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We Mediterraneans: A Chorus of Crossings and a Century of Camps at documenta 14 1 Richard Fletcher (Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy) fletcher.161@osu.edu This paper tells the tale of two images. The images appeared on the website of documenta 14, the 5-yearly German exhibition of contemporary art, which in 2017 was split between its usual home in Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece.2 Each image was used to promote two different events in the summer of 2017 that were part of the exhibition’s extensive public and educational programming. Each of the events focused on the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, one that took place in Athens on June 1st and the other that didn’t take place in Kassel on August 24th. Before I give some context on these two events, let us take a look at the two images.
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This paper is part of my writing and exhibition project 2043, whisper it into a hole about the role of artists in articulating and resituating the legacies of the 2017 documenta 14 exhibition in their work. While the project focuses artistic engagement with the core theoretical frameworks of the exhibition (contemporary decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, minor traditions within and outside of the mainframe of modernism and postqueer politics), this paper is the introduction to how documenta 14 turned to decolonial critique, specifically in the form of Achelle Mbembe’s concept of Necropolitics (see Mmembe 2003) in terms of the violence of displacement (in crossings and camps) that unite historical events and narratives throughout the 20 th and 21st centuries, from the Armenian genocide to the current global migration crisis and privatized US border camps. 2 The documenta 14 website is still live and can be accessed here: https://www.documenta14.de/en/. For a sympathetic and balanced overview of documenta 14, see Weiner 2017.
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This first image is of a painting that appears to depict a blue abstracted human figure drowning in a sea of red. The water of paint sprays upwards, as does the blue of the figure’s body as if disintegrating in the violence of the struggle. While I am not sure about this, when I look to the figures head, I seem to make of a row of teeth, which would then mean the figure’s mouth was open, screaming and taking in the deadly water. The second image is a charcoal drawing depicting six figures in the foreground, with a band of dark sea behind them. Each figure is unique, there seem to be three adults and three children. One of the adults carries a sack, and holds the hand of a small, seemingly naked child, lifting them off the ground with a female figure wearing a niqab (a headscarf and veil with a space for the eyes). Yet strikingly the woman’s naked body can be seen through her clothing. Beyond these details, the faces of two other figures, an adult and a child, are round and roughly drawing with holes for eyes. Lagging behind is an older child in what seems to be a hijab, whose body is overdrawn in an overwrought way. The smudging of the charcoal adds an eerie quality to an already ominous scene, with the beach and sea behind them, also looming above with a flattened out perspective. Looking at these two images together, the painting and the charcoal drawing, they share a sense of violence through the process of the figure, either in painted disintegration and overwrought overdrawing, in relation to being within or besides the sea. This violence comes to the fore when we learn about the two events that they were used to advertise. The first image of the painting was used to advertise a multimedia performance called Auschwitz on the Beach by
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Italian poet and critic Franco “Bifo” Berardi (in collaboration with his brother, Stefano and the visual artist Dim Sampaio), while the charcoal drawing illustrated a public conversation between two academics (Iain Chambers and Eleni Kyramargiou) called Their Mediterranean. Here are the German versions of each page the documenta 14 website, that show the titles of the events (in English), as well as the two images we have already seen.3
As we shall see, even though both of these events explored the connections between the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and earlier historical moments of violence and dispossession, refugee crossings and internment camps, it was the explicit reference to the Nazi death-camp Auschwitz in Berardi’s performance that provoked a storm of controversy in the media, culminating in the cancelation of the planned performance under that title, to be replaced with a
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The former webpage has been taken down following the controversy and the canceling of the event. The English website page for the latter event can still be accessed here: https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/19373/theirmediterranean.
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conversation under the name of Shame On Us.4 As we now turn to that controversy, let us not forget the image that went with it, of a disintegrating body struggling for dear life in a blood red sea. I - ‘Salt water has now replaced the Zyklon B’: The Auschwitz on the Beach Controversy To end a chapter called ‘Apocalypse’ from his forthcoming book The Second Coming, Berardi writes: August 2016: every day thousands of people from Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Sudan and other countries where life is dangerous because of wars, hunger, environmental devastation were trying to find refuge on the European continent. From the East they tried the Balkan route and were rejected at the Hungarian boarder; from the South they tried to traverse the Mediterranean Sea and risked shipwreck and death.5 Berardi then proceeds to describe how that same summer he wrote a poem called “Auschwitz on the Beach” in response to this crisis in the Mediterranean, which he planned to read at documenta 14 at Kassel as part of a performance with his brother, a musician, and the Brazilian Italian-based visual artist Dim Sampaio. The performance was scheduled for August 24, 2017 to take place in the Fridericianum building in Kassel as part of the public program of documenta 14 called The Parliament of Bodies, organized by philosopher and trans activist Paul B. Preciado. Berardi continues the story: Just a few days before, I received some messages from the press office of documenta 14, then a phone call from Paul Preciado, its public service (sic.) director. The German press was launching a campaign to denounce the title of the performance as a ‘relativization of the Holocaust’.6 To turn briefly to these denunciations, Boris Rhein, culture minister for the German state of Hesse, where Kassel is located, wrote in a statement, published in The New York Times the day before the scheduled performance, saying:
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A video of the event Shame on Us can be found on the documenta 14 website here: https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/24356/shame-on-us-a-reading-and-discussion. 5 Berardi (2019) 101. 6 Berardi (2019) 105.
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Any comparison to the Holocaust cannot be allowed, as the crimes of the Nazis were unique.7 Representatives of the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center echoed his objections. The relativization argument also appeared elsewhere, including in the title of a post on the Sara Nussbaum Zentrum für Jüdisches Leben, Kassel called “Performance der documenta 14 relativiert die Shoah”.8 In addition to a screengrab from the documenta 14 website, with the painting we have already been discussing, the post also made reference to the text accompanying the announcement of the performance: In the text of the announcement, European migration policy is documented with words that come from the context of the Nazi mass murder of European Jews. It is said that "the Europeans" established "concentration camps and pay their Gauleiter in Turkey, Libya and Egypt to do the dirty work along the shores of the Mediterranean, where salt water has now replaced the Zyklon B”.9 This quotation shows how Berardi’s analogy between the Mediterranean refugee crisis and the Shoah went further than the title of the talk, specifically with the pointed references to ‘Gauleiter’ (a term used by the Nazi party to describe a regional party leader) and ‘Zyklon B’ (a gas used to kill prisoners at Nazi death-camps). It was, therefore, the extended analogy that provoked the reaction from the German press and Jewish leaders, such as Ilana Katz, who wrote: From our point of view, it is highly irresponsible and an expression of a lack of empathy towards these people, to use the terms 'Auschwitz' and 'Zyklon B' as part of an artistic and political event. At the replacement event Shame on Us, Berardi attempted to explain his position, both upholding his analogy, but also by showing his heeding of the suffering of the Jewish community by publically destroying his poem. Berardi notes that he was not interested in articulating his own freedom of speech or resisting censorship, instead he wanted to use this event to face what he called ‘our impotence, our sentiment of shame’. Berardi went on to explain that his sense of 7
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/arts/auschwitz-on-the-beach-documenta-14-controversy.html?_r=0 http://sara-nussbaum-zentrum.de/performance-der-documenta-14-relativiert-die-nationalsozialistischejudenvernichtung/ 9 Here is the original German: Im Ankündigungstext wird die europäische Migrationspolitik mit Vokabeln belegt, die aus dem Kontext des nationalsozialistischen Massenmords an den europäischen Juden stammen. So heißt es, „die Europäer“ errichteten „Konzentrationslager und bezahlen ihre Gauleiter in der Türkei, Libyen und Ägypten dafür, die Drecksarbeit entlang der Küsten des Mittelmeeres zu erledigen, wo Salzwasser mittlerweile das Zyklon B ersetzt hat“ 8
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shame stemmed from his inability to stop what he dubbed the ‘fascism’ that is mounting everywhere, not only in Europe, but also elsewhere in the world. He acknowledged that we could debate the correctness of the term ‘fascism’, but nonetheless we are enduring a state of emergency. Berardi then cited a specific example from that day’s news, where in Rome a group of 400 migrants have been violently expelled by the police, where a policemen is heard on a radio report telling a migrant he would ‘break his arm’. Panning out from this specific event, Berardi described the background of the growing racism and how white supremacy is deeply rooted in the global crisis of Western domination. He stated: We are going towards an extermination – I dare to use this word To justify his use of this word he cites official figures - 30,000 people drowned in the Mediterranean - to prove how the violence that is coming again is, Berardi says, ‘a looming holocaust’, then asking himself ‘was I right or was I wrong?’ to use this word. To support his argument, Berardi (who is speaking in English throughout) then quotes the American diplomat and political theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski from his article ‘Toward a Global Realignment’ in The American Interest: Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealthseekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims. Political selfassertion enhanced by delayed outrage and grief is a powerful force that is now surfacing, thirsting for revenge, not just in the Muslim Middle East but also very likely beyond. 10 Berardi follows this quotation by describing how we need to emerge from the violence of modernity, colonialism and capitalist exploitation, not for moral reasons but because the alternative is fascism and massive destruction of life, of our life, not only the life of the others. He then pivots to the controversy itself and his meeting earlier that day with members of the Jewish community in Kassel in an attempt to understand the problem if he uses or says that name. Turning to the specific accusation of ‘relativization’, Berardi reframes it as ‘contextualization’. Such contextualization means there is an affinity across the violence of white supremacy, specifically in terms of 1930s Germany and today’s America, wherein humiliated 10
Brzezinski (2016) n.p.
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exploited workers are emboldened as white warriors. Berardi explains that this is why he decided to contextualize Nazism and to ‘use that despicable word’. Turning back to his conversation with the Jewish community, he heard how they spoke of suffering and trauma and Berardi noted how suffering is the decisive word. In his final flourish, Berardi turns to his poem, how it is not a bad poem, its contents are not bad, but if someone is suffering, he will forget about his poem, he will write better poems. At that moment, he rips up his poem and casts it away, finishing with the call for us to find a way to come out of the abyss that financial capitalism and nationalism has brought us. I offer this somewhat detailed account of Berardi’s speech at the Shame on Us event, not to agree or disagree with his blunt and inflammatory methodology, which understandably caused the backlash he received, but to show how Berardi uses the controversy and the charge of ‘relativization’ to call for ‘contextualization’ of the Mediterranean refugee crisis within a larger issue of white supremacy within modernity, colonialism and late capitalism, both historically and in the present. Such contextualization is echoed by the statements on the website to accompany the Shame on Us event, written by Paul B. Preciado and the documenta 14 Artistic Director, Adam Szymczyk. While Szymczyk echoes Berardi’s argument in general by stating: The planned discussion and reading of Berardi’s poem within the Parliament of Bodies is a warning against historical amnesia, a call for an awakening of conscience and for collective action—and not an attempt to relativize the Holocaust. Preciado embeds this argument within the very structure of the public program of documenta 14 (The Parliament of Bodies) as a whole, which: aims to create networks of solidarity between different discourses and practices of working class, anti-racists, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, trans-feminist, queer-crip, and ecological struggles. Whereas these alliances can only be constructed while paying attention to the specificity of each and every history of oppression, it seems urgent to build a common critique of the underlying dominant capitalist and colonial epistemologies of race and sexuality that define contemporary conditions of life and death. Nonetheless, in spite of these framing statements by the two documenta 14 organizers, both Berardi in his comments and the German media response to Shame on Us, slipped back into the explicit names and language that provoked the controversy in the first place. In one article about the event, even though there is an emphasis on Berardi ripping up his poem, his shame and his
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conversations with the Jewish community in Kassel, its author also emphasized how Berardi did not express shame for having written the poem in the first place and ended with a re-articulation of the negative response from local leaders.11 Furthermore, even though the painting that had been used in the promotion of the original performance was also replaced, along with the original statement, it too resurfaced in both this article (juxtaposed with a photograph of the entrance to Auschwitz).
The painting also reappeared on website of the British artist space The Black Box Project Space to accompany a later conversation between Berardi and curator Felice Moramarco.12
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https://www.hessenschau.de/kultur/documenta/autor-zerreisst-gedicht-mit-holocaust-vergleich,auschwitz-beachentschaerft-102.html 12 https://www.blackboxprojectspace.com/critical-dialogues/
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Throughout this whole controversy – the advertising for the original performance, the German media and Jewish community response, the Shame on Us event and its aftermath – what role has this painting played? Now it is important to give you as much context as I can about the painting itself. It is a work called Exile by the artist Dim Sampaio who was to be included in the original performance (and who sat next to Berardi in the Shame on Us event). Berardi tells us in The Second Coming that Sampaio who was born in Brazil, but who lived in Italy for most of his professional life, had: imagined the visual stage for the performance: a square of salt six metres by six metres, glimmering in the light of a big lamp. All around in darkness.13 What Simpaio’s plans for the exhibition makes clear is that Berardi was putting an emphasis on the one analogy he was making between the salt water of the Mediterranean sea as among the killing agents of the refugees. When this emphasis is transposed back onto Simpaio’s Exile, the blood red of the sea and the disintegrating body also takes on a shared specific meaning. There is, however, a problem here. In spite of some initial research, I could not find a date for Exile and so it was impossible to know (without contacting the artist) if this work, like Berardi’s poem and the planned performance, was made as specific a reaction or in relation to the Mediterranean refugee crisis. In a later event of The Parliament of Bodies called ‘Strategy of Joy’, Simpaio was there and a statement about his work written by Berardi (called “The Tragic Mirth of Dim Simpaio”) was read as a slideshow of his paintings was shown behind him, including Exile.14 During the ensuing Q&A, Simpaio is asked about the cancelled performance with Berardi by a Brazilian audience member and Simpaio replies in Portuguese with Preciado as translator, by naming the title of the performance and explaining that it was meant to be a dialogue about art and philosophy in relation to ‘the camps’. At this point, Preciado pivots from his role as translator and describes the Shame on Us event, specifically what he saw as the most important moment, in which historians asked Berardi to think about the Jewish communities fleeing persecution before and after Auschwitz rather than speak of Auschwitz. Preciado then asked more generally: can we collectively construct a language of struggle now and in the future?
Berardi 2019, 104. In the same passage, Berardi describes his brother’s contribution to the performance as ‘mixing a marimba melody and a Philip Glass loop in a distressing rhythm’. This makes explicit the pun of Berardi’s title ‘Auschwitz on the Beach’ as evoking that of Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach. 14 https://www.documenta14.de/en/calendar/24986/the-strategy-of-joy 13
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Exile continues to be part of the narrative of the controversy surrounding Berardi’s performance, but it is also has a life of its own (e.g. it is the work that Simpaio uses to accompany his resume on his Facebook page).15 Yet as the remarks of Preciado show, there appears to be a disconnect between the aims of the exhibition documenta 14 and the works of artists who participated in the exhibition in terms of how to make sense of the construction of this language of struggle, especially when it comes to giving a space for the singular atrocities of Nazi Germany within it. II – ‘Either Hitler or Me!’ Miriam Cahn’s Mare Nostrum In the time I have left, I want turn to the other image, the charcoal drawing, to claim that there were works within the main exhibition of documenta 14 that offered a different approach to understanding the context and legacies of Nazism and the Mediterranean refugee crisis, one that did not rely on the pointed reuse of names and words (‘Auschwitz’, ‘Gauleiter’, Zyklon B’, ‘holocaust’ ‘extermination’) that cause suffering. My conclusion is that Berardi has allies among documenta 14 artists for his fundamental contextual message, but not for his inflammatory methodology, and its continued ‘relativizing’ redeployment of Simpaio’s Exile beyond any specific context.16 The charcoal drawing is an untitled work from the year 2015 by Swiss artist Miriam Cahn, who was included in both the Athens and Kassel stages of the main documenta 14 exhibition, both with large paintings, smaller drawings and text-works. Several of these works, including the charcoal drawing of Mediterranean refugees, were part of a series called Mare Nostrum that had been exhibited before documenta 14. Here is the text from the exhibition by that name at Meyer Riegger, Berlin in spring 2016. mare nostrum – in and beyond late antiquity, this term with its manifold political origins described the totality of all people included within, and at the same time the claim to power asserted by the Imperium Romanum, which has left its mark on European life right down to our day. In the autumn of last year, the Italian naval operation of the same name – which had been called into life in 2013 in the wake of the Lampedusa tragedy to rescue refugees in the Mediterranean – was terminated. It comes as no surprise that the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn has chosen this title both for her group of works and for her overall exhibition, in which new, large-format works and smaller drawings created from the 15
https://www.facebook.com/sampaiodim/ Although, this could be argued as a key feature of ‘abstraction’ that Berardi interprets in Simpaio’s work. See ‘The Tragic Mirth of Dim Sampaio’ video referenced above. 16
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1980s on are put on display. Topics such as war, violence and people fleeing from conflict have found expression in her work from the very beginning and reveal both her precise observation of the world around her and her ongoing concern for her own history.17 Yet even before this exhibition, this series of works was a part of documenta 14 in the form of a portfolio of images and text (called ‘Coincidences’) included in the magazine South as a State of Mind (which documenta 14 used as a site to produces four issues from Fall 2015 to Fall 2017). In the first issue of documenta 14’s South, we encounter Cahn’s Mare Nostrum, which includes our charcoal drawing.18 Here is a still from video I made of the experience of flipping through these pages, posted on my Instagram account:19
Yet the first work in the portfolio is a 2013 work that allude to Nazi Germany called Eichmann in Jerusalem übermalen (Eichmann in Jerusalem Overpainted). Following the images, we find Cahn’s text ‘Coincidences’, written in 2015, which can be read as a series of ‘what ifs’ of her own life narrative. It begins: i would not be i would not be had i not not i i too but not even at all if. i would not be only not i i too i would not be. i am because. i am i too i because if.
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http://www.meyer-riegger.de/en/data/exhibitions/218/mare-nostrum.html Cahn (2015). 19 To watch the video, go here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BtouTJwlxn_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link 18
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This juddering writing continues to explain that the artist would not have been if her one grandmother hadn’t made her mother flee Paris to the South of France in 1941, nor if her other grandmother hadn’t left Hitler’s Germany to Switzerland in 1933, nor if they hadn’t met in Basel, her married Jewish father left his Jewish wife for her non-Jewish mother, she would not have been. Taken together the Mare Nostrum portfolio, including the charcoal drawing, other works from the series, the Eichmann portrait and ‘Coincidences’, makes a more complex and challenging case for a contextual interpretation of the Mediterranean refugee crisis within other stories of violence and dispossession. Furthermore, as an image to advertise the Studio 14 event Their Mediterranean, the scholarly discussion of the sea as a site of earlier refugee crises, dating back to 1922, this complexity comes with it. Finally, Cahn’s Mare Nostrum also offers a way to frame Berardi’s belated account of the controversy over his canceled performance along the lines of Preciado’s call for a collective language of struggle. In light of Cahn’s narrative of ‘Coincidences’, consider this exchange: Moramarco: It is common knowledge that Nazism and the Holocaust are still an open wound in Germany. Berardi: I’m disposed to listen to this objection if it comes from members of the Jewish community, which in fact I met and discussed with. But I’m not disposed to listen to this objection if it comes from some little shit that writes on the newspapers of the “Great Germany”. The German Nazis, which have never disappeared, have inflicted that wound to humanity. My father was imprisoned for seven months in a German camp during the World War Two, so I do not accept that a piece of shit like Mr Jens Jessen on the Zeit, who writes about it being an open wound, because people like him inflicted that specific wound to people like my father.20 Here, for the first time, we hear of Berardi’s own suffering through this narrative of his father’s imprisonment. If we abandon Berardi’s inflammatory methodology embedded in his analogy, what place does this personal story of suffering take? Would it have come out in the poem he destroyed? We may never know. Furthermore, it is precisely the singularity of this experience of suffering that is lacking in Simpaio’s Exile as transposed onto the Mediterranean refugee crisis. Of course, there may also be a story there too, but it was not activated in the process of the artist’s participation in the controversial event, nor in the follow-up Strategy of Joy performance
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https://www.blackboxprojectspace.com/critical-dialogues/
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and Q&A. To conclude, I wanted for us to reach this point, on the path paved by the Cahn drawing, to open up a more expansive argument about how artists at documenta 14 intervene in broader debates, especially those that are simplified by the media coverage of the exhibition and its impact, there are other works and programs that also share her nuanced approach to historical and ongoing collective struggle. In this future work, I want to more directly consider this struggle as in terms of two different images or metaphors – the Chorus of Crossings and the Century of Camps. While the latter stems from a two-day session of The Parliament of Bodies held in Kassel on August 12-13, 2017, organized by Paul B. Preciado and Lebanese curator and critic Rasha Salti called A Century of Camps: Refugee Knowledge and Forms of Sovereignty Beyond the Nation-State, the former is grounded in the role of the Chorus in the documenta 14 education program called aneducation. My claim is that it is from this position of the collective yet individual Chorus members that we can appreciate the tension between individual artistic voices amid the collective program of documenta 14. These include the immediate context of the first issue of South, as Cahn’s Mare Nostrum is followed by selections from Jonas Mekas’ I Had Nowhere to Go and ‘We Refugees’ by Hannah Arendt, as well as in a series of moving image works at documenta 14, including Artur Żmijewski’s Glimpse (2016–17), Angela Melitopoulos’ Crossings (2017), Bouchra Khalili’s The Tempest Society (2017), Douglas Gordon’s I Had Nowhere to Go: A Portrait of a Displaced Person (2016) and Maria Kourkouta and Niki Giannari’s Spectres are Haunting Europe (2016). Finally, I also want to explore the significance of the Achille Mbembe’s concept of Necropolitics which informs both documenta 14 and Berardi’s writings as well as his inclusion in events at The Parliament of Bodies, such those included in The Society for the End of Necropolitics. But for now, let us turn towards the Mediterranean. What are the immediate implications of my paper? If it is ‘Our Sea’ (Mare Nostrum), does the acknowledging of it’s as a site of violence across modernity and coloniality, for the Century of Camps in the Chorus of Crossings turn ‘us’ into ‘Mediterraneans’? In fact, my title ‘We Mediterraneans’ was not just a transofmration of the event ‘Their Mediterranean’ by Studio 14 at documenta 14, but also a pointed reference to Friederich Nietzsche’s ‘We Classicists’. It was my shame as a Classicist, with its long history of white supremacy, that that drove me to leave the field and also to
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immerse myself if documenta 14. Yet I also have a nagging doubt, one that is encapsulated this question in ‘We Classicists’ that I want us to dwell on: We have to see clearly that we make ourselves look utterly absurd when we justify and apologize for antiquity: who are we?21
Works Cited Berardi, Franco “Bifo” (2019 The Second Coming. Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2016) ‘Toward a Global Realignment’, The American Interest: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/04/17/toward-a-global-realignment/ (accessed February 21, 2019) Cahn, Miriam (2015) ‘Mare Nostrum’, South as a State of Mind, documenta 14 #1 Fall/Winter 2015, 105-112. https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/51_mare_nostrum (accessed Feb. 21, 2019) Mbembe, Achille (2003) ‘Necropolitics’ (trans. by Libby Meintjes) Public culture 15.1: 11-40. Nietzsche, Friederich (1990) ‘We Classicists’ in Untimely Observations. 307-87. Weiner, Andrew Stefan (2017) ‘The Art of the Possible: With and Against documenta 14’ http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2017/08/art-possible-documenta-14/ (accessed Feb. 21, 2019).
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Nietzsche (1990) 338.