نیدرورف‬ On March 21st the sun crossed the celestial equator, equalizing night and day, a harmony we ignored as we scrambled to find shelter. The same day Nowruz, the Persian New Year, fell on silenced streets, Aries season, restless and hungry, found us in fresh exile, half mad from fear and quite literally demanded that we orient ourselves to action. You cannot stay here.

Lean into your fire and the self is given to impetus.

Stier/ Ordībehešt / ‫تشهبیدرُا‬ The world has already changed. Like puberty, like falling in love, like dying, all things you have been waiting for shall come to pass. The world has already changed and without a choice, you along with it. The sun returns to Taurus, so loyal, so determined, as the days of quarantine grow long. These days you will be asked time and time again to provide comfort. Leave the cigarettes on the tray, the first life that you will save will be your own.

Waage / Mehr / ‫رهم‬ When a political system routinely devalues oppressed and disabled bodies and in a healthcare crisis we are forced to make choices about who gets care according to Darwinian models; we flirt dangerously with eugenics. As Healers are gathering on the unfortunate horizon of speculating one quality of life over another, Libra!!! Teach us not to measure but to interrogate every factor that society considers detrimental to quality of life. Low-Income, Age, HIV status, Disability, Weight, Appearance, on which side of a border you were born. Hypatia of Alexandria (350- 415 BCE) wrote that the plagues of her time were caused by government corruption and inequality between people. Do not misunderstand: This sickness came from the belly of Capitalism. Dear America, do not let my people die.

Zwillinge / Khordād / ‫دادرخ‬ Gemini will spend their quarantine romancing every online friend they’ve made since the days of early internet. Lovers dial their exes during the last hours of sunlight searching for their twin or renewing effort into the many interactions that could have bloomed more significantly. Who knows the variant paths your life could have taken, bound by a compass which always ruled True to Love. Everyone will fall for you and this time it will be enough.

Krebs / Tīr / ‫ریت‬ The period of house arrest demands adaptations of radical hospitality. It’s us, the rest of the world that now needs Cancerian genius, a wisdom that is untaught. Find ways to comfort your people without drawing them to you. And when you have grown tired of people, of the words and the world, as you often do— turn off your phone. Position closed eyelids under the sun. Enjoy as only you can the way early spring assails your hermitage.

Löwe /Mordād / ‫دادرم‬ Of the pestilences that a foreign god sent to 2020, the Netflix offering of Tiger King has served as a re-

Schütze / Āzar / ‫رذآ‬ Everyday I sit down and try to think of something to say. Writing gives order to the morning and on a grander scale helps inform history. Language being the lame tool at our disposal to separate the Before from the Now and then construct plans that we may not follow through on in the After. Whether you sit all day writing love letters Sagittarius, whether you sit all day writing lists, whether all you can do right now is grieve or you cannot sit still until you have a plan. May the story of this plague be written by every tired poet, and sung by all fallen saints.

Skorpion / Ābān / ‫نابآ‬ You cannot be abandoned. You must carry the others with you. On the landscaped moon we inhabit there are Scorpions and there are Doves, each thriving in maximum utility for a grieving world. Alone is where I imagined myself and now that physical touch is gone, I’ve lost the borders of my own body and you, your’s. Recall the grand performance that is ripping your clothes off, drunk, in front of a new lover. Remember the way home. My Plague Daddy!

Come dance with me for the living and when we find ourselves together again we will dance for the dead.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • APRIL 2020

Steinbock / Dey / ‫ید‬ Yes, you can avoid yourself. With tasks and lists, with money and degrees, with no money and lovers and when your lover is asleep, with your phone.

Yes, you can avoid yourself, with endless plans and ambitions, dreams from childhood and responsibilities that the passing years add. Yes, you can avoid yourself with theories on the construction of self, with that which you claim is your’s. Your armor is paper and a storm is here. Cling not to the Self but to the Rock, Capricorn. There’s only a room where you are until you are not.

Wasserman / Bahman / ‫نمهب‬ The bulk of celestial weight that cued our collective exile fell as Saturn entered Aquarius on March 21st. Saturn who is the ruler of limits, restrictions and challenges now sits in the eleventh house, your house Aquarius, of social groups and society. For what purpose do the stars demand social distance and re-ordering? Here is a moment to carefully consider how we may come together again. How can we be together after all the shit I put you through? Your gift is not atonement but visions. When Saturn releases you from his tyrannical discipline on July 1st, what have you to offer us? What are we going to do?

Fische / Esfand / ‫دنفسا‬ This crisis befalls this generation to whom world wars were history and Shakespeare’s plays homework in high school. The Jacobean dramas, country ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality fables, we cast aside to passively consume whatever horror the internet was suggesting. Even if this is the worst thing that has ever happened to you Pisces— remember that the world has ended many times before. For the Mayans; for those counting the days to the Rapture; for the ones attempting to cross the river at night; for the last ones who speak their language. At the end of the world, we will find ourselves, however unwilling, compelled to carry on.

The silent earth offers herself to our imagination.

HALLIE FROST has withered leaves for hands, sweet smoke rising and her moon sign is trash.

The images belong to the performative installation at KW "My yellow is yours, your red is mine" by NIGIN BECK, a playful reflection on all traditions evolving around Nowruz, the celebration of the New Year and the most important holiday in Iran as well as in parts of Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, China, Georgia, Kurdistan and Pakistan.

KASRA RAHMANIAN, ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛНА АМНЕЗИЯ (2020)

ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛНА

АМНЕЗИЯ OT

Н Е Д А Г Е Н О ВА

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е е ново твърдението, че ежедневието на работниците, заети в сферата на културата, става все по-фрагментирано. Никого не може да изненада и това колко споделено е усещането за фундаментална социална и икономическа несигурност, предизвикани от „гъвкавите“ договори и лошите условия на труд в редица институции като музеи, галерии и университети. Освен съвсем конкретните материални и социални ефекти, които тези условия имат върху все по-прекаризираните ни животи, можем да намерим отраженията им и във възможността за политическа организация в сърцето на институциите, в които се опитваме да се закрепим. Предизвикателствата пред възможността за такава организация са множество: как да изградим база за солидарна борба, при положение, че самата среда изисква от нас да се изправяме отново и отново едни срещу други, срещу онези, които би трябвало да са наши естествени съюзници? Да кандидатстваме за същите позиции като приятелите и колегите си; да сравняваме финансовите показатели на факултетите си с тези на указаните като „дефицитни“? Да си отдъхваме, когато установим, че този път не сме попаднали в последния списък на финансово неустойчивите отдели; да сме благодарни на позиции, които затвърждават несигурното ни положение? Един от най-пагубните ефекти на настоящата ситуация е именно интерпелирането на работниците в логиката на пазарната рентабилност и конкурентноспособност. Както пише Марк Фишър в добилото си култов статус есе върху „капиталистическия реализъм“, последният е характеризиран от циничното откъсване на субективното ни разбиране за това колко несправедливи са нещата, от една страна, от необходимостта да продължаваме да действаме по същия начин, за да осигурим оцеляването си, от друга. Тази цинична дистанция се оказва структурно необходима за логиката на самия капитализъм. Наред със споменатото разделяне и изправяне едни срещу други на работници, заети на различни (йерархизирани) позиции в рамките на една и съща институция, все поосезаема става обаче и един друг тип дистанция – времевата такава. За да фокусирам и ситуирам малко повече настоящия текст, ще набележа няколко развития в институцията, в която работя самата аз. Считана е за един от прогресивните и сравнително успешни университети с хуманитарна насоченост, но като всяка друга институция в контекст на засилващо се навлизане на пазарни принципи, и тя е доминирана от сбирщина некомпетентни, но пък алчни мениджъри. Освен националната стачка, в която активно участваме, към настоящия момент трябва спешно да противостоим и на плановете на новоназначената ни ректорка да „развие“ университета, съкращавайки академичен и административен персонал и централизирайки управленската му структура. За някой, който като мен е ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

прекарал известно време в тази институция, настоящата ситуация се явява като особено гротескно раздуто déjà vu – почти целият ми престой в нея е характеризиран от непрекъснати борби срещу университета. Малко след като започнах докторантурата си преди няколко години, започнаха да се разпространяват слухове за това, че центърът, в който тогава бях базирана, ще бъде затворен. Така, в продължение на няколко месеца, фокусът на нашите дискусии не беше от академичен характер, а потенциалното, непотвърдено, но все пак почти сигурно затваряне на въпросния център. И така до поредната вечер, прекарана в нищене на въпроса защо това се случва и доколко е свързано със скандал с двама вече напуснали преподаватели, които са били обвинени в сексуално посегателство върху студентки. Тогава заедно с други колеги решихме да инициираме среща с тогавашния ръководител на отдела ни. На срещата се стекоха не само докторанти и студенти, но и преподаватели, които – оказа се – също не разполагат с повече информация върху предстоящото закриване. Оказа се, че и, макар слуховете за закриването на центъра да циркулират от доста време, административното решение е било официално взето едва няколко седмици преди тази неформална среща. Причините: финансова неефикасност. Нито дума от страна на управляващите университета за онова, което три години по-късно все още се лансира като действителната, скрита, причина за решението им – а именно, репутационните щети, нанесени му от скандала, състоял се една-две години по-рано. И до ден-днешен, след серия от (неуспешни) петиции, (изтощаващи) срещи с мениджмънта, почивни дни, прекарани в организационна дейност и официална тъжба срещу университета (отнела почти две години, преди да бъде решена в наша полза), официалната позиция е все още, че причините за затварянето на центъра ни са нямали общо със случаите на сексуално насилие в него. До ден-днешен отворен и потенциално трансформативен разговор за сексизма в образователна институция с репутация на „лява“ и „прогресивна“ такава, не се проведе. Затова пък всички, които продължихме да работим в институцията, останахме с усещането, че сме наказани и маргинализирани за действията на двамата насилника, но и заради това, че университетът предпочете да сключи споразумения за конфиденциалност със засегнатите млади жени, така че те реално да нямат легалната възможност да говорят открито за случилото се. Намериха се и хора, включително неправдоподобно кичещи се със званието „феминистки”, които да се възползват от случая, за да увеличат собствената си репутация, заемайки твърде лесната в случая позиция на морално превъзходство и празнувайки затварянето на центъра. Какво общо има тази история със сегашните борби в сферата на висшето образование? Струва ми се, че може да бъде взета за повод да се набележат няколко теми. От една страна, институции като моята, в която повече от половината от заетите работят на непостоянни договори на половин, четвъртин, или една десета работен ден, разчитат на непрекъснатия човекопоток. Малко от тези най-прекаризирани работници остават в същия университет в продължение на повече от няколко години. Така разпокъсаността и липсата на континуитет създава условия за институционална амнезия, в която уроци от борби, провели се в близкото минало, не могат да бъдат ефективно предадени на други. Необходимо е да впрегнем сили в измислянето на начини да споделяме политическия си опит на борба срещу и от вътрешността на институциите – както на тези, които скоро ще бъдат (или вече са) поставени в същата позиция като нас, така и на онези, които се борят на други места и с други средства. Същевременно и днес, както и тогава, винаги се намират опортюнисти, които да се възползват от вечната атака над работещите и учещите в университета. Това обуславя необходимостта да сме нащрек и култивираме в политическите си формации способността да разпознаваме, назоваваме и противостоим на тези „микро-фашизми“ по Дельоз и Гатари. Докато борбите ни на всички нива не спрат да вземат за отправна точка идентичностните и привидно солидни основи („аз като феминистка/преподавателка/българка“; „ние като факултет по история/ културология/литература“), опасността от впримчването им в хегемонни, йерархични и насилствени структури ще продължи да стои на дневен ред. Наместо това трябва да формираме и намираме изразните средства, чрез които да правим публични и достъпни за различни субективности все повече връзки и съюзи, които не само да дават отпор на капиталистически, расистки, сексистки форми на потисничество, но и в крайна сметка да сринат из основа техните институции и инструменти. За да ги изградим наново, заедно.

NEDA GENOVA holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and (still) teaches at Goldsmiths University of London.

She is interested in the politics of time, the relationship between space and narration as well as in feminist and post-colonial approaches to thinking institutional spaces. She is a member of the editorial collective of dVERSIA magazine.

Issue 11 • FEBRUARY 2020

HFT THE GARDENER/BOTANICAL PRINTS/RANK 1: APPLE • US • SOFTWARE & COMPUTER SERVICES (2014-2015) Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art London and P.P.O.W. Gallery New York

SUZANNE TREISTER (b.1958 London UK) studied at St Martin's School of Art, London and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilising various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, Treister has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.

ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS

Issue 11 • FEBRUARY 2020

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