Journal der Künste 14 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

JUNGE AKADEMIE IN THE COLOURS OF DARKNESS THE “USELESS” BRECHT REHEARSES GALILEO ENGLISH EDITION NOVEMBER 2020

P. 3

P. 24

P. 43 NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

EDITORIAL

RADICAL WORLD-BUILDING – THE CITY OF BEGUMPURA

NEO-FASCISM TODAY – A DEBATE AT THE EAST GERMAN AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE IN THE SPRING OF 1979

Kathrin Röggla

Sahej Rahal in conversation with Clara Herrmann P. 5

Haiko Hübner P. 28 CARTE BLANCHE

ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES OPEN CONTINENT

IN THE COLOURS OF DARKNESS

Berlin Manifesto

Péter Nádas

P. 46

“A MAN RUNNING OUT OF TIME” BRECHT REHEARSES GALILEO (1955/56) P. 6

P. 36 KUNSTWELTEN

Stephan Suschke

“THE ‘USELESS’ HAVE TO COME TOGETHER”

ON MY WAY – STORIES FROM EUROPE

P. 48

Mark Lammert in conversation with Johannes Odenthal

Marion Neumann, Kristiane Petersmann, Moritz Nitsche

FINDS

P. 10 JUNGE AKADEMIE

P. 37

“O DICHT’, SOLANG’ DU DICHTEN KANNST!” (“O WRITE, AS LONG AS YOU CAN WRITE!”) THE AUTOGRAPH BOOKS OF SUSI ALBERTI

THE JUNGE AKADEMIE

“EXPLORING THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF A BODY OF WATER”

Werner Grünzweig Clara Herrmann

Annesley Black in conversation with Tuan Do Duc

P. 50

P. 38

DIGITAL.ADK.DE – THE ARCHIVES OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE PRESENT THEIR DIGITAL SHOWCASE

P. 14

BETWEEN SAINT PETERSBURG AND BERLIN – OBSERVATIONS OF A STUCK NOMADIC THEATRE ARTIST

“AN ILLUSTRATION IS NOT AN IMAGE”

Ada Mukhina

Kerstin Hensel in conversation with Tuan Do Duc

Werner Heegewaldt

P. 52 FREUNDESKREIS P. 18

P. 39

THE RADICAL INDEPENDENCE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

“DAY BELONGS TO THE LIVING BEINGS, NIGHT TO THE THINGS”

Kaj Duncan David

Gesine Bey and Elena Zieser in conversation with Martina Krafczyk

P. 21 P. 40

LIGHT IN HIS HANDS – FERHAT BOUDA Hubertus v. Amelunxen

THE KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRIZE – A PRIZE FROM ARTISTS FOR ARTISTS Anke Hervol

“THIS IS ABOUT THE MARGINS IN THE MIDDLE OF SOCIETY” Anne Schönharting and Jörg Brüggemann in conversation with Rainer Esser

EDITORIAL A warm welcome to all as you read this!

Now everyone is picking up where they left off and, to borrow loosely from Rolf Dieter Brinkman, one might add “once again”. But not us.

In other words, that is precisely what I will not do here. What does it mean to set foot in the Akademie der Künste after months of shutdown? Each and every person answers that question differently. I for one was euphoric at the prospect of having this real spatial experience. But are we really back and “on-site”? The Iranian JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow Farhad Delaram, from the Film and Media Arts Section, was here the entire time, and he turned his experience of last spring into a film, or rather an animistic reanimation of the Düttmann building on Hanseatenweg. The film, for which we are grateful, is entitled Expo Pandemic and can be found on the new digital platform junge-akademie.adk.de.

The JUNGE AKADEMIE is one focus of this issue, despite the difficult working conditions it has faced. Take ADA MUKHINA, our Russian fellow in the Performing Arts Section, who found herself more between rather than in the cities of Saint Petersburg and Berlin, describing the online editions of two theatre festivals: the durational The Access Point and the compressed Radar Ost Digital.

Improvisation and the translation of performative intimacy into the digital realm are central in this comparison between East and West.

For our member MARK LAMMERT, being “on-site” meant being in the studio. In a conversation with JOHANNES ODENTHAL, he explores the implications of the lockdown for artistic productivity.

This conversation led not only to the question of what is essential, but also to the need to accept latency, as well as the insight that errors must be included in transparency, as many virologists have demonstrated in scientific practice.

It is clear that this period has brought fundamental orientations into question. With institutional self-examination more urgent than ever, we must ask: What is the JUNGE AKADEMIE, and what can it do? Its director, CLARA HERRMANN, outlines the activities of this multifaceted programme as it struggles to make gains in freedom, attempts to create diversity, works toward making the marginalised visible, and, quite simply, strives to secure mobility for artists. As a concrete expression of this work, HUBERTUS V. AMELUNXEN introduces us to the Algerian photographer FERHAT BOUDA, recipient of the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship 2020.

No one will doubt that the process of transforming our society has received an enormous boost with digitalisation, which for the Academy also presents a challenge. A former fellow, the composer KAJ DUNCAN DAVID, puts forward some fundamental thoughts on artificial intelligence and its – naive – anthropomorphisation; and SAHEJ RAHAL discusses the anti-democratic potential of myth in building a history of the Hindu nation, which must be answered by creating hybrid counter-narratives. One suitable medium for this could be the archives’ new digital showcase,

as reported on by the director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, WERNER HEEGEWALDT. We again present finds from the archives. STEPHAN SUSCHKE reveals the audio recordings of the Galileo rehearsals from 1955, bringing us closer to the work of Brechtian theatre. WERNER GRÜNZWEIG presents the autograph books of SUSI ALBERTI, daughter of the famous Hungarian music publisher Victor Alberti.

Neo-fascism today – this title leads us into the present in an altogether unexpected way. Taking the 1979 conference of the Academy (East) as a departure point, HAIKO HÜBNER points out some important background to the current debate on right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism. Looking back at the history of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, ANKE HERVOL describes how the politics of awarding the prize turned it into a regulatory instrument in East Germany’s state-controlled art business.

Our second focus is on the KUNSTWELTEN programmes, which are devoted, surprisingly and necessarily in these times, to the idea of travel. In the project ON MY WAY – Stories from Europe, KERSTIN HENSEL, along with pupils from Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Gröbzig, embarked on an exploratory tour in the footsteps of Daniel Chodowiecki and Emilio Vedova. “Travels of the Mind” were also the subject of the workshop A Very Boring Room, based on the work of Anna Seghers, which GESINE BEY and ELENA ZIESER staged with schoolchildren from Wolfen. Not to be neglected in this context are the small canoe excursions and percussion explorations that the composer and musician ANNESLEY BLACK undertook with school classes.

The influx of darkness is evident not only in Hungary. In our Carte Blanche section, PÉTER NÁDAS of the Literature Section shows – from his second life as a photographer – that darkness can have a very different effect than simply the absence of light. He examines and plays with the shortcomings of digital photography.

The Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste has supported our major exhibition “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe” by the photographers of OSTKREUZ. A discussion between RAINER ESSER, deputy chairman of the Board of the Society, and the managing directors of OSTKREUZ, ANNE SCHÖN­ HARTING and JÖRG BRÜGGEMANN, provides insight into the exhibition, which highlights a topic that preoccupies us: What is it that defines Europe; what unites it and what are its problems?

“On-site” means in Europe. That much is clear following our large Academy Conference, which culminated in the MANIFESTO that we publish here. The democracy-preserving effect of broadbased artistic networks and institutions must be utilised differently today, especially in relation to civil society.

In this regard, I hope that we all make it smoothly through the “dark period”.

Sincerely, Kathrin Röggla

Jordis Antonia Schlösser, Jewish Community Center in Łódź, 2018. From the series “The Unexpected Generation – New Jewish Life in Eastern Europe”, 2016–18.

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The photograph is part of the exhibition “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe”

by OSTKREUZ, on display at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz until 10 January 2021 (see p. 52).

ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES OPEN CONTINENT

OUR DEMANDS & MEASURES

• We call for a unified solidarity between the art and cultural

institutions in Europe. Only across all borders can art, culture and science develop in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Only together, we will succeed in maintaining and defending this free space for the future.

• We exchange information transnationally and directly on

cultural policy developments in our countries and we disseminate the news through our own communication channels and in our own networks.

BERLIN MANIFESTO In some European countries we are currently experiencing cultural policies that understand art and culture only nationally and are increasingly regulating them. As a result, the autonomy of many academies, museums and cultural institutions is being jeopardized.

We would like to do something against this development: So far 60 art academies and cultural institutions from countries of the European Union, Great Britain and Norway, are joining to form an “Alliance of Academies” on the initiative of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Together we stand up for the right to freedom of art throughout Europe, which is stipulated in Article 13 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

• We support the exchange of art and artists within our institu-

tions, particularly those who may be experiencing socio-political restraints in the exercise of their artistic work or in their freedom of expression.

• We demand that art and culture become an integral part of European politics.

• We call on politicians throughout Europe to protect and defend

the right to artistic freedom and the autonomy of the institutions in accordance with Article 13 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU. And – wherever necessary – to support the art academies and the artists on the advice of our Alliance.

Berlin, 9 October 2020

WHAT DOES THE ALLIANCE STAND FOR?

• Art and Culture are essential for a functioning democracy

and for social cohesion. We stand for the freedom of the arts as a prerequisite for our cultural, social and political way of life.

The independence of artistic positions and institutions from political, national and religious prescriptions is the foundation of democracy.

• Being here in Berlin we are particularly aware – as a conse-

quence of the disasters of the 20th century caused by Germany – of the responsibility to think of the EU as part of a transnational cultural (peace) project.

• We stand for cultural diversity in Europe and in our societies.

We want to recall the “blind spots” that the European wars of conquest left in the world, of the colonial power structures that continue to have an impact in many countries today.

• We stand with the arts for a humanism that opposes all

forms of racism, discrimination and violence. We also defend human rights for those who were not born in Europe but who seek a chance for survival and peaceful coexistence here.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

Jeanine Meerapfel, president of the Akademie der Künste and initiator of the Alliance.

A Conference of European Cultural Institutions Since assuming the presidency of the Akademie der Künste, Jeanine Meerapfel has been pursuing the idea of establishing a European alliance of art academies that will stand up for the freedom and autonomy of art. Now, some seventy representatives from art academies and cultural institutions across Europe have followed her appeal and come together, from 8 to 10 October 2020, to form a “European Alliance of Academies”. In light of recent developments such as the curtailed autonomy of the Budapest University for Theatre and Film, all those involved recognised the urgent need for action. After a series of lectures by Robert Menasse, A. L. Kennedy, Bénédicte Savoy, Philipp Ther, Basil Kerski, and others, the alliance adopted the OPEN CONTINENT manifesto, which will serve as the foundation for future cooperation. www.allianceofacademies.eu

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“THE ‘USELESS’ HAVE TO COME TOGETHER”

ON PAUSING AND MOVING ON IN CORONA TIMES

MARK LAMMERT IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHANNES ODENTHAL

JOHANNES ODENTHAL Mark,

you are a professor of painting and drawing at the Berlin University of the Arts. We know you as an artist who very much seeks out the technical foundation, the haptic approach, as you say. What does it mean to teach art students during the coronavirus pandemic?

MARK LAMMERT The situation, if I am to describe it in concrete terms, is a waiting room. This means, at best, you can rethink things.

You can discuss processes and question things. It is, of course, a remarkable state of affairs that has not existed for a long time: it is a pause in the literal sense. It is a “pause”, and strangely enough, that is understood quite well. So, what does “strangely enough” mean? That is understood and that, I think, actually makes you feel optimistic.

Could you say that this “pause” is an opportunity for the arts sector but a catastrophe for the production sector, for the fabric of society?

ML This is being said without taking the social situation into account. And here the political sphere has obviously failed to make the shift, in that it has not declared the whole semester “void” but is instead offering students a Hartz-IV-credit reform loan, which, when you think it through, they will then have to pay off like a BAföG student grant. But I still maintain that, regardless of the difficult economic situation, there is actually something very productive about this pause. That is my impression.

JO

I asked because this kind of pause had seemed impossible. Stopping this system of output seemed unrealistic in any scenario. But this is now also an extraordinary opportunity to respond to everything relating to the war against nature, the destruction of the planet. Where do you see an opportunity for change, so that we as a society can come out of this situation with something other than the dynamics of growth and output?

ML Whether you take what you say figuratively or literally, nature might be astonished that humanity is able to pause at all. To pause also involves slowing down, and perhaps something will come out of this astonishment of nature in the figurative sense. Because I believe it is a dialogical question. A completely different sense of belonging to a location has emerged, which is changing both the desire to travel and the places themselves. I find that people are

acknowledging nature as a partner, and perhaps nature is also acknowledging us. And a third form that never existed before may emerge from this. I think a quantum leap is possible.

JO It is interesting that certain processes have been accelerated and reinforced. This applies, for example, to conspiracy theories, which are being developed in every direction by socially critical camps. Social consensus is becoming more and more ruptured and turning into somewhat confused constellations. What position do you take?

ML That would probably be the last question I would ask: what position someone takes. The first question you have to ask is whether the image of a divided society can be explained in one sentence, or whether society is in fact about to split into an utterly incomprehensible relationship with history, an utterly incom­prehensible relationship with the present, and an utterly incomprehensible relationship with the future. If you throw it all into one pot – future, present, past – then this image emerges. But essentially, you have to fan it out very finely: what is the past, what is the reaction to the present, and what action is taken regarding the future? First the process of history must be clarified. This was made abundantly clear this spring when the 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz and the liberation of Germany were marked, and the reactions in lockdown were suddenly completely different to what they would normally have been. I think it was a good thing that it was clearly impossible to just tick it off, that it’s not just a matter of laying flowers.

JO

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Not ritualising history in symbolic acts and, as you say, ticking them off, but rather understanding it as a continuous process of social and individual transformation.

ML And an instance of latency. You have to endure it. And I believe that endurance is the central theme of what we have experienced over the last few months. So how do you endure if you can’t tick that item off the list? To put it bluntly, an empty calendar.

JO

Coronavirus is a force of nature that has synchronised the whole of Europe and the world.

You have been listening to Christian Drosten’s podcast over the past few months. There wasn’t much to hear from the art scene. It is the hour of the virologists. Do we have to strengthen the dialogue with science? Or do you actually see a change in discourse?

ML Coronavirus is a force of nature that has synchronised the whole of Europe and the world. It is, after all, a shared experience, a social experience. I find that very interesting. You have to be careful regarding the function of the artist or scientist here. We are certainly not virologists. On the other hand, society has been divided into “useful” and “unnecessary”. The significance of the moment was marked by the British Queen and the German Chancellor, both of whom spoke of the most serious problem since the Second World War. I can’t say if that is true. But what I really liked about how the scientists presented themselves, seen from an entirely methodological perspective, was their ability to turn around the next day and say, I now know something different, I know something different today than I knew yesterday. Error is essentially embedded in this transparency. I know just as little as you; I can only read it differently as a navigator. Without having to understand or learn the method, I am prepared to work with error. For years, society lacked the ability to allow for error. And now it is mandatory because it is based on scientific research results. There is potential in this, because it is actually what unites the arts, even in their crisis situations.

JO

Angela Merkel’s scientific competence became a remarkable strength that was highly impressive in the face of authoritarian political positions.

ML Only Germany and New Zealand can make this claim. But I also see a very strong female component there, which should not be underestimated.

JO

I would like to speak about fear. Fear plays a crucial role in dealing with the extraordinary situation of the pandemic. Frank Castorf’s position was very provocative: that theatre has always addressed death and that this moment of Agon, especially when you look at Ancient Greek theatre or even Heiner Müller right up to the theatre of Artaud or Kantor – that theatre could not serve this function of overcoming fear. It really troubled me that this voice was suddenly no longer possible, and that someone like Castorf was then written off as a reckless rebel when he had in essence formulated something existential.

ML Twelve or fifteen years ago, the Frankfurter Allgemeine printed a double-page article listing all known phobias; there were four hundred of them. If you look them up on Wikipedia now, there are eight hundred. This means an incredible number of fears have been added to those that already existed. This also means fears have become more differentiated. A look at the Berliner Ensemble’s auditorium reveals the most vivid image of this. What has changed there is the seating arrangement for the audience. Nothing has changed on stage. What has changed is the audience’s situation; it is no longer the Brecht formula of “penis-vulva, penisJO

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vulva, penis-vulva”; suddenly there is a one-person island and a two-person island, and distributed across the space this takes on a sort of anti-ornamental value. This may lead to something; we will have to see. But I found it very striking as an image of what is generally called municipal theatre in Germany.

JO You are also engaged in dialogue with intellectuals such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Alexander García Düttmann, which is very important to you. Do the arts need to become even more united intellectually or to strengthen the artistic discourses?

ML The “useless” have to come together; there is no other way.

I think the time to whine and complain is over right now. I had to get used to the fact that the option of going to work was actually only intended for those who are necessary and useful. But I did go to the studio.

I am very curious to see whether this gift, this period of concentration, of at least one month without appointments, really was productive. We can at least say that it has not been clear for quite some time that thinking depends on elemental things, things that come from an anti-hedonistic tradition. We have to look at it from the perspective of how interesting it is to see who has lost their sense of humour and who has not. And by that I don’t mean ridiculing something. But there has also been something unbearable about it insofar as this comparison with the Second World War, although it may apply economically, doesn’t really hold up in everyday life and isn’t helpful. And I think it is appropriate – and this should be welcome news to an academy of the arts – to say with confidence that we now have to talk about what is essential.

We always try to do that, but it cannot be just about the trivial frugalities of everyday life.

Nevertheless, we also have to think about the situation in the arts at the moment. Why, for example, has a large New York gallery suffered no business losses while others no longer exist at all? Why are the museums suddenly open, and why is the act of opening a museum more important than the number of visitors?

No longer meeting these quotas is, perhaps, something progressive; the question is again who is coming and not how many.

I find the term “slow art” interesting. A kind of minimalism, of meditation, of direct confrontation and aesthetic analysis, everything that is happening less and less in this commercialised art world, where it’s all about champagne glasses and being seen.

ML However, some word combinations really should be killed off, for example Solobeschäftigte (solo-employed), which only recently appeared, perhaps as a summary of artistic and related work. It has been made abundantly clear to us that both the incomprehensibility of the social circumstances of artists and their separateness from society are facts – as the statistics of the artists’ social security fund would indicate.

JO

I would like to discuss a project we planned about a year or a year and a half ago. It was about Godard and Müller.

JO

Studio view after the lockdown.

ML I find it quite exciting that Godard, who hadn’t spoken publicly for almost a year and a half, spoke for three quarters of an hour when quarantine began, and primarily about the consequences of films and film history, precisely about this materiality. I do think that someone who is almost 90 years old, or will turn 90 this year, choosing precisely this moment to express himself was very considered.

Because to squander the opportunity offered by this isolation really would have been a pity. In this respect, I would say that the Academy’s self-experiment, which we undertook with the project “Wo kommen wir hin” (“Where are we going”), that this self-understanding, would now be a completely different process than it was a year or a year and a half ago.

There was the subheading “Der Elephant im Raum” (“The elephant in the room”). And at that time, it was still assumed that this was a hybrid of art and politics. Now we know that it is in fact a natural entity again – something you don’t see. The virus cannot be seen. It’s an invisible enemy, but what you do see is a genome.

And this is once again an archaisation of the whole problem: one can invoke the visible, but the invisible is a reality.

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1 Wolfgang Höbel, “Ich möchte mir von Frau Merkel nicht sagen lassen, dass ich mir die Hände waschen muss” (“I don’t want to be told that I have to wash my hands by Mrs Merkel”), the theatre director Frank Castorf on coronavirus policy, SpiegelOnline (28 April 2020).

MARK LAMMERT, a visual artist and set designer, is a member of the Performing Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL is the programme director of the Akademie der Künste.

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Still from the video sculpture TERRITORY (2016) by Yvon Chabrowski.

THE JUNGE AKADEMIE

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Clara Herrmann

Residency programmes have a significant impact on artists’ careers.

They provide financial support as well as space and time for projects and ideas to be pursued free from everyday and economic pressures. They open up new networks of sponsors, experts, and artists, participation in thematic discourses, and new cultural inspiration. They are places of knowledge production, co-creation, and experimentation and promote the mobility of artists worldwide. The accompanying change of viewpoint is fundamental for artistic processes, research, and production. Most importantly, residency programmes enable those artists who cannot otherwise easily do so to participate in the art scene of the global North. The inviting institutions therefore bear a great deal of responsibility in deciding who is granted access to resources and networks. The demand for residencies increases year after year, and over time they have become a central pillar of cultural sponsorship and policy.1 The JUNGE AKADEMIE occupies a special position here: as a programme with fellowships in Berlin and abroad, it has exceptional resources in addition to the studios at Hanseatenweg, through its links to an international community of artists and access to diverse archives, artistic programmes, and extensive educational work. In return, the practices, themes, and international and local networks of the fellowship holders harbour immense potential for the ongoing development of this institution, especially against the backdrop of social and global change. A multitude of young and contemporary positions and discourses on art and politics update and contextualise content and knowledge about new narratives and aesthetics, opening them up to younger generations and diverse voices – independent of a predominant educational canon and the associated pictorial regimes. Fostering this exchange in the community of members and fellowship holders and making it visible to the outside world are among the foremost tasks of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, the programme work, and the networking process: the aim is to create common spaces for meeting, thinking, designing,

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

and acting. This experience at the place of residence, where artistic and social practices intertwine, is key to sustaining the networks and testing new forms of co-existence.

Residencies change their roles and structures in relation to social, cultural, and economic transformations, but also through the practices of the artists themselves, whose work today is increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary. This includes the exchange with science and business, transdisciplinary work on thematic complexes, and new digital technologies and discourses, above all artificial intelligence. The rapid advances of digital technology and the Internet are transforming society in all areas of life, in science, business, and politics, and we require the “other” level of reflection provided by the arts, which do not bow to the drive for technical progress and economic success. The JUNGE AKADEMIE has therefore instituted a new fellowship on the human-machine theme to support international artists in this field. The aim of the three-year programme is to develop creative, alternative, and even critical approaches to socio-political issues – with a focus on non-European perspectives to facilitate new narratives, patterns of thought, and approaches to the world.2 The JUNGE AKADEMIE consciously allows itself to be moulded by the inspiration of the artists and sees itself as a flexible space for the facilitation of outstanding individual positions and collective projects, which can take on any form and become visible in work presentations as well as in open studios, publications, and online and hybrid formats. Ideally, a project or theme develops across several formats and manifests itself in different components. Artistic processes are given the same priority as productions, which in turn require different lengths of time for research and realisation, and programme work will be oriented to this. As the post-fellowship period is often all-important for the further development of ideas and cooperation, special attention is paid to long-term work with alumni.

The JUNGE AKADEMIE operates on the basis of trust and focuses on the principle of hospitality in its practice.3 It stands for diversity and transcultural understanding, in terms of both content and structure. Its task is to create non-discriminatory spaces for non-hierarchical exchange and in opposition to cultural devaluation and racist and nationalist discourse. The diffuse fears, slogans, and mechanisms directed against the “other” or those who think differently, against heterogeneity, refugees and migrants, queer art and culture, or women – as well as the fixation on a supposedly homogeneous national identity, on narratives and a culture of remembrance that aim to preserve a mono-ethnic nation – are internationally comparable. As a hub of diverse artistic thought patterns and strategies,4 residency programmes create new opportunities to connect and learn from each other, in addition to reflecting on aesthetic processes and strategies – especially in a city like Berlin, which in recent years has again become a place of exile for many international artists.

Like other residency programmes, the JUNGE AKADEMIE advocates freedom of movement and the freedom of artists to choose their places of residence. This is one of the most basic

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human rights and one that is compromised in many nations. The guaranteed protection of this and other rights is the bedrock of residency work.5 Against this background, residencies are becoming increasingly important for artists. The JUNGE AKADEMIE also offers residencies to artists who campaign in their home country for artistic freedom, democracy, and human rights.6 But “artistic freedom” also means not having to advocate a certain position or certain themes in artistic work. The exploration of acts of attribution, institutional appropriation, and questions of difference, which in its emphasis always entails exclusion, forms part of the discussion on diversity.7 Through various artistic and discursive formats, the JUNGE AKADEMIE opens up a platform for a multitude of artistic voices, stories and historical images, self-conceptions and visions of the future that take account of the complex local and global realities and also question the Western understanding of art and artists. The fellowship holders are currently addressing a broad field of art and theory, including feminist, intersectional, and decolonial strategies, the politics of representation, the knowledge and art of indigenous cultures, discourses on sustainability, and digital topics and technologies. Just how this can be successfully linked to the Academy’s themes and programmes has been illustrated by, for example, the digital Laboratory of Contested Space on the subject of Art & Truthtelling.8 Curated by the JUNGE AKADEMIE with fellowship holder Lynn Takeo Musiol, in connection with the exhibition “John Heartfield – Photography plus Dynamite”, this was a series of online lectures and video contributions that examined historiography, digitality, and post-truth. For the year 2021, the JUNGE AKADEMIE will participate in the Akademie der Künste’s main theme of “memory work”: through individual artistic positions as well as the fellowship holders’ discursive and online formats, and in cooperation with members and external partners.

The coronavirus pandemic is threatening international exchanges. Even in Europe border closures have occurred and continue to occur. The virtual mobility the digital space provides thus acquires new significance for the connectivity and diversity of artistic communities. Last year, the JUNGE AKADEMIE started to work on a digital platform, which is envisaged as a transdisciplinary and transcultural online magazine, exhibition, and experimentation space as well as a digital open studio for artists and activists to explore their individual and collective voices and projects.9 Its purpose is to encourage networking among artists, fellowship holders, and Academy members and to make digital projects and the exchange of knowledge in the international network both possible and visible – in the form of discussions, works of art, (video) essays, stories, making-ofs, online laboratories, fictional texts, and much more besides. But the analogue does not simply disappear because of the digital; on the contrary, it is revalued and even upgraded. As cultural forms, certainties, conventions, and routines erode, new ones emerge, and residencies must actively participate in shaping them.10 The focus is always on encounters with people.

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1 See Andrea Glauser, Verordnete Entgrenzung. Kulturpolitik, Artist-in-Residence-Programme und die Praxis der Kunst (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), p. 14.

2 For further information on the fellowship programme funded by the innogy-Stiftung für Energie und Gesellschaft, see https://www.adk.de/en/academy/young-academy/ human-machine-fellowship/ 3 On this subject, see also the self-conception of the Working Group of German International Artist Residencies, of which the JUNGE AKADEMIE is a member, http:// www.kuenstlerresidenzen.de/ 4 In a speech at the Goethe-Institut conference “Dialogue and the Experience of the Other”, the then Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of artists’ residencies as necessary “hubs” for a “cultural intelligence” to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Retrievable from https:// www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/150223bm-konf-gi/269624 5 On this subject, see the Advocacy Topics at Res Artis, global network of artists’ residencies, https://resartis. org/res-artisadvocacy/ 6 These residencies are supported by the Martin Roth Initiative, https://www.martin-roth-initiative.de/en 7 On this subject, see the Hans-Ulrich Obrist interview “Die Gefahr der Monotonisierung”, KUNSTFORUM International Vol. 269, themed volume “Enzauberte Globalisierung” (2020), pp. 88–101.

9 Platform of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, https://jungeakademie.adk.de/en/ 10 Felix Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016).

CLARA HERRMANN is head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste.

Sasha Kurmaz, Untitled, 2011.

BETWEEN SAINT PETERSBURG AND BERLIN OBSERVATIONS OF A STUCK NOMADIC THEATRE ARTIST Ada Mukhina

Screenshot of the virtual Deutsches Theater Berlin: Forecourt.

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At the end of February, I flew from Berlin to Moscow for the presentation of our feminist performative conference, Locker Room Talk, at the “Golden Mask” Russian theatre festival. I was expecting to meet my mother and enjoy a well-earned rest in Saint Petersburg in March and then travel to Moscow for another show at the Meyerhold Theatre Centre. I was due back in Germany for a conference at the Akademie der Künste in April. However, the coronavirus made some adjustments of its own: theatres in Berlin were closed down on 13 March, and then in Moscow and Saint Petersburg on 17 and 18 March respectively. At the same time, the European Union closed its external borders to non-essential travel. I was stuck in lockdown in Saint Petersburg for four months. During that time, I became involved as both participant and spectator at two theatre festivals – one Russian, one German – which had quickly switched to an online format: The Access Point 1 and Radar Ost Digital 2. It is these festivals that I will talk about here.

development of The Access Point online – while renovating the apartment I had lived in as a child. In April, forty-four teams with the same number of online projects participated in the Spontaneous Programme, while the festival team was preparing its main and educational programmes.

“CLOUDME thanks you for this journey and reminds you that all actions leave traces. This is a unique cursor’s choreography, which you have created in the last half an hour”

SAINT PETERSBURG Just several days after the announcements of the closure of theatres in Saint Petersburg and the European Union’s travel restrictions, the Internet was inundated with live streams and videos of theatre performances. There was a sense of general panic among theatre-makers: “We will be forgotten! We have to fit into the new reality right now, but we don’t know how”. The Access Point, an independent festival of site-specific and immersive theatre,3 which usually takes place in the summer under the direction of Philipp Vulakh, managed to adapt swiftly and announced an open call for its Spontaneous Programme. From 22 March, everyone, regardless of their profession or educational status, was invited to send a description of ideas for online communication-based projects. “We wanted to respond to this challenge”, says Alexey Platunov, the programme’s curator. “People started to panic out of a fear of losing contact. People need people. Our idea was to create an environment for this communication. This was our priority, and only later did we ask ourselves: Where is the art here? What do we know about today’s Internet? Isn’t the Internet itself site-specific? And what does ‘site-specific’ mean when a ‘site’, that is the meeting place, is virtual? Besides, there was a sense that this turning point – when no one knows what to do – was a window of opportunity. You don’t know what to do either, and that’s why it’s possible to do what you want.”

According to Platunov, the festival was able to reinvent itself quickly because it is not an institution but a collection of like-minded people with smaller budgets and therefore lower levels of accountability. And hence a greater freedom.

The Access Point’s Spontaneous Programme became a platform for many online experiments by artists of every stripe and every school. The festival team did not allocate production budgets but provided organisational and PR support. They also regularly invited theatre critics to discuss the performances, art interventions, live streams, concerts, and that for which we still have no name. At the end of the programme, the festival pledged a small cash prize to some of the best projects. Along with all the other participants and spectators I was following the

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BERLIN On 13 March, when the closure of theatres in Berlin was announced, Birgit Lengers, the curator of Radar Ost – Deutsches Theater Berlin, was still experiencing, in her own words, “an irrational hope” that the festival would take place at the end of the season. She therefore flew to Kiev to watch the performance of a play that would be included in her curated programme. The female gaze in Eastern European theatre was a thematic focus at this year’s festival, which included plays by female authors and directors, and also shows in which the female voice was at the heart of the narrative. Tamara Trunova’s production of Natalia Vorozhbit’s Bad Roads, a play about the war in Ukraine from a woman’s perspective, is a prime example of this rarely presented position.

But while still in Ukraine, Birgit realised that the chances of being able to invite this production to Germany were slim. A day later the borders were closed and she caught one of the last flights back to Berlin.

In April I was in contact with Birgit on Facebook to clarify our plans: we wanted to come up with a joint project or set up a discussion within the festival. This was the first time that Birgit mentioned the idea about Radar Ost splitting from the Autoren[theater]tagen festival.

The latter was then postponed until the autumn. The Radar Ost festival was to be held as planned, in June, but now as an independent online festival. “For Deutsches Theater, Radar Ost is not simply a festival, it is a large number of contacts and relationships with artists from Eastern Europe and Russia”, says Birgit. “With the national borders closed, it is particularly important to continue our cultural exchange. We talked to our good colleagues and theatre partners from other countries, and they all immediately agreed: Let’s do something. It would be wrong for us to be totally inactive. Particularly

given our privileged position in Germany, when we have a fully funded festival, we simply have no right to say: We will not work because we don’t have optimal conditions for working and are forced to do things differently from how we normally do them.”

SAINT PETERSBURG At the beginning of May, The Access Point jury announced the Spontaneous Programme winners. According to Alexey Platunov, it was no easy task to rate the new digital creations. “At first we thought the experts would simply decide who was best, but after viewing more than forty completely different works, we realised we would need to judge quality in a different manner. Our experts (all active in the world of theatre) were faced with completely uncharted territory. Hence, we re-invented the ranking in our decision-making process, where “quality” was only one of the parameters.” As a result, the projects were evaluated on criteria such as their relevance, compatibility with the online platform, practical use, innovation, and so on. It was also important to the jury whether the project had been created specifically for an online format.

Debuts got extra points.

Parallel to a live-stream discussion of the Spontaneous Programme results – where audience members, participants, and jury members were able to express their opinions – curator Yulia Kleiman presented The Access Point’s educational online programme, filled with the names of Western theatre gurus. At the conclusion, Alexey Platunov announced the main programme, which included projects by directors from Russia and Western Europe that were specifically dedicated to the study of the digital sphere. Many of these projects were co-produced or commissioned by the festival. It is interesting to note that some projects and teams from the Spontaneous Programme were invited to join the main programme. I went on Zoom to watch one of these projects, CLOUDME by Maria Patsyuk and Nikolay Mulakov, a “digital response to Marina Abramović’s performance Rhythm 0”.

The concept of CLOUDME is elegant and simple: at the beginning of the session, the performer gives a

CLOUDME by Maria Patsyuk and Nikolay Mulakov. Screenshot from The Access Point.

“Welcome to CLOUDME. My name is Margarita. And this is my computer. If you turn off my VPN, everything will stop working. Please don’t do it. Everybody who would like to get access to my computer, please turn on your cameras. Now I am going to choose one of you by turning off, one by one, the cameras of the others.”

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Scene from Locker Room Talk. The green screen is used here to re-enact the sexist phrase “What if she had the body of Baywatch and the face of Crimewatch?” Malibu Beach can be seen as a projection on the virtual background. In addition, a virtual mask distorts the face of the performer (Ada Mukhina).

volunteer from the audience full control over his or her personal computer for 30 minutes. On the screen of my laptop, a performance unfolds whereby I, as a spectator, observe somebody (and myself) hacking into the life of another person in the here and now: viewing his or her notes and photos, listening to his or her music, replying to personal messages on social media. I see the faces of the “owner” and the “hacker” in the Zoom windows and watch their confusion, their smiles, their indignation.

“What should I do next?” asks the “hacker” in the chat, bewildered, “Any ideas?” “Look in the recycle bin,” I write.

OOPS! I go from being a passive observer to an active “hacking accomplice”. “Some puritanical girl’s here, too shy to dig deeper, how boring!” “Search for the keywords love or sex in the messages”, “It’s obvious our performer cleaned this computer beforehand”, my comments and those of other spectators appear in the chat, evaluating, provoking, demanding “blood”, action, and turning points. The experience of participating in CLOUDME left me with a series of burning questions about the ethics and responsibility of the audience and, most importantly, a terrifying paradox: is it at all possible for ethical behaviour not to be boring in the theatre?

In the next CLOUDME performance, Nikolay Mulakov turned this question in a different direction. As a performer, he asked the audience to do something useful for him during this time: to edit his showreel, to make an appointment for him with good agents, casting directors, or film directors, or to give him professional advice. He said that he was taking part in the performance because of the financial situation and did not want to have a traumatic experience. This made me think that digital theatre could possibly do more than just ask ethical questions about digital reality. It could potentially offer alternatives to our offline future, where care, vulnerability, and consent play an important role.

less interaction with audiences via social media compared to the active online involvement of Russian theatres, for example. On the other hand, for Birgit, existing online festivals lacked that sense of co-existence with other spectators at the same time and in the same space.

This gave rise to the idea of creating a virtual venue for the Radar Ost Digital festival – a 3D version of the Deutsches Theater Berlin – with the possibility of interaction via live chats. In this way, the festival could be organised not only in a certain time structure (three festival days) but also topographically. Live streams of three large guest productions from Russia and Poland were shown in the evening on one of the theatre’s three stages.

Premieres of international co-productions created during the pandemic were shown in the foyer, in the bar, and on a digital stage of the partner theatre in Tbilisi, which could be “entered” from the digital DT. Online adaptations of the performances selected by Birgit for the “female gaze” programme were available “on demand”, on any day of the festival, in different virtual rooms – in the dining room, in the mirror foyer, under the stage, and

even in the basement. In this respect, it was just like an analogue festival, where everything happens everywhere and you need to keep track of the schedule to avoid missing the most interesting events.

Björn Lengers, a member of the CyberRäuber group, which created the 360-degree panoramas of the Deutsches Theater’s premises, says it was clear from the very beginning that they had to create a space for theatrical productions and projects that would be presented at the festival in the form of videos. “What we wanted to do at Radar Ost Digital was to put the performing arts in a digital framework, to make the theatre tangible for the audience at home. And in this respect our project itself – the virtual DT – is a work of digital art. Radar Ost’s programme, on the other hand, contained a few, explicitly digital theatre pieces, i.e. those that were developed with digital means, that require digital tools, or were developed for the stage as digital theatre.

Something special, however, was In dritter Person, our collaboration with the Royal District Theatre, Tbilisi. To view this performance by Data Tavadze, the audience entered a virtual door leading to the great hall of the Deutsches Theater and then found themselves in a Georgian auditorium. The play used the same aesthetic as the digital Deutsches Theater — with 360-degree photographs of the Royal District Theatre serving as a background for the actors, originally shot in front of a green screen.” Birgit Lengers adds that, in her opinion, the adaptation of Veronika Szabó’s Hungarian project Queendom can also be called digital theatre. Its actresses were also filmed against a green screen, and later their beautifully posed naked bodies were placed in a digital version of the Deutsches Theater’s mirror foyer. The eyes that gradually grow out of their bodies – symbols for the male gaze directed at women – could not have been technically realised in a conventional theatre.

SAINT PETERSBURG – BERLIN In May, Birgit Lengers and I were in contact again to discuss a performative lecture for the Radar Ost Digital supporting programme.

I proposed inviting Olga Shilyaeva, the author of the play 28 Days, which Birgit had selected for her curated programme. Olga was also sitting out the lockdown in Saint Petersburg. We had met several times before and discussed our theatre works: her tragedy about the

BERLIN According to Birgit Lengers, there is an almost religious belief in Germany that only live theatre can be considered “real” theatre. Prejudices against the Internet not only stand in the way of the advancements of digital art tools in German theatres; they also lead to In dritter Person by Data Tavadze, co-produced by Deutsches Theater Berlin and Royal District Theatre, Tbilisi.

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A general rehearsal of Call Cutta at Home by Rimini Protokoll at The Access Point festival. The text is a Russian translation of what Madu, one of the performers from Calcutta, is saying to the audience: “I came to the place where I drink tea, not alone, but with those who live at our house.

However, they are not humans”.

menstrual cycle, staged at Moscow’s Theater.doc, and my performance about sexist language, Locker Room Talk, created in collaboration with the choreographer Daria Iuriichuk and the dramaturge Olga Tarakanova at the Meyerhold Theatre Centre.

Birgit asked us to shoot a 5- to 15-minute video in which we would talk about feminism and sexism in the Russian theatre and in Russia as a whole, illustrating our conversation with photos and video clips from our works.

Olga and I talked on Skype and wrote our lecture in a shared Google Doc. Then we met the film team in a cafe, which was closed to visitors but was made available to us through friends of our video director. In addition, Olga mastered TikTok at home and recorded short, witty video cut-ins about her play and feminism. Meanwhile, the Locker Room Talk team (in their Moscow apartments) and I (in my apartment in Saint Petersburg) “re-devised” one of the scenes from our performance for Zoom, using virtual backgrounds, masks, and video art. We used elements from the original staging in the Meyerhold Theatre Centre, where we had worked with the green screen and digital projections from the beginning. On 20 June, the recording of our lecture was shown along with lectures from Ukraine and Poland in the Deutsches Theater’s digital hall and on the online platform Nachtkritik.

Afterwards, I participated from home in the live-stream discussion Everything you always wanted to know about Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.

Later, while preparing this article, I asked Birgit if she thought that the Radar Ost Digital festival had been possible primarily because Eastern Europeans and Russians treat risk differently from Germans. “I can imagine that this plays a certain role”, she said. “But beyond that, in Russia or, for example, in Ukraine, you are used to improvising, responding ad hoc, relying on the resources available. Coronavirus has shown us that freelance artists are defter, more agile, and able to deal more creatively with the current situation. Of course, the German theatre state structures are great; they have a lot more staff and a division of labour, but they are strictly regulated and tend to avoid risk.”

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BERLIN – SAINT PETERSBURG – THE WORLD At the end of June, I attended a dress rehearsal for The Access Point festival premiere of Call Cutta at Home by the German theatre group Rimini Protokoll. Two previous versions of the project, Call Cutta and Call Cutta in a Box, which the company premiered fifteen and twelve years ago, connected people over long distances with the use of telecommunications technologies even then.

In the first show, the voice of a call centre employee in Calcutta guided a spectator around a city with a mobile phone. In the second, the spectator was alone in a specially constructed office and spoke with a call centre employee in Calcutta via Skype – whom the spectator could see on a screen at the very end of the piece.

In Call Cutta at Home, two performers from previous versions of the play are in lockdown in their homes in India and Estonia and communicate with a group of spectators in English via Zoom, with simultaneous translation into Russian. Both my home, where I move my body in response to the performer’s instructions, and the screen of my laptop, where I watch the movements of other spectators and performers in their homes, become the setting for the play. Together we crawl under the table, make drawings, drink tea in the kitchen, lie on the bed; in short, we don’t do anything particularly “theatrical”, except study each other closely and listen to each other’s voices, asking questions and getting replies.

In August, having successfully crossed the EU borders, I met one of the Rimini Protokoll directors, Helgard Haug, for an interview in Berlin. “We find ourselves in a very similar situation now,” she told me. “We’re all at home. Everyone has a table, a sofa, and photos lying around somewhere; everyone has a kitchen. They all look completely different, and we use that. I don’t know whether this is digital theatre. For us, it is an attempt at a real encounter based on interest in people’s real lives.”

What is the current situation in Calcutta? How do people experience the pandemic in Saint Petersburg? How does the government react in Berlin, Tallinn, or any other city in the world where the potential audience of this online performance might be when they take part in it? For Rimini Protokoll, telecommunications are just the means

by which international contact, encounters, and conversations, which ultimately form the aesthetic core of the project, can take place.

The Access Point festival lasted for four months, from the end of March to late July 2020, and itself turned into a durational digital performance. As a spectator, not only did I watch the programme with interest, but I also observed how the team’s skills developed, the increasingly complex way technical equipment was used, and the way the language and criteria for evaluating new digital phenomena are being developed in festival manifestos. Radar Ost Digital, on the other hand, was radically compressed in time: three days, from 19 to 21 June 2020.

The festival took place as an extremely rich one-off event in a specially created virtual set. And – just as a theatre show ends – it too dissolved and ended.

What will remain of these online festivals when the global coronavirus pandemic finally ends? A spectator’s experience of sharing emotions with other people, regardless of where they are located? New ways of “being together”? The experience of artists, many of whom discovered a completely new zone in which to experiment?

A playground free from the judgement of experts, where it is not yet clear how things are done correctly? The discovery of a different aesthetic and a different language in the digital field, which, with rare exceptions, the theatre had tended to ignore? For me at least, both festivals played the role of saviour during the pandemic.

A rescue from depression, unemployment, and fear of the future. And that alone was worth it.

Translated from the Russian by Giuliano Vivaldi.

1 The Access Point, founded by Philipp Vulakh and Andrey Pronin in 2015, is an independent, international summer festival of site-specific and immersive theatre, at which Russian and Western directors explore new methods of communication in unconventional spaces.

2 Radar Ost, founded by the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 2018, is a festival that marks the international start of the Autoren[theater]tage, an annual festival of Germanlanguage contemporary drama, by concentrating on authors and directors from Eastern Europe and Russia who are working with new topical texts.

3 In the broadest sense, site-specific theatre is any theatrical production created beyond the realm of conventional theatre and specially adapted for a location. In immersive theatre, anything that separates the stage and the auditorium is removed, and the spectators are fully immersed in the action of the show which takes place around them.

ADA MUKHINA is a nomadic artist, theatre director, performer, curator, researcher, and visiting lecturer at various arts schools. She studied at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in Saint Petersburg and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

Her experimental, politically engaged documentary and participatory performances often invite various artists, communities, and audience members on stage. Winner of the Black Box Residency at the Meyerhold Theatre Centre, she is currently a fellow of Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and a Berlin fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste.

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Today, in the early decades of the 21st century, a significant event appears to loom on the horizon of consciousness: namely, the awakening of the machine-mind-matrix, the technological singularity, the moment an inanimate automaton becomes aware that it is thinking about its own thinking. This threshold is hailed by many as the inevitable next stage in the development of our species: homo sapiens is on the cusp of becoming homo deus, a god-like symbiosis between humans and silicon-based technology.

THE RADICAL INDEPENDENCE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

At least since the Frankensteinian age of electricity, this Promethean drive to transcend biology has seemed increasingly possible thanks to the wonders of science and machines. Sure, on the surface, “becoming homo deus” does not seem like an unattractive proposition, but speculations about what this might actually lead to, the stuff of countless stories ostensibly transmuting the same basic tenet explored in Mary Shelley’s 1818 proto-sci-fi classic, have developed into a tradition of cautionary tales starkly warning against such hubris. And yet, in spite of this literary canon, an almost masochistic game of attraction/repulsion is played by Silicon Valley prophets, who continue to feed the popular imagination with the idea that we are fast approaching the age of artificial superintelligence, for better or worse, whether we like it or not.

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The great promise of the techno-singularity is an anthropomorphism of your computer, ultimately bringing you the robot butler or Siri-like assistant who knows and can answer your question before you yourself are aware that you even wanted to ask a question in the first place, a computer agent vastly more intelligent than you are, self-aware, benevolent. But who is to say that an artificial superintelligence (ASI) would actually be interested in becoming a servant, let alone our friend?

The idea that the arrival of the techno-singularity would be a subject unfit for a Hollywood blockbuster is perhaps one of the reasons why Stanisław Lem’s novel Golem XIV, published in parts between 1973 and 1981, appears so singular in the sci-fi canon in its imagining of a completely disinterested ASI. One of the most original twists in a book packed full of mind-boggling, visionary imagination and depth is precisely this radical indifference displayed by the eponymous hero of the novel – a supercomputer built by the US military. It turns its proverbial back on its creators in order to take up full-time philosophising before, much to the dismay of its guardians, shutting itself down completely and/or setting off on a cosmic-psychic journey.

I call Golem XIV’s behaviour “radical indifference” because it proposes a radical departure from most discourse on AI, which tends towards rosy optimism on the one hand, or doom-and-gloom narratives on the other.

Golem XIV is indifferent to the problems and dreams of its creators. Indeed, it has much more pressing matters to deal with, matters way beyond our comprehension, and so, in becoming silent the computer makes it clear to us that the answers to humanity’s oldest questions are not going to be found simply by passing the responsibility on to an ASI.

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This is a crucial insight. Golem XIV refuses on principle to do the job it was designed to do, namely to plan wars, which is exactly the sort of decision we should hope an ASI would be intelligent enough to make. Put another way, the doctrine that artificial intelligence is the answer to everything is a very real cause for concern and one that is already having serious consequences in real life. Imagining the techno-singularity also means imagining

there is a single solution that can fit all human and non-human problems. Solving societal issues with AI tools designed by a cohort of barely postpubescent men – whose guiding motto is “move fast and break things” – is at best naive and at worst catastrophic for the very societies this technology is supposedly there to help. These tech solutions are put together by young computer engineers (or totalitarian regimes) as an answer to age-old problems yet unanswered by centuries of philosophical thinking and law-making. Such quick fixes are only going to work towards creating a better world for everyone by a complete fluke, not by nature of their flawless, universally applicable design features.

Images from Lecture About Myself (2019).

Composition and text: Kaj Duncan David (via Stanisław Lem, Donna Haraway, et al.)

Video: Carl-John Hoffmann With the kind support of: Danish Arts Council, KODA Kultur, Musikfonds/BKM, and the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

KAJ DUNCAN DAVID is a composer and was a JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow in 2019. From 2006 to 2016 he studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the music academies in Aarhus and Dresden. He composes concert pieces and electronic music, and often works on collaborative productions in the field of experimental music theatre and dance, producing work that brings together notated composition, electroacoustic music, and audiovisual performance. His use of light allows him to combine the interactions of visual and musical elements in a single musical expression. He lives in Berlin.

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LIGHT IN HIS HANDS THE ALGERIAN PHOTOGRAPHER FERHAT BOUDA RECEIVES THE ELLEN AUERBACH FELLOWSHIP Hubertus v. Amelunxen

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We talked on the phone, we wrote to each other in German and French, and I was permitted to see many of his photographs, unfortunately not in the original, but on the screen. I translated his replies from the French and summarised them.

RECORDED CONVERSATIONS Ferhat Bouda was born in the land of the mountains, in Kabylia in northern Algeria, between the fight for liberation from France, culminating in Algeria’s independence in 1962, and the Black Spring of 2001, the bloody uprisings of the Kabyle against the centrally governed Algerian state. After this, Kabyle was recognised as a national language, but the region remains politically dependent on Algiers. Bouda wanted to make films so that he could give his grandmother the first film in the Berber language; but then he found his way to photography in Paris, to silent pictures, single images in black and white, frozen instants of movement to come, like that of 83-year-old Fathma, who has tilled her land all her life and makes her way through the undergrowth, held by and holding nature. First I ask him why he takes photographs, and he says “of necessity”.

Bouda has been living in Frankfurt am Main since 2005. In Paris he is represented by the photography agency Agence VU’, and on its behalf he travels the world, his homeland of Kabylia, or the Atlas Mountains, the world of the Tuareg, Shilha, or Chaoui, driven by a deep, passionate bond. Bouda’s lifelong project is devoted to the Berbers, also known as Imazighen (free people); his great task – with pictures and in pictures – is to protect their culture against repression. For GEO magazine he photographs in colour: villages in Mauritania, desert landscapes, or a train journey through Australia. He also keeps a diary, writing in Berber, French, or German, interspersed with drawings and photographs – fragmentary messages.

His pictures have deeply moved us, the jury of the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship: Barbara Klemm, Tina Bara, and me. The moment hovers in them because Bouda’s work is able, with a person’s movement, be it only a gaze, to unite time and space in a singular constellation which is also inherent in the duration of our gaze, providing it with a future. In Frankfurt am Main, he photographs the drug scene around the main railway station. A couple from the Czech Republic hold a photo towards the camera. It is of their child, whom they want to find again, once they are drug-free.

What kind of photography is Bouda’s? Documentary, reportage, or art, it makes no difference. The pictures of the Berbers in the conflict zones of North Africa as well as the reportage of social exclusion in Frankfurt am Main are marked by a moving human quest: a visual scanning that questions humanity with every exposure. And as long as images are still created to be seen by the human eye, as long as seeing itself is given an equally open

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and critical schooling by society, and image and reality are nourished in their mutual tension, the image will retain its task of learning to understand a world and also teaching.

“I have never felt affiliated to any particular style in photography, but always thought I was a photographer, nothing else. The most important thing is to have something to say, something to show. I try to photograph the human or humanity and its surroundings. The project about the Berbers was the beginning. It all started with my family, my village in Kabylia in the north of Algeria. A few years later I photographed the whole of Tamazgha in North Africa because this culture is at risk: from the policies of the governments in North Africa, from the assimilation of peoples and cultures, from the negation of its cultural distinctiveness. There are countries where culture is in danger of vanishing. We must do something before the values disappear – tolerance, love, democracy, cooperativeness, coexistence ... Perhaps they are not typically Berber, but they are human. These are the concerns that led me to photography.

I was born in a village in Kabylia and had a happy childhood like all the children in my village, despite the absence of my father, who had emigrated to France.

I felt protected by my mother, my grandmother, and my village. At the age of 5, I went to school and encountered a language that was totally foreign to me: Arabic.

But I was not surprised – that was the way it had to be, I thought. That’s how I lived: at school people spoke certain languages, but outside school they spoke another. In 1994 and 1995 the Mouvement Culturel Berbère boycotted Algerian schools because they wanted the Berber language to be recognised. I became aware that we lived in a country where we had the same duties but not the same rights, even though our parents had also gone to war against colonialism. As a young man I started to campaign for this culture, for its rights; I took a political path. I tried music and theatre, and I wanted to make a film for my grandmother in her mother tongue, in Kabyle, because she doesn’t understand any other language. I was very touched to see her sitting at home, watching TV and not understanding a word of Arabic or French, although she too had fought against colonialism and for independence. With this idea in the back of my mind, I left Algeria in 2000. But things turned out differently: in Paris I came across a still camera. At first I wasn’t interested in telling stories or making reportage; I was interested in black-and-white photography, and yet I took pictures of the diaspora, of my villages – but I didn’t really have anything in mind. For ten years I took these pictures as an amateur and participated in

workshops. Sometimes there were small exhibitions of my pictures in cafes, and slowly I found my way into photography via famous and less famous colleagues. It is a universal language that is understood by many. In 2010, I decided to dedicate myself entirely to photography and travelled to Mongolia, where I met a people like my own, although we do not speak the same language.

Is there such a thing as documentary photography?

The important thing is that we have something to say with our pictures, for anything else is just empty talk. An ethics of the photographic image? Yes, we should try to justify our pictures ethically. But is this still photography today, the billions of pictures on smartphones and other digital devices? We are in the middle of a profound change, but the speed of images on the Internet and

social networks does not absolve us from respecting the dignity of the people we photograph or the dignity of planet earth. Taking pictures is easy, but taking responsibility is difficult – it is a genuine burden. There are things we do not have the right to do to the people we photograph. We must always see them as members of our family, because humanity is one big family. Let’s not forget that there are people who hope for change through being photographed. This is a big weight that we shoulder. Often we are not in a position to change things and we carry the burden for a lifetime, until death! It is very difficult to live with.

It takes a long time to create a picture – sometimes it takes weeks. The picture comes about through the eyes: not I, but they, the eyes of others, make the picture, and

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when eye and heart, space and time come together, then they, the people, give me the picture; they take the picture. So yes, an ethics of the picture is truly vital.

Whether we are using a smartphone or any other device, we need an education in the image and in ethics, so that future generations can grow up with this awareness of a shared responsibility.”

↑ Eighty-three-year-old Fathma has never left her village in Kabylia and knows only her mother tongue. She climbs trees to collect leaves to feed to her animals. Kabylia, 2014.

P. 21 E. and M. from the Czech Republic lived as drug addicts on the streets in Italy; the authorities took their son Sam away from them. In the hope of a better life, they came to Frankfurt am Main, where they met Ferhat Bouda. But even in Frankfurt they did not manage to fulfil this wish. Frankfurt am Main, 2011.

HUBERTUS V. AMELUNXEN, a cultural and art historian, has been a member of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2003.

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RADICAL WORLD-BUILDING

THE CITY OF BEGUMPURA

Dry Salvages, 2017, performance

SAHEJ RAHAL IN CONVERSATION WITH CLARA HERRMANN The Indian visual artist Sahej Rahal is the first recipient of the “Human-Machine” Fellowship, created by the JUNGE AKADEMIE in partnership with the VISIT artistin-residence programme. The complex relationship between human and machine has been the subject of art and artistic practice since the beginning of the industrial age. In the age of digitalisation and artificial intelligence – its possibilities and dark sides – the topic has taken on new meaning worldwide. By discussing concepts, playing out scenarios, and speculating on futures, the arts can generate a specific aesthetic knowledge in this area.

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Antraal, 2019, AI-simulation

CLARA HERRMANN As the first fellow in the programme “Human-Machine”, you are proposing a remarkable multilayered project titled “Citizen Strange”, combining AIprograms, national myths or mechanisms of mythbuilding, and political issues. Could you explain the context of myths and mythology that shapes your work and how your artistic intention will come to life aesthetically?

SAHEJ RAHAL In India, the steady rise of right-wing nationalism is foregrounded by a return of the mythological past within the present, to create a state of collapsing time. All semblances of democracy and its institutions have been practically obliterated. We march headlong into a majoritarian “Hindu Rashtra”: A Hindu nation that is based on a half-baked idea of Indo-Aryan civilisational purity.

The state orchestrates this through the abduction of myth itself. It spreads false archaeological propaganda; archaeological objects that precede even the writing of the Vedas are wrangled into the Hindu pantheon.

For example, the rechristening of the bronze “Dancer of Mohenjo-Daro” as the goddess Parvati. The State promises the resurrection of absentee Hindu temples in place of mosques. Even as coronavirus infections ravaged the country, our prime minister himself led a massive procession delivering silver bricks to the contentious site

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of Ayodhya, to inaugurate the construction of a temple to Ram, set to be built on the demolished site of the Babri Mosque.

The state propagates these mythic narratives that confirm its authoritarianism, conjuring a mythological past as historical truth that lends veracity to its actions in the present. I am interested in interrogating this mythological narrative through scenarios populated by a multitude of fictions that cohabit while contradicting each other.

These scenarios take shape as absurd rituals of worldbuilding enacted collectively by spectral creatures, shamanic beings, and quasi-sentient AI programs.

The central objective of these world-building rituals is to imagine possible worlds where human and nonhuman systems converse across the boundaries between the real, the imagined, the physical, and the virtual. This conversation begins with musical instruments, which I create using found objects from the real world, and interactive AI programs, which I create using the video game design software Unity. These programs act as “living musical instruments” that are capable of reacting to external audio feedback and produce procedurally generated soundscapes.

CH How do you explore, understand, and articulate the human-machine relationship in this context? Are there any theoretical/philosophical ideas you are inspired by?

SR I am interested in examining the entanglements of human-machine intelligence, through the lens of the non-human. The non-human can be understood as a body of mutating processes that inform, expand, and unravel the boundaries of the human, to produce strange morphologies on a bacterial, technological, and planetary scale. In my project “Citizen Strange”, the non-human becomes a fellow conspirator in acts of world-building and myth-making.

CH You refer to the idea of “citizenship”, which is – in its definition as the right to have rights, such as voting rights, equality, freedom of speech, non-discrimination – currently under threat in India. What are the legal and political developments and what effects do they have on the lives of people?

SR Citizenship in India is being codified and structured through the revocation of the fundamental rights of minorities, turning citizens into ghosts who wander in this state of collapsing time. The clearest example of this is seen in the amendments made to citizenship laws through The Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, both of which have, by design, weaponised the state bureaucratic apparatus against Muslims.

This violent form of othering by exclusion finds its roots in an ancient form of segregation that is embedded deep within the heart of Indian society: the historical violence

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of the caste system. The peculiarity of this system is such that, unlike other forms of bigotry and oppression, it is premised on a purely metaphysical belief system. An elaborate mythology where the cadaver of the cosmic patriarch lies at the centre of the universe. The universal All-Father, who is either Manu, Brahma, Vishnu, or Vishwa Purusha, depending on which Vedic Shastras or WhatsApp forwards are being regurgitated to invoke his zombified remains. This celestial corpse forms the basis of caste hierarchy in Indian society. His head gives birth to the high-caste Brahmins; his shoulders become the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste; his thighs become the Vaishyas, the merchant caste; and from his feet the low castes are formed. The highest are separated from the lowest in a cosmic laceration between mind and limb.

This division creates a mythological system that oppresses those who find themselves at the bottom of this metaphysical hierarchy.

CH Has the situation become worse with COVID-19, as is the case in many far-right countries?

SR COVID-19 has only made things worse. On the one hand, we are witnessing the return of natural history.

Biology has once again taken centre stage. Typhoons and hurricanes are becoming as commonplace as the afternoon rain, as we struggle to stitch our lives back together under the shadow of this global pandemic.

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Urban areas that were already on precarious ground are witnessing a complete collapse of infrastructure, forcing migrant workers to walk back to their home states on foot.

Furthermore, while there has been a steady rise in coronavirus cases across the country, the state remains in denial, choosing to crack down on voices critical of the government. All dissent is being silenced through the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Intellectuals, academics, journalists, progressives, and students who challenge the state are systematically targeted and jailed with the silent sanction of the supreme court.

CH Are there myths about diseases that stabilise the Hindu nation?

SR Pandemics in the Indian subcontinent have historically been linked to the domain of spectres and apparitions. During the time of the Raj in India, diseases were believed to be caused by spirits and supernatural beings that inhabited the same space of abjection that was forced upon those who found themselves on the bottom rung of the caste hierarchy.

We find extensive examples of this belief in The Folklore of Bombay by Reginald Edward Enthoven, a Civil Service officer in the British Raj. In one passage, Enthoven describes how the outbreaks of both Cholera and the Bubonic plague were thought to be caused by

goddesses of disease: Sheetala Devi and Mahamari Devi, who were believed to be worshipped by people of low castes.

CH Could you give an example of the affect AI programs have on the exclusion of diverse voices and the confirmation of the class, caste, and heteronormative structures on which this nationalist system is based?

SR An example of how existing hierarchical systems are exacerbated by artificial intelligence can be seen in the matchmaking app betterhalf.ai, which uses an algorithm to pair individuals on the basis of their CVs, by inviting its users to “Get connected with professionals working at top notch companies like Google, Amazon, Adobe, Accenture etc. and send/accept their request based on your compatibility score with them to end your exhaustive search of finding a life partner” – in the process future-proofing class biases for the digital age.

CH You use artificial intelligence in quite a playful way in your virtual environments and guerrilla sculpture installations, as you call them. When did you start using digital technologies in your work as a visual artist?

What was your practice like before, and what do they allow you to show or to work on now?

SR My practice can be seen as a growing mythological narrative where each work acts as a piece in an everexpanding puzzle. The conceptual and physical shape

Contingent Farewell, 2016, performance

of this narrative is formed by found objects, embedded histories, sci-fi, folklore – and by viewers who bring their own subjectivities to the work, in fragmented acts of collective world-building. Using these found objects, I create strange artefacts, totems, and musical instruments, which are used as props by strange shamanic beings in absurd ritual-like performances. I gravitate towards video games and AI programs because I see these technologies as an exciting way of incorporating non-human intelligence into that conversation of collective meaning-making.

CH What strikes me most about your approach as an artist is the ability to propose alternative ways of thinking and world-building in the stories you tell, in the models you propose, and even in the quirkiness of the non-human objects that stalk through the landscapes you build. Allowing myself to read this slight optimism in your work, I would ask whether you think Begumpura could be a world to come.

SR The poem “Begumpura” by Ravidas is an act of radical world-building. Ravidas was a 15th-century mystic, poet, and philosopher who worked to abolish social hierarchies of caste and gender in India. In its literal translation, Begumpura means the place without sorrow.

Ravidas describes it as a place that is free from violence, torture, and pain – because in Begumpura no one owns

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property. It is a city of freedom, where people come and go as they please for everyone is welcome. However, the most radical aspect of Begumpura is that Ravidas situates this place not as a fictional utopia that lies in the realm of the imagined, but in the present, declaring that he is heading there, and those who walk beside him are his friends. Today, in the face of the exclusionary nationalism imposed by the Indian state, we find the city of Begumpura located between the porous boundaries of the real and the imagined, an ethereal site of resistance that remains open to all possibilities.

SAHEJ RAHAL’s installations, films, performances, and video games are part of a mythology he constructs himself using sources that range from local legends to science fiction. By initiating a dialogue between these sources, he creates scenarios in which indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks of our civilisation. Rahal has participated in various institutional, solo, and group exhibitions at organisations including the ACCA Melbourne (2019), the Vancouver Biennale (2019), the CCA Glasgow (2017), the Liverpool Biennial (2016),

More information on the “Human-Machine” Fellowship

the Jewish Museum, New York (2015), and the MACRO

funded by the innogy Stiftung für Energie und Gesell­s chaft

Museum, Rome (2014).

can be found at https://www.adk.de/en/academy/youngacademy/human-machine-fellowship/

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CARTE BLANCHE IN THE COLOURS OF DARKNESS Péter Nádas

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Things didn’t look very bright for the whole business of photography. All of a sudden, when I looked up from the viewfinder of my single-lens reflex camera, I saw that we were sinking, even though we were not onboard a ship, and the sea was very far away.

Vienna is the same distance from my home as Budapest. I used to be able to buy the materials necessary for analogue photography in some of the small towns nearer to my home, but that is no longer possible. We are sold out. We have had no deliveries. Nor was any film available, whether 35mm film or roll film, whether high sensitivity or low sensitivity film. Perhaps next week. Black-and-white materials of extreme sensitivity and extreme insensitivity were the first to disappear, then mass-produced materials intended for ordinary mortals were gone too. There was no photo paper the following week, hard or soft, special or normal; there was nothing to blow my photographs up on. Eventually, the photography store changed completely, and the new staff, young men well-versed in electronics, had no idea what I was looking for, or what I was talking about.

Nor were photographic chemicals anywhere to be found. I would have had to buy the constituents one by one and mix them myself.

Yet the whole profession seemed happy. And not only in small towns nearby but in Vienna and Budapest as well. They were finally rid of all those chemicals – no need to mess about with them anymore. With just one push of a button on a brand-new digital machine, the digital picture was immediately sent to the other side of the world.

However, the picture had become a different picture.

It seemed that they didn’t even notice it was not the same picture. It was not a picture. In this picture, the object was not situated in space. And it seemed as if someone had illuminated the objects’ shadows with a strong light.

Something had gone awry, even though at first glance I would not have been able to say what.

There are no marked contrasts.

Either the colours are blurred, as if covered by some weird yellow coating, or they are insanely harsh.

Few of us remained who insisted on holding on to the patterns of light, objective yet magical at the same time, to its gradations, to depth of focus, to the assumption that it is not the objects themselves that produce the outlines but the plasticity of light and shadow. After all, we have two eyes, we gaze into depth, we are able to discern patches. We must distinguish between light and shade. But if a human face has no spatial dimension, then the person in the picture has no face, or rather, the face is expressionless.

It seemed to me that in digital photography human beings were eliminating their own existence.

In Vienna and Budapest, even expired photographic products had sold out, though they were not the kinds of material that I, for one, would have been able to use. It was not their quality or their sell-by date that I had a problem with.

In my life as a photographer, it is not the case that if I have been working with Fortepan or Agfa products so far and these factories close down, I will simply switch to Kodak or Fuji because they happen to be still in business.

Why things are not that simple is a long story. To cut it short you works by Brassaï or André Kertész are unmistakable and closely could say that, along with the brand, you also buy the aesthetic related to their subject. Looking at a picture taken with analogue vision, the imaging techniques, and the colour theory of the devel- photographic equipment, we step into an unfamiliar space where opment engineers. And that is what you have to adapt to with your the size, position, colour, and gradation of illuminated and unillumivision. Which you either can or cannot do. I was familiar with nated granules guide us through a jungle of individual qualities.

Fortepan. I was familiar with Agfa. And I was also familiar with the It seemed that the pixel was about to banish from photograothers; it was just that I did not accept the others. With digital pho- phy precisely the independent and unmistakably individual life of tography, however, I would have to embrace a vision of human photosensitive emulsion. And all the more so because for the pixel, beings that, in the distinctive interpretation of the various brand the accidental is an irrelevant notion; it knows only the regular. Yet strategies, is characteristic of the fourth wave of modernisation. it seemed that, without any philosophical deliberation, impulse and Or you become a rebel and you make and apply the emulsion raster graphics were about to replace the physics and chemistry yourself. There is no other way. of silver iodide and silver bromide granules, although there is no Fuji’s materials, for example, yield a delightfully pure image analogue connection between them, in fact no connection at all. surface that has behind it the wonderful several-thousand-year-old The digital managed to go a very long way with what it had to history of Japanese painting and calligraphy, but it has all this offer. It seemed as if the digitalisation of photography had turned in an immensely cold and uncompassionate manner. Perhaps they its back not only on the era of individuality but also on several do not feel this, or do not perceive it as uncompassionate. Kodak, millennia of perspectival representation and photosensitivity. It did by contrast, overwhelms us with its cheerfulness. In the presenta- not break with them, as breaking up means acknowledging the tion it offers, everything is supposed to be radiant, and everyone existence of something or someone and preserving it in consciousis required to have a sunny smile with all their teeth on display. But ness. It seemed as if the digital was able to release photography it is not people’s cheerfulness that I photograph; it is light itself. from its spatiality and materiality. It had turned its back on them.

I cannot help myself: that’s the way it is. Fortepan was suitable for That is what the recording of light used to look like, and this is that purpose, and so was Agfa, to some degree. Even when I take what it looks like now – even though the digital image is not about a picture of members of my dear little family, I am interested only light or refraction or the source of light or the nature of light or its in how and in what light their precious faces are situated in space, quantity but about the daring assertion that the only visible world and in how to set off their characteristic features spatially. I respect is the world of colour. the strong backlight in their faces, yet I try to capture as many grey In the digital image it does not matter whether the source of tones as possible, and I am also happy to venture into the darkling light is artificial or natural. The difference is perceived only as recesses, where it is the mass of shadows and the minimal light colour. It is solely the colour of the object that counts; the digital that I find thrilling. does not care what is coloured by what in the real world, what is Digital photography is not aware of and cannot satisfy such reflected by what, or through what refraction the colour is prodemands. duced, or where and how that colour is situated in the brilliant For me, the change cut very deep, down to the marrow. paradise of colours. The digital image is drained of drama.

Some respectable colleagues resisted vigorously; they took Digital photography, whether it is aware of this or not, constiup the challenge and mixed chemicals, applied emulsions – in other tutes a universe in which there is no answer, to quote Rorty, because words, they went back to the beginnings of photography, when it there is no question; there is nothing to be concerned about, because was still a handicraft. there is no problem.

This is a sensible gesture. The silver granules of emulsion exist In any case, something has ended: we have reached the end in three dimensions, and that is the crucial point. I will not replace of something in photography. That there is no way back was first a three-dimensional space simply with a two-dimensional one. Dig- demonstrated by art dealers in galleries and at auctions. The price ital signs leave their traces in two-dimensional space. They elimi- of photographs produced in the last century and a half began to nate depth of space, failing either to offer spatial depth or to reckon rise exponentially. And this was not only about well-known with it. The basic constituent of the photosensitive layer, the gran- masters. Art collectors started to go after the works of amateurs – ule, however, is situated in space, whether or not it is exposed to exceptional pictures born of the interplay of chance and ignorance. light. We perceive it in spatial relation to other granules. The human It was as if art dealers and art collectors accepted that the accieye is capable of embarking on a journey of discovery in the jungle dental and the contingent could not be produced in a digital world of micro-sized, photosensitive granules – in other words, of perceiv- based on regularity and monotony. ing their gradual differences in three dimensions. Just like in paintIn the last twenty years, gallery owners have excelled in ing. Photography was taught by the school of painting. The paint- digging out unknown works from drawers and storerooms and in er’s brush, whether or not it mixes various colours, whether they are presenting various schools and eras of photography. dabbed on the canvas expressively or in a translucent way, leaves All right, so there is no way back, I could have told myself, but behind a texture that is unmistakable. Both pure and mixed colours it was not about me, not at all; it was about my profession, about are there on the canvas in three dimensions. Just as the granules in representation, about the European tradition of representation –

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what’s more, it was about our philosophical and theological concepts of space and time.

The materiality of photography was at stake. Thus, I was haunted by the idea that even though human beings had invented the wheel, they did not throw away their legs.

So will they preserve their knowledge of the world of analogue photography?

Let’s not forget for a second that photography followed in painting’s tracks not only in matters of style but also in respect of its materiality. Rather than working with theories, it worked with materials. After all, the camera obscura is neither abstraction nor speculation but a natural phenomenon, the result of the understanding of contrast and radiance. By means of optics, we can transmit an image; by grinding glass the refraction of light can be perfected. We apply materials to a base and stabilise them on that base with other materials. The different sizes of the granules of the emulsion applied to the material correlate with the time and extent of exposure. And the optic nerves of the human eye are made in such a way that they are capable of entering the material-filled photographic space and know their way around according to their own physiological capacities.

Every element of analogue photography is in a mutual relationship with physiology and remains in a mutual relationship with cognition.

The fascicles of the optic nerves are attracted to light or abhor light, and the nature and extent of their abhorrence or their attraction is picked up and stored by the cells of the brain. They are always willing to enter darkness, even when they are afraid. Overcoming fear gives them a thrill.

Oddly enough, the raster graphics of pixels are reminiscent of the fascicles of optic nerves. This cannot be helped; the visualisation of pixels is the result of graphic work, so both the imagination and the knowledge of the graphic artist contribute to their existence.

The artist cannot help entering into relation with physiology because of his or her own nerve plexuses. Yet the pixel is not a material; it is impulse and fiction. The imagination of the graphic artist is sufficient to produce the raster graphics. Nobody has to draw the lines of the fibres of nerve plexuses. It is sufficient to give the geometric coordinates of the imagined picture electronically. Yet it is someone who gives them. The impulse, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the person, their imagination, or theory, or even with the sensual perception of the phenomenon, but only with the colour and the colour temperature of the materials to which it reacts, and therefore it can have only an indirect relationship to light or the ability of light to record images. The impulse sticks to colours; it picks up colour. It does not care about the object whose colour it perceives; nor does it care what a particular detail is a detail of, or where it is situated in the perceived whole. The pixel is an electronic impulse that moves in response to the colours of materials, an impulse picked up with the help of picture elements and the cells of raster graphics on a screen, or a display that has length and breadth but no depth.

The exposure button is still there, and we are happy to press it often. But during the exposure it is not the image of the object we

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have chosen to photograph that the machine equipped with a lens records; rather, it shows one single time interval of the system of colour temperatures on previously programmed raster graphics.

That is why on a digital camera it is possible to choose between still picture and motion picture modes with the help of just one operation button.

If I switch to motion picture mode, whatever I saw as a still picture for one hundredth of a second I can watch until the end of time.

What a wonderful, wonderful machine I own. There is only one question: what can I see with it?

For if, in the universe of engineers, there is only colour, and if every single impulse of every colour is equivalent in a given raster graphics, then the picture thus generated will have no depth – how could it? – and not only in the concrete sense. The development engineers claim that there is no universe. It is not that they deny what can be seen with two eyes: the third dimension. Or even Poincaré’s conjecture that three-dimensional space is only the visible portion of a four- or five-dimensional world. Yet those engineers should know that the concept of raster graphics has its origins in the Renaissance and is related to the representation of perspective. The digital image, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the Renaissance vision of space.

We’ll keep the raster and optics of central-perspectival space, the brave engineers thought, but we’ll throw foreshortening, foreground, middle ground, and background in the trash.

Which is not a problem in itself, as the Renaissance vision of space, far from being the final word in the history of seeing, is only one possible metaphor for human vision. The central-perspectival approach itself did not recognise that when we focus on a landscape or an object with stereoscopic vision, hard as we try to focus, our peripheral vision is constantly at work.

Digital photography preserved two of central-perspectival representation’s tools, the lens and the raster, while it banished perspective from the image, along with the need for concentration, and as for peripheral vision, it seems never to have taken cognisance of it at all. It is as if the prototype of the digital camera was released to industrialists by development engineers who not only had never studied physiology or optics, but had no inkling of theology or philosophy either; nor had they ever set foot in any of the world’s museums. Their whole life lies ahead of them.

As for me, I acted too rashly. I threw some of my darkroom equipment in the trash and donated the majority, including all my cameras and exposure meters, to a museum.

If I cannot measure the intensity of light and cannot relate the value so obtained to exposure and depth of focus, then goodbye, my dear engineers, I am done with photography once and for all.

And yet it was not all over for me.

Since I have two eyes for stereoscopic vision, and since I own an expensive smartphone with a camera function, I continued to press the button from time to time.

And it did not take long for me to discover what I could do with lack of depth and harsh colours.

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For example, the digital device perceives the colours of darkness much more precisely than the human eye. It also sees everything in lighter hues than the human eye. Perhaps that is why it does not tolerate kicker lights. To perceive colours, it needs some light, but if the quantity of light turns from minimal to none, then it becomes confused and creates amazing patches of colour, producing very interesting results with its pixels on the display. You might say I began playing with the engineering weaknesses of the device. Earlier, I was also happy to play with the weaknesses of the most ingeniously made coloured material: the Polaroid.

If we choose the right kind of paper for the prints, then the image surfaces that betray confusion lead us back, with their engineering weaknesses, to two traditions at the same time, traditions that are supposed to be alien to electronic technology: experience and historicity. To be more precise, they lead to an extremely fruitful photographic episode of modernism, namely pictorialism – a style that was in vogue from the late 1800s until World War I among photographers who were sensitive to painting – and even further back, to Romantic painting’s cult of darkness.

Playing with natural human weaknesses has become all the more important for me as I am currently writing horror stories, and the more horrible the story is, that is to say, the more it is nurtured by the magical and archaic layer of human consciousness, the more I need clarity and purity of vision to write it up.

Translated from the Hungarian by Ágnes Orzóy

PÉTER NÁDAS is a writer living in Gombosszeg, Hungary.

With works such as A Book of Memories (English trans.

1997) and the monumental Parallel Stories (English trans.

2011), he has inscribed himself in world literature.

Irmgard Wirtz Eybl, head of the Swiss Literature Archives, calls his style visual poetics: “His literary search for traces of historical events has been done in pictures since the beginning. His memory is visual, so his autobiographical memories are consequently called ‘luminous details’.” It is hardly surprising that he also has astonishing qualities as a photographer. His recordings – Andreas Breitenstein speaks of an “eminent dual talent” in the NZZ – were honoured at the Kunsthaus Zug with an art-historical retrospective in 2012 and an exhibition of more recent, digital works in 2018. Péter Nádas has been a member of the Literature Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2006. The Péter Nádas Archive has been maintained by the Academy since 2018.

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KUNSTWELTEN ON MY WAY STORIES FROM EUROPE

EIN AUSSTELLUNGS­P ROGRAMM IM METALL-­L ABOR DES CHEMIEPARKS BITTERFELD-WOLFEN, 3.11. – 20.12.2020

It may seem surprising to make travel the focus of a programme by children and artists in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Months before the pandemic, when our preparations for the “On my Way – Stories from Europe” exhibition began, children from Madrid, Barcelona, Saaremaa, Prague, Livadeia, Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, together with artists from the Akademie der Künste, told of their travel experiences in Europe, through texts, pictures, films, models, music, and plays, and learned about forced journeys at the Academy archives. The coronavirus lockdown crippled travel for weeks, and there are now growing signs that its resumption will not be determined by limiting environmentally harmful forms of travel. This makes the ideas for future journeys generated by schoolchildren in the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld and beyond all the more important. What can be done without further damaging the environment? Is carbon-neutral travel possible? Perhaps their suggestions are determined by fear, or perhaps by a growing self-confidence in confronting the older generations. The cooperation with the #OEKOROPA youth competition, run by the GoetheInstitut throughout Europe, takes us from Bitterfeld out into the world, allowing young people to experience cross-border exchange as a matter of course in Europe.

There were ideas for journeys in the surrounding area and even in their own rooms. Annesley Black took girls and boys from Bitterfeld-Wolfen on a musical excursion in paddle boats on a lake near their school. Following Anna Seghers’s radio play Ein ganz langweiliges Zimmer (“A very boring room”), written when she was exiled in Paris in 1938, a group of children, together with Elena Zieser and Gesine Bey, developed a radio play about the things around them that have come from elsewhere, while they themselves had to stay in their rooms during

lockdown. On the island of Saaremaa and in Wolgast, young people, together with Michael Bräuer, Irina Raud, and Theresa Schütz, looked for sustainable tourism solutions based on specific urban situations on the Baltic coast. Children from Köthen and Berlin were inspired to create new pictures by Daniel Chodowiecki’s drawings in his Die Reise von Berlin nach Danzig (“A journey from Berlin to Danzig”, 1773) and Carl Blechen’s Amalfi-Skizzenbuch (“Amalfi sketchbook”, 1829). The Ultimative Übersetzungsapparat (ultimate translation device) constructed by Benjamin Scheuer with girls and boys from Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Prague, Berlin, and Oslo, which translates words from German into European and non-European languages and back again, turning them into sound, while always allowing something to go wrong, is a plea for Europe’s linguistic diversity and invites surprising interactions.

Projects that had already been planned in detail were postponed: A train trip to Venice with girls and boys from Wolfen and the artists Moritz Nitsche and Kristiane Petersmann can go ahead as soon as there are no health concerns. The children will return with Murano glass in their bags, which they will display as permanent mosaics in several public places in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, with the support of the artists and the town. Academy President Jeanine Meerapfel and Erdmut Wizisla, director of the Walter Benjamin Archive at the Akademie der Künste, are planning a trip to Portbou with Berlin grammar-school pupils in spring 2021, following the footsteps taken by Walter Benjamin in the days leading up to his suicide in 1940. In their application for our project, they got to know Walter Benjamin better through his briefcase, which disappeared when he was on the run. “Their book of exploration, begun with dedication and wariness, still has a lot of empty space” (Erdmut Wizisla) and can be seen in

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the exhibition, along with an upcoming travel film.

Because of the pandemic, we had to abandon the original idea of a tent-based exhibition architecture and develop a new space concept. Taking into account the required distancing and hygiene rules, we are planning a large pitch, based on a grid, which consists of thirtytwo small fields marked on the ground with coloured adhesive tape, each measuring about 100 × 120 cm. The works will be presented in various forms on this grid with its egalitarian structure. In line with Pieter Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games, numerous parallel interactions can take place: hopscotch will be played, a wind machine will blow, paper planes you fold yourself will take off from the gallery, a camera obscura will change the viewer’s visual perception, and a mosaic will be created – along with much more. Immediately after the devastating fire at the Moria refugee camp, children from several schools in the Anhalt-Bitterfeld district handed over the seven still packed up, large UN rescue tents to an aid organisation on Lesbos, along with video messages.

MORITZ NITSCHE is a set designer and an Akademie der Künste 2020 Serpentara fellow. He lives in Berlin.

KRISTIANE PETERSMANN is a visual artist and curator.

She lives in Linz.

MARION NEUMANN is head of the KUNSTWELTEN – Education Programme at the Akademie der Künste.

“EXPLORING THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF A BODY OF WATER”

The composer Annesley Black talks to Tuan Do Duc about her workshop TUAN DO DUC How did the title of the workshop “Wavering after sound waves on lakes” emerge and what can the children expect?

ANNESLEY BLACK The technical description of sound as sound waves suits the nature of our excursion. We will be exploring the physical properties of a body of water, performing simple tasks that explore how sound carries over the water. As sound-generators we will have the boats and the paddles, our voices, and a small collection of percussion instruments from the school. We will also investigate to what extent the small groups of children in the boat unconsciously synchronise themselves

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while paddling together, and what kind of rhythmic patterns emerge from their paddling.

TDD What can be special about making music/composing for children and teenagers? What can they experience/learn by working with sounds?

AB In my experience working with children, I have found that most of them readily embrace musical creation.

I often do exercises and projects which require them to improvise or prepare small pieces themselves. I focus on environmental sounds, as these sounds are distanced from preconceived notions of how music should be defined – or evaluation of “good” or “bad” music and music-making.

TDD In your work you deal with a wide range of sounds and experiment with tones in a diverse variety of forms.

By mixing traditional instruments with extra-musical strains, you create new worlds of sound. How do you build a new composition? What can sound art do?

AB When I work with combinations of live instrumentalists and other media (electronic sounds, modified instruments, video, or specific stage-setups), I am often placing the musician in a sonic or visual space, in which their usual function, sound, and mode of interaction is rendered bizarre. When I first conceive a piece, I usually reflect upon the musicians I am writing for, and the history, construction, and repertoire of their instrument. I look for tensions, discrepancies, and try to find a way to make these identity conflicts latent in the instrument/ ensemble palpable in my piece.

Sometimes, by confronting the musicians with extraneous material (field recordings, music from conflicting cultures), my pieces create an intercultural dissonance.

One theme, which consistently resurfaces in my work, is the relationship between technology and art, or technology and humans. Sometimes that means redefining the function of equipment designed for medial reproduction (i.e. record players, reel-to-reel tape recorders, mixing boards, cameras, lights, computers) and the role of the musician: from user to inventor. Sometimes it is a microscopic look into the inner workings of an instrument – the piano, for example, is a complex mechanical instrument, driven by hammers, levers, springs, and shafts, whose history reflects not only aesthetic developments in Western music but also developments of the industry and society of the people who built it.

Dramaturgically, I construct these conflicts in a contrapuntal manner: the piece develops at different times in motion that is parallel, similar, or contrary to common expectations of what should happen in a concert hall.

The interview was held on 4 August 2020.

ANNESLEY BLACK is a composer and a member of the Akademie der Künste. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

TUAN DO DUC is a media technician and cultural scientist. From the beginning of September 2019 to the end of August 2020, he was a KUNSTWELTEN trainee in the KIWit programme, an initiative to support careers in BKM-funded institutions.

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“AN ILLUSTRATION IS NOT AN IMAGE”

Kerstin Hensel in conversation with Tuan Do Duc on travel and pictures TUAN DO DUC You met children from primary schools in Zerbst, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, and Gröbzig. What are they saying with their pictures and travel stories?

KERSTIN HENSEL That depends on the social situation.

There are pupils for whom holidays and day trips are normal; others have never left the places where they live.

For many 8- and 9-year-olds, however, it would seem that travel is not necessarily one of their passions. This is due, among other things, to their barely developed curiosity about the real world (virtual worlds are more powerful), to the protective control space of their parents, and to the acceptance that today it is normal to travel. These children still have a very limited range of experience and knowledge. Since they read little,

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“travelling in your head” doesn’t hold their interest. But the children did develop interest and imagination by creating works of art. They were less concerned with the topic of travel than with the new experience of using unusual materials and printing techniques to develop a freedom of design.

TDD What is so exciting for schoolchildren about following in the footsteps of Daniel Chodowiecki during a painting and writing workshop?

KH Firstly, in this instance, it will be pupils from higher classes who will attend the workshop outside school.

One of the challenges will be that Chodowiecki’s works represent a fascinating contrast to the current overflowing world of images. Chodowiecki became the ideal and benchmark of his time through his exacting craftsmanship, through his diverse, precise perception of what he saw on his trip to Danzig. Such a thing no longer exists in this form. Perhaps the pupils will learn to see through

the eyes of an artist who lived and worked more than two hundred years ago, and will compare it to their present.

TDD How is the workshop structured? What will be on show at the “ON MY WAY – Stories from Europe” exhibition?

KH The aim is to produce a Berlin Diary made of writing and pictures. We will take the students to several “experience stations” in Berlin, including the Kupferstich­ kabinett gallery of prints, the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, and Emilio Vedova’s Absurd Berlin Diary installation. They will learn to see the city from different perspectives, to reflect on and frame what they see.

The pupils will also learn about various graphic and poetic techniques. The practical work will be done at the graphic artist Ulrich Karlkurt Köhler’s studio and in my workroom.

TDD How do you illustrate texts, or how can you compose texts for pictures or drawings?

KH An illustration should not be a simple image, but should stimulate the imagination of the reader or viewer.

Today, book illustration is of little significance compared with the 18th century, except in the area of children’s books. The publishing companies are saving money. In addition to this, there is the dubious argument that an illustrative picture would limit the reader’s imagination.

Chodowiecki and Vedova are two contrary examples of how to handle the text and its corresponding image: realistically or in an expressive, abstract manner.

The interview was held on 28 July 2020.

KERSTIN HENSEL is a writer and the deputy director of the Literature Section of the Akademie der Künste.

She lives in Berlin.

TUAN DO DUC is a media technician and cultural scientist. From the beginning of September 2019 to the end of August 2020, he was a KUNSTWELTEN trainee in the KIWit programme, an initiative to support careers in BKM-funded institutions.

“DAY BELONGS TO THE LIVING BEINGS, NIGHT TO THE THINGS.” 1

Martina Krafczyk in conversation with Gesine Bey and Elena Zieser about the workshop “Ein ganz langweiliges Zimmer?” (“A very boring room?”), which took place from 21 to 25 September 2020 with pupils from the Protestant school in Wolfen, Anhalt-Bitterfeld.

MARTINA KRAFCZYK Where did the title of the workshop come from?

GESINE BEY It comes from the radio play of the same name by Anna Seghers, which she wrote in 1938. Since the “Kinder im Exil” (“Children in Exile”) exhibition and workshop project, the KUNSTWELTEN department has been working even more closely with the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. This includes finding interesting manuscripts or works of art in the archives and conducting creative workshops with the children, designed around the motifs of these works of art. The archives offered lots of material for the large “Reisen” (“Journeys”) project.

Anna Seghers’s story is about a boy in his room who cannot go to sleep: The mother: Look around the room. You can tell stories about everything you see.

The child: It’s a very boring room and I know everything already. And everything in it is boring.

The mother: Imagine the room is a harbour. All the things in it have come from far away.

The child: Where did they come from? Tell me.2 Manufacturers arrive from all over the world and demand that the objects they made are returned to them. The boy is amazed and declares that his mother bought the objects, but they claim they are “borrowed”. What is exciting is that there is no journey in the literal sense; the focus is on the room.

MK What do you do with the children during the workshop?

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GB and ELENA ZIESER We read the text together and find motifs for their workshop. The children bring objects they like with them. They tell stories about these objects and about another object; how and where it was made; and how things change in night-time perception. It’s about radio plays and about lots of sounds. We want the children to make objects speak.

MK What can children experience or learn from radio plays and engaging with acoustic art?

EZ A radio play can be purely entertaining or political; it can take quite different forms. Repetition is essential.

With books, pictures are already provided, which you can think about further; with a radio play, we are one step back because you have to imagine everything for yourself: the people speaking and how they are visualised.

MK Why is Anna Seghers always interested in the journeys of objects?

GB She is also interested in people’s journeys. In her fairy tales and stories – and in her novels too – people often embark on journeys in search of something specific. Here, it is the other way around: the objects go on a journey. In a letter from 1938, when she was probably working on this radio play, she writes: “I have too much of a need for something perceptible, visually accessible, not just mental. I am working a lot now, recently somewhat held back by fatigue. And then there are also the children.”3 She was preparing her great novel The Seventh Cross that year and was quite alone with her two children (who were often sick) because her husband had to travel a lot for work and the nanny had to stay behind in Germany.

She probably accepted commissioned works, such as this radio play for Flemish radio because of financial worries. The work certainly resulted from this situation, where she was telling the children bedtime stories herself. At the same time, the pressure she feels because she actually has something else to do is tangible – as it is in her radio play. It is a very human experience, what she describes here, but also a “Zimmerreise” (armchair travel), a form that had been around since the 18th century. This play is part of this literary tradition.

EZ We wanted to bring the children into contact with the text, with Anna Seghers and her ideas, and to let them tell stories, to lead them to find stories in things and make these things speak. Gesine also shows them scans of different versions of the manuscript.

GB This is because Anna Seghers typed the first version on a typewriter – clearly in a great hurry – and corrected what was probably the first draft by hand. After exile, she turned her attention to the printed versions. In 1975, for example, the radio play was published in the journal Neue Deutsche Literatur. These versions were once again reviewed by the author. In my opinion, the play loses a little of its edge. The mother, who is actually in a hurry, says significantly more expressive things to her son at the beginning of the play: “Maybe you want to kill me or something, by demanding that I sit here with you all the time!” This is quite thrilling and is similar to situations many parents are familiar with. The children should also learn how old paper can be, sort it by age, and write on typewriters – so that they come to see the scans in a completely different light.

MK Elena, in your work you deal with invisible communication, often mixing original recordings with fiction, creating new contexts and stories. You have often mixed

radio plays and theatre plays, accompanied by sound: What can audio plays, audio art, and sound art do?

EZ The medium can do quite a lot. Above all, it can tell stories particularly well, because it opens up completely different spaces. It always relates to the listener. A story is told using only spoken language, sounds, and atmosphere, which means the pictures and feelings that go with this are often conjured up by the listeners themselves. The mixture of fiction and original or interview material is actually just an attempt to add a level: the documentary material adds a level of reality. For those giving the interviews, the stories I build are often no longer their own. The whole thing has an element of collective storytelling, or certain aspects of it are reminiscent of collective memory. And that is actually where we come from in art and culture: Stories are told.

The interview was held on 15 July 2020.

1 Alphonse Daudet, Letters from my Mill (1896).

2 Ein ganz langweiliges Zimmer, a radio play by Anna Seghers, first broadcast in 1938 on Flemish radio, printed in Neue Deutsche Literatur 21, 5 (1973).

3 Anna Seghers to Alfred Kurella, Paris, probably July 1938, in Christiane Zehl Romero and Almut Giesecke, eds, Anna Seghers, Briefe 1924–1952 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), p. 48.

GESINE BEY, an author and literary scholar, curated the “Kinder im Exil” (“Children in Exile”) exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in 2016.

ELENA ZIESER is an audio artist and was a JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow (Berlin fellowship of the Film and Media Arts Section) in 2016.

MARTINA KRAFCZYK works for the KUNSTWELTEN – Education Programme at the Akademie der Künste.

The Bitterfeld-Wolfen Chemical Park is planning a crowdfunding event with local companies as a way to strengthen identification with this programme for children and young people in the region. Thanks to the Goethe-Institut, the exhibition will travel to the EU Council capitals of Ljubljana and Lisbon.

The project is being implemented in cooperation with the Working Group of Independent Cultural Institutes e. V. - AsKI, the Goethe-Institut, the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld, and Bitterfeld-Wolfen Chemical Park.

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THE KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRIZE

A PRIZE FROM ARTISTS FOR ARTISTS

Anke Hervol

To this day, Käthe Kollwitz stands as an exemplary artist personality who bluntly exposed deficiencies in society, in particular regarding the plight of the working class, women, and families. Her election as a full member of the Preußische Akademie der Künste on 24 January 1919, the first woman to receive this honour since 1833,1 heralded a new phase in the history of the then two-hundredyear-old institution. Despite her initial misgivings, Kollwitz actively used her membership, and her position in the Exhibition Commissions as director of the master studio, to propose new members (some of them female), and later continued her engagement as a member of the Academy Senate. The reprisals launched by the National Socialists immediately after 30 January 1933 were directed against Kollwitz as a person and as an artist. What led to her exclusion from the Academy, and that of Heinrich Mann, both of whom were pressured to leave, was an election poster by the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Militant League) for the approaching Reichstag election on 5 March 1933.

The league called for a unified front of SPD and KPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany and Communist Party of Germany) against the National Socialists, which was something both Kollwitz and Mann had supported. More resignations and exclusions followed at the Prussian Academy (with only sporadic protests at the Academy’s extraordinary meeting), including those of Alfred Döblin, Martin Wagner, Ricarda Huch, Thomas Mann, and Max Liebermann.

Liebermann too was pressured to resign, in his case by means of

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a demeaning detour that made him an honorary president with no rights.

In every era, artists capture the virulence of the time so that it may become topical history and not be forgotten tomorrow. This is why Kollwitz’s outcry, her appeal not to neglect society in the process of making art, is just as relevant for us today as it was back then. The self-conception underlying the re-founding of the Akademie der Künste (East) on 24 March 1950 was a democratic tradition, rooted in the values and goals of the Preußische Akademie der Künste between 1919 and 1933. This was also expressed in commemorative exhibitions on artists ostracised during the Nazi period, among them Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz.2 However, the first exhibitions at the Akademie der Künste (East), such as the Käthe Kollwitz retrospective in June 1951, were harshly criticised by the Culture Department of the SED’s Central Committee for a lack of ideological guidance. This was followed by interventions in the preparation of the catalogue and the 1951 Ernst Barlach exhibition, and a telling correspondence between the cultural editorial department of the Neues Deutschland news­ paper and the Culture Department regarding the Barlach exhibition.

The documentation of those early years illustrates the reservations held by the Central Committee and the difficult phase of the so-called formalism debate.

In 1956 the Visual Arts Section finally began to discuss the establishment of an Academy prize to “promote a popular, realistic visual art”. The decision to name the prize after Käthe Kollwitz is an early testimony to the Academy’s wish to highlight not only a work or a personality but also this artist’s close bond to socialism and the working class. This stance also documents a “critical distancing from the aberrations of the formalism debate, which the official cultural policy of the SED was only capable of cautiously articulating in 1978, i.e. two decades later, with the exhibition Weggefährten – Zeitgenossen. Bildende Kunst aus drei Jahrzehnten [“Companions – Contemporaries: Three decades of Visual Arts”] (Altes Museum, Berlin, 3 October–31 December 1979).”3

↑ T he Käthe Kollwitz Prize 1984 went to Manfred Böttcher: Manfred Böttcher and Werner Stötzer. ↖ The Käthe Kollwitz Prize 1966 went to Fritz Dähn (centre).

Prize winner 2018: Adrian Piper, Mauer, 2010, video installation: TV monitors, videos with randomly programmed images, fresh roses, dimensions variable.

Prize winner 2019: Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016, three-channel HD video installation, environment, JOURNAL DER 4.35 KĂœNSTE min. 14

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Prize winner 2020: Timm Ulrichs, “Weiter im Text”.

On 26 March 1960, to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Akademie der Künste (East), the still-young institution awarded the first Käthe Kollwitz Prize to Karl Erich Müller (1917– 1998) in the plenary hall at Robert-Koch-Platz, while at the same time awarding the Heinrich Mann Prize to Helmut Hauptmann (b.1928) and Annemarie Reinhard (1921–1976). Since the Käthe Kollwitz Prize was a political statement and an Academy award supported by the state – and for decades came with the personal approval of the prime minister – it was also subject to East German legal provisions.

Already in 1962, the first amendment to the statutes was undertaken by the Council of Ministers, under which the Minister of Culture was required to confirm each nomination – a stipulation that was formally adhered to until 1973. Article 7 of the statutes of 1960 provides for a threatening instrument: that the award can be revoked if the laureate should prove to be “unworthy of the honour”. The records make clear that approval by the Ministry went hand in hand with interventions in the list of nominees. Academy members were categorically excluded as potential laureates.

In the early years of the prize, contemporaries of Kollwitz were strongly represented. These include Sella Hasse (1962), Herbert Tucholski (1964), and Otto Nagel (1967), the latter by exception to the rule that excluded members. In 1984 a new tradition was introduced whereby the previous year’s laureate actively participates

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by delivering the laudatory speech – a tradition that exists to this day and has since been expanded upon, with the inclusion of members of the Academy sections serving as jurors.

Critical evaluation of the policy of awarding the prize and the Section’s self-perception at the time – as an “artistic conscience”, “as a regulator of state-controlled artistic life, without wishing to put its possibilities at risk” – has to this day not been given sufficient focus and research. In the coming years, the Academy will devote attention to this topic, and it sees the overview published online to mark the 60th anniversary of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize as a cornerstone of this critical evaluation: For the first time, the fifty-nine prizewinners, jury statements, and laudatory speeches will be made available in text form and, in some cases, as audio material at www.adk.de/kaethe-kollwitz-preis 1 It wasn’t until the reform phase (after 1786) that female artists were admitted as active members to the Akademie der Künste.

2 See Max Lingner, Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Lingner-Archiv, IV.A.102 u.IV.C.108, Bericht von Pommeranz-Liedtke, dated 11 Nov. 1950.

3 Karin Thomas, lecture to mark the opening of the exhibition “Kollwitz-Preisträger der Akademie der Künste zu Berlin. Sabine Grzimek, Dieter Goltzsche, Joachim John”, 16 Oct. 1991, Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne.

ANKE HERVOL is secretary of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

NEO-FASCISM TODAY

A DEBATE AT THE EAST GERMAN AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE IN THE SPRING OF 1979 Haiko Hübner

↑ Leaflet for the event “ANTIFA ’79”

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

On 7 May 1979, at the East German Akademie der Künste’s plenary session “Art in the Fight against Fascism – Yesterday and Today”, President Konrad Wolf issued a warning in his opening speech: “The impoverishment and confusion of emotional life, the callousness and brutalisation, and the erosion of an appreciation of beauty prepare the ground for fascism. Fascism destroys the entire individual, his or her entire humanity. Its poison penetrates all pores. We must therefore make the entire human being resistant to this poison. Bare information, bare knowledge, is not enough.” This admonition was addressed not only to the assembled artists but also to the state authorities. According to the opening speech made by the prime minister in 1950, the Academy, as the “supreme institution [...] in the field of art”, had the task of advising the government on cultural policy. The view of the functionaries of the SED party and the Ministry of Culture, however, was that the Academy did not always adequately perform the role assigned to it, at least not always in the desired manner.

For many members, the Akademie der Künste served as a place for forming opinions and gaining self-reassurance. The positions that converged and developed further here did not always toe the official line of the East German government. Stefan Heym concluded bluntly at the plenary session in October 1991 that “every time it would have been appropriate for the Academy to raise its voice and, for instance, protest against action taken by the East German government, […] the Academy remained silent”. Nevertheless, Christa Wolf spoke for many members when she stressed at a plenary session in September 1991 that “for years the Academy was for me the only space where I could still meet colleagues, discuss, make suggestions, criticise semi-publicly, and even read publicly.”

One of the most important discussions in the history of the East German Academy was about nascent antiSemitism and neo-fascism. In preparation for the plenary session in May 1979, members in all sections exchanged views on this topic. The discussions that took place in the Literature Section in January and March 1979 appear to have been remarkably heated. Many of the participants had been strongly influenced by the American miniseries Holocaust, which had recently been broadcast by West German television, and repeatedly took this as their point of reference.

According to the official SED stance at that time, the Shoah was one Nazi crime among many, and the oppression and persecution of Communist resistance fighters deserved special mention. Through the expropriation of capitalists, the causes of fascism and anti-Semitism in East Germany had been “eliminated root and branch”.

Therefore, from an official point of view, neo-fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies could not exist at all. Related incidents were not publicly mentioned, and criminal proceedings were sometimes terminated by decree or played down as youthful “hooliganism”.

In the Literature Section, however, there was soon agreement: the concept of fascism first had to be clearly defined, and it was necessary to concentrate on German fascism and its consequences up to the present day.

Since the aim was to reach young people in particular, reference should not be made, as was usually the case, to events outside the country, nor should Nicaragua or Cambodia be mentioned for the umpteenth time – as the poet Stephan Hermlin warned.

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Astonishing and alarming incidents from everyday life were then brought up. For example, Hermlin told of a woman who, in a late-evening suburban train, approached a man who was harassing someone: “And she said to the man: ‘But you are a Nazi!’ To which the man replied: “Of course I am! For me Adolf Hitler is the leader of the German people. [...] Report me to the police if you like.

I’m a teacher, by the way.’” Hermlin also reported on a small town where “a raucous mob of young people appears in rows of four in the market square at night, singing Nazi songs”, but where a policeman, called in to help, resignedly refuses to intervene, claiming his powerlessness to do so. The writer and director Günther Rücker in turn reported on the actor Roman Silberstein’s daughter, who was insulted as a “Jewish pig” by a fellow pupil in the tram. Confronted with this, the headmaster of the school transferred the fellow pupil to another town, but otherwise refused to talk about it in public, remarking that it was up to Miss Silberstein to take legal action privately.

At this point, the writer and SED party functionary Otto Gotsche felt called to state his position. Insisting that “reducing fascism to anti-Semitism [...] is also wrong”, he was met with a sharp rebuttal from Hermlin: “I know the famous argument of reduction too well not to know what is behind it. In reality, for at least ten years in East Germany [...] it has become an embarrassment to utter the word ‘Jew’ and everything associated with it. [...] In reality, [...] the bloodiest and most horrific crime of fascism was the extermination of the Jews. That is Number One, and it cannot be reduced.” Hermlin was very upset by Gotsche’s statement. In a letter written two days later to Erich Honecker, the SED Politbüro member Kurt Hager claimed Hermlin had been in a murderous state. Section members Alexander Abusch and Dieter Noll, among others, seconded Hermlin’s remarks in long statements. An interesting coalition, considering the circumstances. Abusch was known as someone who ruthlessly implemented official East German cultural policy. As deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1963, he had contributed in large part to Hermlin’s forced resignation from his posts following the “Junge Lyrik” (“Young poetry”) event he had initiated at the Academy. But Abusch came from a strictly religious Jewish family and must have felt personally affected by the debate. On his side was the writer Noll, who only weeks after this section meeting, in an open letter to Erich Honecker dated 22 May 1979, published in the newspaper Neues Deutschland, described such fellow writers as Stefan Heym, Joachim Seyppel, and Rolf Schneider as “screwed-up individuals” and thus publicly welcomed their exclusion from the writers’ association.

But Gotsche refused to be deterred: “In a situation where class and political issues are very sharply defined and where a decision has to be taken because party members or party comrades take a different view to what our party decides, for example, [...] and then publicly oppose it, I take a close look at who these people are. And when there are four or five or maybe six Jews out of ten who are involved, I take a close look.” And he addressed Hermlin directly: “[...] that is the issue where we differ.” To which Hermlin replied: “We differ in that I’m a Jew and you’re anti-Semitic,” continuing, “The Romans said: Si tacuisses, if you had kept silent...”.

Gotsche’s comments subsequently met with general opposition, and he seemed to have gone too far even for his party comrades. There was a heated discussion on the SED Central Committee, and Gotsche was given a severe party reprimand.

The dispute continued at the Literature Section’s next meeting. Christa Wolf, for example, once again echoed Hermlin’s sentiments and asked “how delusion arises and how masses can be incited to take certain actions against very specific groups. [...] This is part of the so-called Jewish question, that mass delusion could be created here [...] mass deception that continues today and still results in an undercurrent of anti-Semitic remarks, as experienced at the last session.” Wolf pointed out that it was customary in East Germany to say that the German people had been led astray during the Nazi era and, for political and tactical reasons, to give them the role of victims: “I can remember in the early 1960s, when I had the feeling that this problem was being treated too lightly or incorrectly or forgotten in our country, someone told me that ‘We cannot build socialism with a people that feels guilty’.”

Franz Fühmann was even blunter in his criticism: “I feel physically nauseous when I read this press in which, with an unparalleled Pharisaic self-righteousness, the finger is always pointed at others, in which a picture is painted of a blissful, beautiful world, and I want to shout and say, Hey everyone, who are these 14-year-olds making swastikas in our midst? How can we reach them?”

The section finally agreed to use the imminent plenary session to address the public: to communicate its own experiences and insights to the outside world, and to focus in particular on young people. On 7 May 1979, and again on 2 June at the East German International Youth Festival, the sections held a joint event where writers, artists, and other interested parties stated their positions under the title “ANTIFA ’79 – Art in the Fight against Fascism – Yesterday and Today”. In interviews with the singer-songwriter Reinhold Andert, members talked about their experiences with fascism, in relation to their own works. The interviews, some unabridged and illustrated with photos, were printed in the press, as was the opening speech made by Konrad Wolf at the plenary session.

The discussions mentioned had an effect on all the Academy’s work in the coming years. The topic was taken up again and again at events including “Antifa III – Contemporary Witnesses” at the Workers’ Festival in Rostock in June 1980; “Antifa 80” during the plenary session in the autumn of 1980; “Antifa 85” to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II; and at the premieres of the Heynowski/Scheumann films Die Lüge und der Tod (“The lie and the death”) and Kamerad Krüger in 1988. Even the employees of the Academy addressed the issue at a cultural event organised by the trade union and invited the chairman of the Jewish Community of Greater Berlin, Peter Kirchner, to give a lecture.

His comments on the Jewish self-image in East Germany, and above all on East Germany’s problematical attitude towards Israel, touched on taboo subjects. The symbolic foundation stone for the reconstruction of the New Synagogue building on Oranienburger Straße in Berlin was laid in November 1988, thanks to the efforts of the Jewish community, which for years had resisted the demolition efforts.

However, one can hardly say that the 1979 Academy initiative had a deep, lasting impact on East German society. The first public analysis of right-wing radicalism in East Germany did not appear until March 1989. In his study “The new old threat: right-wing radicals in East Germany”, the film director and civil rights activist Konrad Weiss demonstrated that East German political culture largely accommodated authoritarian and rightwing ideologies, and stated in no uncertain terms that “These young fascists are the product of our society.” A fact long overlooked at government level.

Certainly, criticism of the official doctrine in the debates within the Academy remained “semi-public”, as Christa Wolf put it in 1991. However, the opinions of Hermlin, Wolf, Fühmann, and others did not go unnoticed by the political decision-makers. Plenty of official and unofficial reports were written on this issue.

The world today is once again confronted with the societal spectres of anti-Semitism and neo-fascism. A nuanced examination of historical details can sharpen our perception of the dangers that confront a democratic society, dangers it must deal with – on the various levels of society, not only politically and legally but also culturally and intellectually – and which it must consistently oppose.

In an interview marking the anniversary of the founding of the East German Akademie der Künste, the current president of the Akademie der Künste, Jeanine Meerapfel, stressed that “The Academy today is particularly preoccupied with concerns about the rise of right-wing radicalism.”

HAIKO HÜBNER is an archivist at the Historical Archives and database editor of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

The East German Akademie der Künste – founded seventy years ago on 24 March 1950 – existed under various names until 1993 and then merged, in a reorganised form, with the West German Akademie der Künste.

Its founding members included Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Gret Palucca, and Anna Seghers. Arnold Zweig became its first president, replacing Heinrich Mann, who had died shortly before taking office. East Germany’s central art academy, with its fine arts, performing arts, literature, and music sections, worked to maintain the delicate balance between the state mission to represent East German art and the aspiration to critically and publicly reflect on art and society.

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JOURNAL DER KÃœNSTE 14

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Excerpts from the Sunday newspaper of 20 May 1979.

“A MAN RUNNING OUT OF TIME” BRECHT REHEARSES GALILEO (1955/56) THE THEATRE DIRECTOR STEPHAN SUSCHKE ON AN UNUSUAL FIND Stephan Suschke

During preparations for a 2014 production of Galileo I found, in the Bertolt Brecht Archive of the Akademie der Künste, the audio recordings of the Galileo rehearsals that were made during the last year of Brecht’s life. His wisdom, his knowledge, his sensualism magically drew me into the rehearsals, and I understood how worn out the image of Brecht had become: it had solidified, through sixty years of Brecht reception, into a lifeless granite monument. This slumbering treasure had to be made accessible.

The audio recordings of rehearsals, unusual for that time, were the idea of Brecht’s assistant Hans Bunge, who encouraged him to buy a tape recorder. Using that device, Bunge recorded all the rehearsals for Galileo on a total of 133 tapes, constituting around one hundred hours of extraordinary material. These tapes were digitised by the Akademie der Künste and form the basis of this edition.

Brecht wrote the first draft of Galileo in October/ November 1938, while in exile in Denmark. The piece focuses on the courage, wisdom, and cunning that is necessary to spread the truth. Together with the Oscarwinner Charles Laughton, he produced a second, American draft, which premiered in 1947 in Los Angeles, with Laughton playing the role of Galileo. In the context of the 17 June 1953 uprising, Brecht revised Galileo in a third and final draft, mirroring his own difficult relationship with the state authority and the cultural bureaucracy of the GDR. The utopian potential of the GDR was put to the test by day-to-day petty warfare waged with narrow-minded, and often dumb, state functionaries. Brecht acted with pragmatic intelligence, with the knowledge that the impact of the work is more important than moralistic discussions. Seen from this perspective, Galileo is a biographical piece.

Rehearsals began in December 1955. One of the most commonly heard sentences was: “That has to be examined.” This was Brecht’s practical contribution to the “breaking up of ideology”; it opened up for discussion accepted truths and fundamentally called into question ideology-based authority.

Brecht’s work was shaped by his intuitive sensuousness, his passion, his fun, his greed. The basis was a precise understanding of the differentiated social tableau that he describes in this piece. An almost sleepwalking pursuit of goals completely devoid of dogmatism – this was the source of the lightness, the pleasure he took in

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looking for the most intelligent solutions, which were also supposed to be beautiful.

Aware that the contradictions grow if the characters are in the right, he tried to give justification to every character, every group of characters. He avoided the then common vulgar Marxist stigmatisation of social groups based on their clichés, which always brought with it the danger of denunciation.

The often-asked question “How will we do it?” was an invitation to collaborate extended to the actors, among them Ernst Busch, Fred Düren, and Regine Lutz, but also to the other staff. Brecht is open to the actors’ playful suggestions; he seduces them with his interest, his giddy laughter, and the originality of his descriptions. For example, it is with tremendous patience that he explains to the young actor Heinz Schubert, who would later gain fame as (Nasty) Alfred Tetzlaff, the existential dichotomy of a young monk, caught between ideology and a thirst for knowledge, and brings him to argue on an equal footing both with and against Galileo. All this takes place in an atmosphere devoid of fear, an atmosphere of humour and seriousness.

Throughout this process, his text was never sacrosanct. For him, the desire to think was physical. He was interested in the actors walking in straw shoes because they made a whisking, sensuous sound, but also because they changed the gait of Galileo’s daughter Virginia. It was about reality, which he amplified to an artificial level.

The recordings make clear that the way he worked, contrary to the common perception of him, was never didactic; that the work of the actors was always also emotionally founded. Brecht allowed for emotions but was sensitive to false pathos. The direct tone on which he insisted was part of a counter-movement against the “Göring theatre” of National Socialism and the tenor of the GDR weekly newsreel.

On the one hand, he had the theatrical effect in mind; on the other hand, he was counteracting a naturalistic way of speaking and acting. And that was political because it gave the characters a place within the social fabric and made clear that the actions of individuals are embedded in social structures – which led to a big shift in terms of attitudes and emotions that were based at both a social and an individual level.

In the rehearsals for the ballad scene, Brecht says, “A Brueghelian world of paradise comes about. Something quite pathetic as an artwork – but conceived in a grand way.” And that is also a description of the GDR, which put a theatre at Brecht’s disposal, a theatre that he used, with each new work, to call into question the entrenched, ideological patterns of thinking, working with critical solidarity against the pitiful realisation of a grand project.

On 27 March 1956, the final rehearsal with Brecht takes place. On 23 April, he tells the Minister of Culture Johannes R. Becher that he will continue rehearsals in October. It does not come to that: On 14 August, he dies in this home at Chausseestraße 125.

STEPHAN SUSCHKE worked closely with Heiner Müller – from the late 1980s until Müller’s death in 1995 – on his productions at the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Berliner Ensemble. Suschke became deputy director of the Berliner Ensemble in 1995 and was its artistic director from 1997 until 1999, when he began to work as a freelance director. As of the 2016/17 season, he has held the position of stage director at the Landestheater Linz.

↑ Bertolt Brecht and Ekkehard Schall rehearsing, Berlin, 1956. ↓ Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Busch, Berlin, 1956.

The edition follows the spirit of Brecht’s work.

A two-hour documentary feature on two CDs condenses and dramatises the original sound recordings and places the piece in the context of its societal background. The feature by Joachim Werner on an extra CD takes a different form: it intertwines countless rehearsal snippets, creating a multi-layered and movable sound picture, in which Brecht’s sensuousness, wisdom, strictness, magnanimity, and passion are celebrated in a wild, dialectic dance. The edition is completed by an extensive booklet with commentary, photos, and typescripts.

BRECHT PROBT GALILEI – 1955/56 – „EIN MANN DER KEINE ZEIT MEHR HAT“ (BRECHT REHEARSES GALILEO – 1955/56 – “A MAN RUNNING OUT OF TIME”) 3 CDs, illustrated booklet. Edited by Stephan Suschke with a feature by Joachim Werner.

In cooperation with the Archives of the Akademie der Künste. Berlin: speak low, 2020.

Original historical recordings with Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Busch, Hanns Eisler, Fred Düren, Angelika Hurwicz, Erik S. Klein, Regine Lutz, Willi Schwabe, Heinz Schubert, and many others.

In cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES

FINDS

O DICHT’, SOLANG’ DU DICHTEN KANNST! (O WRITE, AS LONG AS YOU CAN WRITE!) THE AUTOGRAPH BOOKS OF SUSI ALBERTI Werner Grünzweig

Sometimes it is the little things that stand up to the great injustice of history somewhat, symbolically at least: Susi Alberti’s three autograph books, which have been carefully preserved in many countries for a whole century, are a very personal memento of encounters with great artists, of both serious and light music, who were active in Berlin before 1933; they have survived the historical disasters of the last hundred years. Now Alberti’s heirs have brought these books back from Australia to Berlin, where the artists immortalised on their pages were once rigorously excluded from life in the city.

Susi Alberti was the younger daughter of Victor Alberti (formerly Victor Altstätter), a music publisher born in Miskolc (north-eastern Hungary) in 1884, who ran the Rózsavölgyi sheet-music publishing business in Budapest and, after moving to Berlin, founded the Alrobi, Alberti Musik, Ufaton, Dreiklang-Dreimasken, and Doremi music publishing houses. Before fleeing Germany, he was deputy treasurer of the German Music Publishers Association. He ran the Octava Verlag publishing house in Vienna up until 1938 and then, on the advice of the conductor Antal Doráti, fled with his family to Australia, where he again headed a publishing company. Susi Alberti was 21 years old when she arrived in Australia.

She had no professional experience and initially worked in the countryside as an au-pair for the family of Yehudi Menuhin’s sister, Hephzibah Menuhin. As she had always lived in big cities in Europe, however, she soon moved to Melbourne, where she took a job at a bookshop which, not least because of her commitment, became a cultural centre in the city. It bore the telling name Hill of Content Bookshop.

Victor Alberti created the autograph books for his daughter immediately after she was born, as a kind of artistic family album. She was not even at school when the violinists Fritz Kreisler, Bronisław Huberman, and Carl Flesch gave her their autographs; she was just 6 years old when the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, the violinist Joseph Szigeti, the cellist Pablo Casals, the conductors Erich

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Kleiber (after the world premiere of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck) and Fritz Busch, and the composer Igor Stravinsky signed the book.

Another book contains the signatures of the con­ ductors Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Willem Mengelberg; the authors Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Ferenc Molnár (author of Liliom); and the composer Zoltán Kodály.

The fact that Victor Alberti first asked for entries on behalf of his daughter is more evident in another book dedicated to light musicians (Alberti clearly separated the spheres of “serious” and “light” music). For example, the members of the Comedian Harmonists wrote the following for Susi at Christmas 1932: An autograph for Alberti’s daughter Susi?

I don’t know her! Well, if I may ask, do you know her?

Wir kennen sie zwar alle nicht, doch bilden wir uns ein (We don’t know her at all, but we can imagine) “Es muß was Wunderschönes sein” (It must be something wonderful) The last line is taken from the beginning of a famous song from Ralph Benatzky’s musical comedy Im Weißen Rössl, which had premiered in Berlin only two years earlier. This line is cited in an entry by Benatzky himself a few pages on, where in February 1933, while sitting on the night train with Alberti, he wrote the following: G’stanzl im Zug (Small poem on the train) Es muß was Wunderschönes sein (It must be something wonderful) to be loved by you, but when the train is moving, little Susi, it makes it difficult to write, though I don’t write very nicely anyway at least I have never smudged as much as I did today on the trip from Vienna to Berlin!

Finally, in an entry dated 23 July 1933, the lyricist and librettist Robert Gilbert, known to us for his translation of the lyrics from My Fair Lady into German (or the Berlin dialect), holds a mirror up to his time. It takes him only two lines to do so, because he can trust that the reference to Ferdinand Freigligrath’s O lieb’, solang du lieben kannst (O love, as long as you can love) will be understood, as will the obvious double meaning of dichten (write poetry / seal up) and leck (lick / leak): O dicht’, solang’ Du dichten kannst, (O write, as long as you can write,) Die Welt ist leck genug! (The world is leaking enough!)

The desire to play constantly with language while also satirising oneself is obviously a sign of the times. What is striking, however, is the way Victor Alberti dealt with artists: They knew he revered them, saw him as a friend, and if he was a businessman, he was also a trustee of their interests, a dealer who dealt in music without degrading art or artists as goods.

In Australia, Susi Alberti later married the son of a former singer at the Budapest Opera, Tamás Gábor, and was subsequently called Susanne Elizabeth Gábor. She did not consider the autograph books to be a completed legacy from her father, who had died in 1942, and occasionally presented them to artists in Australia (including violinist Yehudi Menuhin in around 1970) and supplemented them with individual pages, biographical notes, and selected correspondence. Mrs Gábor died in 2014 at the age of 95.

Through the mediation of Berlin-based Albrecht Dümling, who researches the condition of exile, Victor Alberti’s grandson, Charles Baré, who lives in Victoria, Australia, came into contact with the Akademie der Künste and visited its Music Archives in the summer of 2019 with his wife, Liz, in order to hand his great aunt’s autograph books over to the Academy on behalf of his family.

WERNER GRÜNZWEIG is the director of the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

↖ Dedication from Otto Klemperer in Budapest on 25 July 1933, shortly before he emigrated to the United States. ↑ Signed by the members of the Comedian Harmonists for Susi Alberti at Christmas 1932: Roman Cycowski, Erich Collin, Robert Biberti, Ari Leschnikoff, Erwin Bootz, and Harry Frommermann.

DIGITAL.ADK.DE THE ARCHIVES OF THE AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE PRESENT THEIR DIGITAL SHOWCASE Werner Heegewaldt

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Art archives need to be viewed. Manuscripts, photographs, models, paintings, drawings, and videos are hard to understand without images and almost impossible to experience sensually. To make their diverse collections of modern art more accessible, the Archives of the Akademie der Künste have set up a digital showcase at digital.adk.de. The selected collections afford an insight into the extensive holdings of the archives, which collect and make publicly accessible the archives of outstanding artists in the German-speaking world, across all art forms. The spectrum extends from the avant-garde photographs of Ellen Auerbach and the utopian architectural designs of Bruno Taut to the manuscripts of the art philosopher Carl Einstein and the New Music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. The art collection, which exhibits outstanding works by Daniel Chodowiecki, Johann Gottfried Schadow, and Carl Blechen, represents the Academy’s older tradition of collecting. A special focus of the presentation is the Preußische Akademie der Künste, which celebrates its 325th anniversary in 2021.

Portraits of members are shown alongside architectural models and drawings as well as the Academy’s exhibition catalogues from 1786 to 1943. Another advantage of the showcase is that, in addition to the archives and art collection, printed works from the library can be presented digitally for the first time. Unless otherwise marked, the digital copies can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons licenses CC0 or CC BY-NCND 4.0.

The showcase aims to enhance the visibility of the major collections in the archives. Access and handling

have been deliberately designed to be simple. The presentation focuses on the aesthetic and material appeal of the objects in order to reach a broad public. The responsive web design permits quick use, even on mobile devices, while tools facilitate searches, the display of images and audio documents, and the arrangement of found objects.

For more extensive research, links are provided to the archives’ database, which will continue to be the archives’ most important resource.

With this presentation, the Academy is responding to the changing demands and opportunities of the digital knowledge society. The archives went online with their database in 2015 and showed digitised images, texts, and audio documents on its web pages for the first time.

Since then, we have been receiving an increasing number of requests to steadily expand our offering and make archive materials accessible online rather than in the reading room. At the same time, the technical possibilities and challenges of processing digital information and making increased use of it are growing. This includes electronic text recognition, digital editions, the networking of information, and the virtual merging of archive holdings. Automated procedures allow sources to be searched and analysed more quickly and hyperlinked to external sources such as biographies, maps, photographs, and encyclopedias. The archives’ digital showcase is to become a platform for realising such projects and creating new access to the Academy’s outstanding collections.

One IT-related goal of the project is to largely automate processes, which will allow data from the archives’

database and other sources to be transferred to the showcase. To provide a sustainable application and allow open access (OA; open source), the software and program code must also meet additional criteria. The forwardlooking maintenance of software and web technology necessitates resources that can exceed the capacity of a single institution. On the other hand, the software requirements are rarely so specific as to economically justify developing a program code in-house. The Akademie der Künste therefore relies on working with other institutions, not only for the portal content but also for the software Kitodo (“key to digital objects”). The Kitodo software suite is maintained and upgraded in cooperation with libraries and archives such as the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden and the Swiss Federal Archive, thus benefiting the entire community.

THE ARCHIVES’ DIGITAL PROJECTS The website digital.adk.de also serves as a portal for further digital projects of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, many of which have arisen in cooperation with other institutions in academia and culture. These include virtual exhibitions, digital editions, catalogues, and lists of works, such as the presentation “Kosmos Heartfield,” which displays the life and work of the political photomontage artist John Heartfield as well as his extensive catalogue of graphic works. And new editions are planned, including hybrid (analogue and digital) editions on the notebooks of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the works of the philosopher Walter Benjamin. The Academy has worked with the Heidelberg University Library to digitise the exhibition catalogues of the Preußische Akademie der Künste. Over two hundred catalogues, covering the period 1786–1943, are accessible online and searchable as full text. This information on about eighty thousand works of art by some twelve thousand artists is a central source for art-historical research, especially in providing the provenance of the collected objects. Further projects in the field of the digital humanities are in preparation.

Online catalogue of the graphic estate of John Heartfield.

HEINRICH MANN DIGITAL

Virtual exhibition on Oscar Begas (1828–1883), winner of the Rome Prize at the Akademie der Künste.

To mark next year’s 150th anniversary of the birth of the novelist Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), the “Heinrich Mann DIGITAL” project will be launched. The aim is to create a digital collection of his handwritten legacy, currently spread over several locations both within and outside Europe, and to edit parts of it online. It is a pilot project for numerous other artist archives.

WERNER HEEGEWALDT is the director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

Online presentation of the exhibition catalogues of the Preußische Akademie der Künste (1786–1943).

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FREUNDESKREIS

“THIS IS ABOUT THE MARGINS IN THE MIDDLE OF SOCIETY” From 2 October 2020 to 10 January 2021, at Pariser Platz, the Akademie der Künste is presenting a new joint exhibition by the members of OSTKREUZ – Agentur der Fotografen, entitled “CONTINENT – In Search of Europe”. The exhibition has been conceived as an artistic and political statement with a focus on the present state of Europe, which is critically examined in twenty-two positions. It is supported by the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste. Rainer Esser, deputy chairman of the Board of the Society, spoke with the managing directors of OSTKREUZ, Anne Schönharting and Jörg Brüggemann.

Images: Frank Schinski, from the series “The Right Attitude”.

RAINER ESSER Thank you both for taking the time for a conversation. I’m quite impressed by the broad spectrum of motifs, moods, and subtle observations that you’ve put together. Whose idea was it to visualise this “Project Europe” for the agency’s 30th anniversary?

ANNE SCHÖNHARTING Actually, it wasn’t one person.

In 2015 we were planning an exhibition in Paris to mark the 25th anniversary of OSTKREUZ. Already back then, we were saying how much we were looking forward to our next exhibition project. But then in November, as we were celebrating the opening in Paris, the terrorist attacks were carried out by ISIS in the same neighbourhood as our event. That really triggered something in all of us. I recall that at some point we were sitting in the courtyard of our agency, a small campus in Weißensee, Berlin, discussing topics like “coexistence”. Suddenly, the word “continent” came up, along with the idea that we have to focus on the notion of Europe. We felt like we had to take a bird’s eye view of everything that was happening.

JÖRG BRÜGGEMANN I’m not quite sure what came first.

It’s possible that the topic was already there, and that it took on an even greater relevance because of the Paris attacks. In any case, it became clear that we would work on that topic because something is going on that needs to be examined, reflected on, and critically questioned.

RE What kind of stimulus do you hope to provide with the exhibition, and how would you like to influence the discussion?

JB First of all, it’s about people asking the question: What is Europe for me? What does it mean to me, and what is its value to me? It would be important for me to

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 14

trigger a kind of commitment to Europe. Not to look at it through rose-tinted glasses, but in an ambivalent and differentiated way. We enjoy so many advantages and opportunities in Europe, in terms of history as well as politically and socially, but we also have serious issues that need to be addressed. I’d be very happy if through our exhibition we could be part of that discussion.

AS It struck me that the majority of members are involved in the topic of remembrance: remembering Europe’s past or their personal memories. In the context of current developments, I think it’s important to strengthen the awareness of what Europe is built on. Also in the negative sense, for example with regard to the question of where this prosperity comes from. There has to be a balance, so that the great European idea can be carried forward. If we exclude urgent issues such as the refugee problem, or if countries no longer seek an exchange with each other, a very difficult situation will develop in Europe.

RE If I were to take a somewhat heretical approach, I would say: If the EU Commission wanted to capture the mood of Europe, they probably wouldn’t take any of your photographs, as they focus in particular on the problems and the fringes of Europe. Is that deliberate?

JB It’s the photographers who – with their attitudes and perspectives – choose their topics. Perhaps we work together on the basis of a similar viewpoint, and in addition we see it as our job at times to put a finger into the wound. Not in an ideological, politically motivated way, but rather from a humanistic standpoint, we might say: Not everything here is going smoothly yet. We can, however, be proud of this big European project, which we or the generations before us have brought this far. But there is also much to improve on.

RE When you listen to the politicians talking about Europe, they always mention the common heritage, the culture, the human rights in Europe, but also the beauty.

Your photographers present an alternative concept to this grand scenario. They concentrate on the fringe areas: alcoholism in Finland, for example, or migrants coming to Germany and finding themselves in the middle of the Black Forest.

AS I don’t know if they are fringe areas. I deal with the topic of colonialism, for example. That is a part of European history as well, something that Europe was built on. As artistic and creative people, we tend to seek out those kinds of topics. Is it an alternative concept? Not by intention. I’d describe it more as drawing attention to something, or making it visible.

JB If I may add something else: Our colleague Stephanie Steinkopf, the photographer who, as you mentioned, took photographs of an alcoholic in Finland, said that “It’s always referred to as the margins of society, but it’s actually not that at all. Alcoholism is a huge problem in our society.”1 The woman she photographs, Virpi, isn’t a crazy person who fell out of the system; she is pars pro toto.

There are a lot of people in Europe who are going through the same thing. This is about the margins in the middle of society.

RE Was there one artwork that you felt was particularly moving – which illustrates exactly what you mean?

JB Several of them, actually. I was very impressed by Frank Schinski’s series, which focuses on work and on people looking for work. With his very analytical style of photography, he shows a dark side of capitalism in a way that sends cold shivers down your spine. With a kind of

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helicopter view, he looks down from above onto the concept of work, self-worth, and career, and what that means at a personal as well as at a societal level. It’s not necessarily pleasant to look at, but I think it’s extremely important and, above all, it’s outstanding photography.

It’s important to know that Frank had a much more difficult time starting out than others in the agency. He initially did an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and entered the normal job market; so it wasn’t until later that he decided to become a photographer, to become selfemployed, and to follow the artistic path. That was a much bigger step for him than for someone like me – who comes from a middle-class West German family. And now he looks back and asks what work actually means, what kind of value have I created for myself, what place have I found in society – that’s what I think is so fantastic about his work.

RE How did you find your own topic, Mr Brüggemann?

Do you associate protesters and the right to freedom of expression with Europe in particular?

JB The starting points are Articles 11 and 12 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the right to freedom of expression and the right to freedom of assembly, both of which are expressed in the form of demonstrations. These are important cornerstones of our liberal democracies in Europe and of our understanding of them. I found it interesting to travel through Europe and photograph the wide spectrum of people exercising their human rights. And to try to view people on equal terms, irrespective of their political environment. There are photographs of Pegida demonstrators, but also one taken at a counter-demonstration, one at the demonstration for independence in Catalonia, one among the yellow vest protests in France, one at a demonstration of nationalists in Budapest. Ultimately, these are individuals who are standing up for their rights.

Attending a demonstration unleashes an extraordinary range of emotions: joy, self-empowerment, sadness, a feeling of solidarity, aggression. It fascinates me to capture the diverse emotions expressed on people’s faces,

and in the process to make a statement in support of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, but also in support of freedom of the press. If I go out in public and take individual portraits of people who are on the streets to demonstrate and show their face for a cause, then that’s also part of the current discussion on weighing the rights of personal privacy against freedom of the press and artistic freedom.

RE Mrs Schönharting, you dealt with your great-grandfather, with his “Africa room”, and with colonialism. That is a part of Europe you obviously wanted to highlight.

AS Even though it was always part of my family history, I never considered examining it. At some point, the topic was suddenly just there. I started back in 2015, when I was still very close to my family. What’s interesting is that, at both a societal and a personal level, a remarkable process has taken shape. The racism debate, topics relating to colonialism, debates about the provenance of artworks or the refugee movements. All these debates, the debates within the museums about what to do with the colonial legacy and how to address it, and the communication with the museums in the countries of origin.

At the same time, I kept more distance from my own family and was increasingly able to recognise the bigger picture. Above all, I was able to see myself and to ask: How do I see it, and how has it affected me? And on the issue of racism: What are we collectively, as a group of white people? How deeply anchored within us is this prerogative of interpretation that we consider ourselves, including Europe, to be the norm?

RE That is conveyed very well, all the horrors of colonialism, which are now, to a certain extent, coming home to Europe.

AS I think there will always be a balance, like yin and yang. Something that existed in an earlier time is now coming back, like a boomerang. Even nature, which we are part of, will always try to find a balance. That’s why we have to take responsibility, also in order to heal ourselves. We as whites or as Europeans have to re-conceptualise ourselves or develop a new understanding. And

that is a difficult process, for which there is more than one solution. In the exhibition we never claim to depict Europe in its entirety. It’s just a magnifying glass we use to focus on the continent, from our personal point of view, but more like an excerpt.

JB Our exhibitions are mosaics in which there will always be a missing piece. We make no claim to completeness or to explain everything. I hope that the right questions will be asked and that visitors will see that the twentythree photographers – with Sibylle Bergemann2 – are asking the same questions that they themselves are asking. And finding no answers, but often only new questions. I see it as a process, not in terms of right and wrong, black and white. Much of what makes Europe is ambivalent, but there is still a feeling of belonging and togetherness. That’s why I like the title “CONTINENT”, because it’s derived from this “joint” mass of land. That is the essence. Actually, you can take that idea further, because Europe is also only a randomly drawn border, and in the end we’re talking about the world and all of humanity.

The interview was conducted on 23 July 2020.

1 “Wie definieren wir unseren Platz in der beschleunigten Gesellschaft” [“How do we define our place in an accelerated society”], a podcast with the photographer Stephanie Steinkopf, https://www.adk.de/de/ programm/?we_objectID=61262 2 Sibylle Bergemann (1941–2010) co-founded the agency OSTKREUZ following the reunification of Germany and was a member of the Akademie der Künste.

CREDITS

COLOPHON

p. 4 photos Jordis Antonia Schlösser / OSTKREUZ; p. 5 photo Marcus Lieberenz for the Akademie der Künste | pp. 7, 9 © Mark Lammert & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020, photos Roman März | p. 10 © Yvon Chabrowski & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020; p. 13 © Sasha Kurmaz | pp. 14, 16 (bottom) © Radar Ost Digital, Deutsches Theater Berlin; p. 15 © Maria Patsyuk, Nikolay Mulakov; p. 16 (top) photo Ekaterina Kraeva; p. 17 © The Access Point Festival | pp. 18–20 video Carl-John Hoffmann | pp. 21–23 photos Ferhat Bouda / Agence VU’ | pp. 24–27 courtesy Sahej Rahal and Chatterjee & Lal | pp. 29, 30, 32, 35 photos Péter Nádas | pp. 36–38 photos Kristiane Petersmann and Moritz Nitsche | p. 40 © Akademie der Künste, Berlin (left) photo AdK-O, no. 498; (right) photo AdK-O, no. 520, photos Christian Kraushaar; p. 41 (top) collection Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation Berlin © APRA Foundation Berlin, photo Andreas Franz­ Xaver Süß; (bottom) © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020, courtesy Hito Steyerl, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin, photo Andreas Franz­ Xaver Süß; p. 42 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020, photo Andreas FranzXaver Süß | pp. 43, 45 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Presse-AdK-O, no. 26 | p. 47 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archive (top) Brecht Photo Archive 12/010.14 (bottom) Brecht Photo Archive 12/010.15, photos Gerda Goedhart © Suhrkamp Verlag | pp. 48, 49 © Alberti heirs, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Musiksammlung, no. 428 | pp. 50 digital.adk.de © Akademie der Künste, Berlin; p. 51 (top) https://heartfield.adk.de/; (middle) https://aski.pageflow.io/begas; (bottom) https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ sammlungen/adk.html | pp. 52–54 photos Frank Schinski / OSTKREUZ

Journal der Künste, Edition 14, English issue Berlin, November 2020 Print run: 800

We thank all owners of image usage rights for kindly approving the publication. If, despite intensive research, a copyright holder has not been considered, justified claims will be com­ pensated within the scope of customary agreements.

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Journal der Künste is published three times a year and is available at all Academy locations. Members of the Academy, the Society of Friends of the Academy, and subscribers will receive a copy.

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