Following the cancellation of the event series ‘The Condition of No’ at short notice due to an intervention by the City of Munich against the list of speakers, Villa Stuck has together with the speakers have decided to go ahead with the series nonetheless.

“Zensur! Zensur?”, on art magazine, 30 MAY 2025

“Rückgrat zeigen für die Freiheit der Wissenschaft”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 MAY 2025

“Villa Stuck: gecancelte Gesprächsreihe zu Boykott findet doch statt”, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Fazit, 04 MAY 2025

Prologue: What are the Limits?

03 MAY 2025, 19.00 CEST
With Aziz Al-Azmeh & Susan Neiman
Moderated by Florian Malzacher

What is considered an acceptable opinion has been increasingly narrowed down in recent years. The prologue of The Condition of No (which at the same time is the 30th episode of The Art of Assembly) asks where the limits of freedom of expression lie, what we have to listen to, how we can combine the need for safe spaces with the need for agonistic spheres – and when the state should intervene. Looking at the history of the Enlightenment, philosopher Susan Neiman doubts that the explosive current debates in Germany, for example, are really about freedom of expression. The historian Aziz Al-Azmeh profiles Arab and Islamic topoi present in Germany today and juxtaposes considerations of universalism with an intensified discourse of culturalism and cultural difference.

German Institutions

04 MAY 2025, 15.00 CEST
With Margarita Tsomou & Eyal Weizman
Moderated by Michael Buhrs

While initiatives such as Strike Germany and numerous international artists accuse most German cultural institutions of complicity in silencing pro-Palestinian positions or at least a lack of balance, the latter often see themselves as defenders of freedom of expression who, against all odds, keep spaces for dialogue open. Margarita Tsomous is a curator who organises discourse programmes at Berlin’s Theater Hebbel am Ufer – HAU. Eyal Weizman, director and founder of the research agency Forensic Architecture, criticises bias and self-censorship in the German cultural field.

Universities & Academies

09 MAY 2025, 19.00 CEST
With Meron Mendel & Geraldine Rauch
Moderated by Elke Buhr

Alongside culture, the debate about freedom of expression is most heated at universities and academies: Places where the free exchange of opinions should be a fundamental prerequisite for research and teaching. The anti-Semitic incidents and pro-Palestinian protests at German universities and academies in the context of the Gaza war are the starting point for the discussion. Geraldine Rauch, President of the Technical University of Berlin, was harshly criticised for her supposedly overly understanding approach to the student protests – including by Meron Mendel, Director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre in Frankfurt.

Freedom of the Art

04 JUL 2025, 19.00 CEST
With Candice Breitz & Christoph Möllers
Moderated by Bernd M. Scherer

Numerous codes of conduct have been negotiated, passed and heavily criticized at federal, state and municipal level in recent years. Especially in the area of cultural funding, debates about the pros and cons of codes of conduct have shaken the cultural climate. Cultural institutions are unsure how to defend their own freedom – between supposed and real censorship, self-censorship and the desire to do the right thing. The discussion will feature South African-born, Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz, whose exhibition planned for 2024 at the Saarland Museum was canceled due to allegedly controversial statements on the Gaza war, and constitutional law expert Christoph Möllers, Professor of Public Law and Philosophy of Law at Humboldt-University in Berlin, who advises the German government, among others.

Epilogue: Useful Art in the Condition of No

06 JUL 2025, 15.00 CEST
With Tania Bruguera
Moderated by Florian Malzacher and Roland Wenninger

For many years, the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, who currently lives in exile in the USA, has been campaigning for freedom of speech and against censorship in her performances and exhibitions. At the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, Tania Bruguera’s performance Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading “The Origins of Totalitarianism“) made headlines in early 2024. The reading of Hannah Arendt’s book was disrupted by protesters and stopped the following morning. Based on her experiences in Berlin and at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Tania Bruguera conceived the three-part project “The Condition of No“ for the Villa Stuck in Munich, examining the issue of censorship from different angles. Author and dramaturge Florian Malzacher and curator Roland Wenninger talk to Tania Bruguera about her experiences in very different contexts.

A production by VS – Villa Stuck
in cooperation with INSTAR & The Art of Assembly

Historically, the concept of the “project” can be seen as a liberation from the idea of the artistic work as a finished entity, andfrom the conventional role of the artist – an opening for processes, collaborations etc. But now, since it has become a dominantartistic practice for quite some years, it has also shown its downsides: it is limited in time; it is fragile in many ways, notsustainable; it can become quite self-absorbed etc. Long-term planning and thinking are often impossible. In reaction to that, moreand more artists have become interested in creating their own institutions and organizations. And by this, I don’t mean their ownstudios or production companies: the founded organization itself is considered the artistic work. This can take on many forms,from political movements (like Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International in Queens or Yael Bartana’s purely fictitious Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland) to schools (like Chto Delat’s School of Engaged Art in St. Petersburg), quasi-universities (like Ahmet Öğüt’s Silent University) or even unions of sorts (like the Concerned Artists of the Philippines) and manymore. So the idea behind Artist Organizations International (AOI) was to bring together as many and as diverse artist initiatives as possible.

One of the artist organizations hosted, with a clear sociopolitical agenda, is Ahmet Öğüt’s Silent University (SU), anautonomous platform for exchanging knowledge provided by and for immigrants or asylum seekers, mainly academics who arenot able to teach in the countries where they now live. This is an interesting example of how to initiate an organization with the potential to outlive its creator, that can be carried on by other people. Isn’t there the risk, however, of the organization falling apart once the artist leaves?

The SU is indeed paradigmatic because Ahmet has always stressed that the SU never should be called a project. It is an institution. It is meant to last. And it allows for a different kind of dialogue with art institutions that might want to host a SU. This might be rather symbolic, since the SU is such a precarious and small institution, but still, it is no longer just an artist talking to a big museum: it is one institution talking to another. And this is the basis for the other important aspect of the artist organization concept you just mentioned: it has the potential to exist without the initiating artist.

A different, very interesting example would be the Viennese group Wochenklausur. Over the last 25 years, they have always managed to bring in new people. I think that’s quite amazing. But they also have a specific take on the question of sustainability: their own engagement always has a clear, limited time frame. They analyze the problem they are invited to tackle and then try to find a solution. They develop a plan, get people involved etc. – and then they hand over that plan, with all responsibility for it. Ithink their very first project, a mobile medical clinic for homeless people in Vienna, is still running!

Usually funding is temporary, and the organization needs to seek funding from time to time. This might pose quite some problems for politically engaged organizations. How does it work with the Silent University?

So far, most branches of the Silent University have been founded by art institutions. This construction is, of course, tricky:What are the motivations for an art institution to initiate such a move? What symbolic value is to be gained? And at least at the beginning, it is clearly a top-down thing before it (hopefully) emancipates itself. This is a contradiction, which Ahmet is very aware of.

On the other hand, the institution always has to argue why it is spending money that is allocated to the arts on a project that clearly has strong social aspects. That is part of what makes it so interesting: it is a social and an artistic project. One can clearly argue for both sides – and do so in different ways according to the context.

To stick to examples I am involved in: Impulse Theater Festival needed a partner that could guarantee longer support than I couldwith my limited contract as artistic director. So we collaborated with a theater, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr in Mülheim, which in themeantime has become the main partner of the SU Ruhr. This cooperation also changed their way of working as theater: they offerall kinds of translations in their shows now, and they have hired some apprentices from Syria etc. The Silent University is, on one hand, a concrete example of social- ly engaged art, but on the other hand, it is also a work of institutional critique, with an impact on the hosting institutions.

What is special about a project that is initiated by an artist compared, for instance, to one founded by a social worker? Why dowe need art activism and not just activism?

F.M.: Well, in some socially engaged art the dividing line to social work might indeed almost become invisible. Or the border to politics – for example in Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International. And it also works the other way around, when activism uses artistic strategies: an activist action might become an artistic action. In general, I am not so much concerned aboutthese distinctions. The question “Is this still art?” has accompanied all avant-gardes… so it is not exactly new.

By assigning a category or a genre to a work, one pro- poses how to look at it – this sometimes might be frustrating, but it also has great potential. What happens when you look at a social project through the lens of art? And vice versa? What do I understand differently? Generally, I believe, the encounter between art and politics has created many very interesting and productiveprocesses. Both sides have something to gain. But it also poses com- plex problems and questions that are important: activism, forinstance, does not want to stay in the symbolic realm, while art can never completely leave it. So in different contexts, artists find different solutions for relating to politics.

And so, for some time now, a renewed change in the working methods of many politically and socially engaged artists in particular can be observed: away from temporary, precarious art projects to long-term structures of interference. These artists found organizations and institutions – but not as a means to an end. Rather, such organizations are themselves the actual artistic work. The institution becomes art and art becomes institution. Spaces of action and possibilities of influence are expanded, but also aesthetic possibilities, when symbolic practice is combined with structural effect.

The lecture introduces very different artist organizations: From Marina Naprushkina’s “Office for Antipropaganda” to the “School of Engaged Art” of the Russian group Chto Delat, Tania Bruguera’s “Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR)” and Renzo Marten’s “Institute for Human Activities (IHA)” to Yael Bartana’s “Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP)”, to the “Silent University” and the Vienna Wochenklausur.

Florian Malzacher: Yael Bartana’s underlying idea is pretty simple: that of transferring the Yom haShoah ritual to Germany and of interrupting the city’s everyday life for two minutes. This ritual from the country of the victims is transferred to the country of the perpetrators. For Yael, who moved from Israel to Germany and who is living here, it is about our shared history. Although we obviously have extremely differing perspectives, we share this memory.

Against this background, we and Yael Bartana wanted to ask the question of how we can update our memory of National Socialism. The sheer fact that increasingly longer periods of time are separating us from this era makes remembrance inevitably more abstract. Today, you will hardly meet people anymore who have experienced this horror or who perpetrated it. In a couple of years, there won’t be any contemporaneity left. So shall we confine ourselves to the victims of historic German fascism, or don’t we also have to show where right-wing extremism is still alive today in order to move remembrance into the present time? Especially in Cologne, it was obvious for Yael to talk about the NSU and the attack committed in Kolbstraße.

This raises the question as to whether an update like this puts the Holocaust at risk of being relativized. And anyway, who decides how the victim groups are defined? That was the basis for a – partly extremely aggressive –   criticism of the project. There were those who asserted that this performance mainly showed Yael’s anti-Israel attitude. During one discussion, she was literally called a “useful Jewess”. Although the concept is clear and very simple, it provoked lots of complicated questions and very heated emotions. This led to increased caution on the part of municipal offices and to the beginning of an extreme slowness in some areas of the administration. Instead of a discussion about two minutes of standstill, the result turned into six months of standstill. The coming into being of this torpor says a lot because torpor prevents any kind of remembrance.

It is of course much easier to limit remembrance to a period of time that is long behind us.

I believe that this attitude, this restriction of view, also contributes to the fact that it took such a long time until it was even realized that those murdered by the NSU were victims of right-wing violence. Until then, people apparently thought that right-wing violence must appear in exactly the form as it was known historically and that it would show itself accordingly.

Now “Impulse” is a theater festival, so what has remembrance of the Holocaust got to do with theater? 

I’m interested in the core of theater, even beyond the bourgeois-dramatic conventions that are still claiming general validity today. Whether text-based or not, whether contemporary or in historical retrospective, the question is what is at the center of the theatrical event. In this context, ritual, collective meeting and remembrance are main aspects: the shared look back. We found it a very fruitful idea to come together in Cologne for a performance in which there are no differences between actors and spectators, performers and recipients, where all perform a ritual act together. In the art context, we wanted to address the question about the form of remembrance and how it is done. It’s basically a humble proposal. We were less interested in the idea of establishing a new ritual, and more in questioning what it means to come together as a community. This also implies the idea of collectiveness; Yael’s activities often deal with rituals, above all mass rituals. The collective as a mass. Here the ambivalence in question instantly becomes obvious. Of course, the distrust of the collective as a mass is justified; on the other hand, there is the ideal of a community in which the individual feels attached to the others.

In this case, the public space is certainly better suited than the four walls of a theater. 

Particularly since it was meant to be a statement. After all, a few hundred people were on site in the end. You position yourself publicly with your physical presence. Other than with a click on the Internet, you make yourself visible. Our concern was to make a contribution to dealing with history – and not, in point of fact, to forget what has been or to relativize it. The aim is to draw consequences from history for today.

Interruption is also a gesture directed against the omnipresent acceleration.

As a matter of fact, you will quickly reach a limit with a festival because you go away again very quickly. You are only visible temporarily. You should, of course, devise a continuous discourse on this issue. The critical reactions in particular highlight the necessity of this project. As it is difficult to classify, you need to start thinking for yourself and do not stand on the right side automatically. It depends on what you make out of it; and on the way each individual makes his own arguments.
The belief that you can say “That’s not my problem” with a clear conscience is only possible if you believe that you can distance yourself easily. When I was jobbing in Israel for a year twenty years ago, one of my tasks was to organize a youth exchange with Israel. I perfectly recall my shock when, during this exchange in Israel, a group of youngsters from the new federal states brushed aside the historical relationship between Germany and Israel as if it were not their concern. Instantly and – in my eyes – with striking arrogance, they started talking about Israel in the role of the aggressor against Palestine. That was how they had learned about it in the GDR, and now it was just an opportunity to assign blame for any ethical wrongdoing to others.

Years ago, I had a discussion with a popular migrant who took the view that we are all Germans. I asked him if he also experienced Germany’s fascist history as a festering wound: a suggestion he rejected indignantly.

With the “steirischer herbst” festival, we initiated the Rebranding European Muslims project by the Israeli group of artists Public Movement: an imaginary rebranding campaign for Islam. In this context, we held discussions with many Muslim groups in Austria, including the “Muslim Youth of Austria”. A young Austrian guy of Egyptian origin whose parents had not been born in Austria, while he himself was born there, told us: “We need to face up to the responsibilities that we as Austrians have for the Holocaust!” For him, it was clear, it is not the question: Did my family take part in it? But he had entered into a community and, in doing so, he had taken responsibility for what was done in the community’s name. That’s an interesting question to me: Must migrants who enter a new community also assume such co-responsibility? For me, Yael’s project was also an attempt to bring the different experiences with right-wing extremism into a dialogue and, in doing so, look for a basis for shared remembrance.

Today it has been fifty days since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street. The symbolic sign of the movement is Zuccotti Park with its iconic camp, its tents and signs, its self-organisation, and its visual presence in the media. But there are—less known but probably more important—a number of initiatives, committees, and sub-committees enlarging the idea, working out the demands, spreading it throughout the city. You are a member of the Education and Empowerment Committee. How would you describe the relationship between the very visible camp and the less visible activities backstage aiming for something more sustainable?

All the committees that work alongside the movement started in the camp. In the beginning the movement was concentrated there and the camp played a very important role. But the question is, How necessary is the occupied space compared to all the other activities around Occupy Wall Street? What is their relationship? For example, all general assembly meetings happen in the camp. But if all of the more than 4,000 members were to attend, it would be impossible. The camp has logistically come to its limit. It is a representation of the movement. But it is not the movement itself.

But it is still needed as an image?

In the beginning it absolutely was. There have been many discussions about moving or leaving the camp. But such a decision has to be strategised very well. If we give it up, it should not be covered by the media as a defeat, as deserting. Why do we think about leaving the camp? Because we go beyond. Every day some of us occupy something. We go to the Ministry of Education, to the Ministry of Transportation, etc. And all of the important committee meetings happen at 60 Wall Street in a privately owned public lobby of a bank. The real actions of the movement are happening more and more outside the camp.

But the camp also functions as a model of society—a self-made state. A lot of committees deal with its organisation: in the security council, former gang members and former cops discuss how to solve conflicts without violence, while psychology professors and students seek solutions for attending to mentally ill people who want to join the camp. You discuss how to distribute donated food, clothes, how to organise the camp’s library. It is like the creation of a social structure from scratch; it is negotiating how to live together—almost in a utopian way.

The United States has a long history of homeless camps that started in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, we may recall images from cities like Camden in New Jersey or the outskirts of Newark or the North of Philadelphia or certain areas of Detroit where there are campsites of homeless people. They are called “tent cities”. Historically, tent cities have been associated with radical social formations. Homeless get organised and create their own environment and start to demand or construct or resist certain issues. They get empowered not only by themselves but also by organisations who give them the tents or food, etc. Don Mitchell says in his book The Right to the City that the reason why tent cities haven’t proliferated is that the government has always tried to annihilate them. The moment they start creating some sort of social cohesion, they get dissolved. The government is afraid of this form of organisation.

I think that the camp here mimics this. Don Mitchell argues that tent cities are centres for radicalisation. There has been an incredible knowledge transfer from homelessness into the camp, how to retain, how to survive. In the camp here there are some homeless, too. And many of the people that now give advice, for example on how to survive in the cold, are actually homeless. So, the camp might have its own very-well-working organisation, enclave-like community, where people form their own society, their own medical aid, etc.

It is a site of experimentation, of resistance, and of representation of the resistance. It might be a prototypical city, but we cannot forget what this movement is about. It’s about all of us. The people in the camp, they are the 99 per cent, but only together with the people who live around them in the same city, in the same world order.

It seems like the 99 per cent still need the image of the camp. What will happen when it is gone?

The image of the camp is very powerful. But the biggest efforts of the education committee or the outreach committee are about going into the disempowered neighbourhoods of New York and being present there. There is only a certain type of people who approach Zuccotti Park, which in the end is very limited. We have to reach out to those that have no access to Zuccotti Park. When we talk about the representation of the 99 per cent, we still have taxi drivers, we have room servers, we have construction workers from the MTA; we have steel workers around or cleaners or waitresses. And I don’t think that the Zuccotti camp does enough. The possibility to create different campsites all over the city is much more powerful than one central location in the city as a representation. I am more worried about how we can attract taxi drivers, sweepers of the park, gardeners—all those who’ve been much more oppressed than a big number of the people represented in Zuccotti Park.

So, what should the next steps be? How should the movement develop?

Look at the newspapers this week. Every single one claims that the G20 was a complete failure. Greece is totally in the mode chaos. Spain is getting there. Italy is in a very bad situation. France is also facing the threat of economical problems. There will be a tremendous growth of the movement all over the world. I think the movement should open its arms as wide as possible. To unite the Indignados, or ¡Democracia real YA!, or Krytyka Polityczna and so on, and to create a hyper-coalition of all of us. So, I believe that the movement will spread out. The movement grows organically; it’s already everywhere. The most important thing is, again, to go as a movement to the working class. We have to be in the disempowered neighbourhoods. The movement cannot be focused on those people who are already disappointed by the dominant politics and economy. Those people are at Zuccotti Park now. But there are people who are oppressed and who cannot imagine that something can change—they are in fact the majority. We have to approach them and integrate them; we have to listen to them and convince them to join.

If we compare the rather small number of Occupy Wall Street members with the huge movements in Spain or Greece, we realise that it’s not the number that makes media interested in your activity. Why are journalists so strongly focused on Occupy Wall Street?

Because Americans have been sleeping for decades. But that’s the end of this inertia. In the U.S. we are in the “belly of the beast”—in New York we are in the financial capital of the empire. And if the very centre of the empire is infected by the resistance movement, it can happen anywhere.

The movement has no leaders. At the same time you have more than eighty working groups targeting particular issues. What do they produce? What are your demands?

If we were to issue demands, we would be immediately co-opted and we would lose independence. The majority of us feel the same. Nobody wants to demand anything. We are totally disillusioned with the political system. The radicalism of the different manifestations around the world in the last two years has not been based on demanding anything from the government. They have been focused on self-awareness of society, on self-governing, without relying on politics.

In the beginning pure resistance might be good. But at a certain point you have to act, not only react. You cannot stay only extra-parliamentary.

Calm down. The movement is very young and it needs to form itself. The movement has transformed us and given us the possibility of creating parallel political, social, and economical realities. Perhaps in developing this parallel world, we will be able to insert ourselves into the political apparatus of the country one day. The democracy in America is not like the German one, where such a group like the Piratenpartei can suddenly appear, receive 10 per cent of the votes, and become a part of the governmental system. Here we have a two-party mob which controls everything through the financial system and blocks all ways to the Congress for all political subjects who are not Democrats or Republicans.

Already now, after six or seven weeks, it seems that different interests are tearing at this movement from all sides. Some want to either co-opt it, buy it, promote it, or kill it. How can you resist these demands? Are you not afraid of being transformed by the dominant system in order to mimic it?

People compare Occupy Wall Street to 1968. They remember May ‘68 because that’s when the riots happened. But 1968 lasted approximately three years. During this time they changed a lot, but later the process was stopped. Today we are fighting with a much bigger creature than in 1968. The globe is totally centralised now. Controlling and handling 40 per cent of the wealth of the world are 147 corporations. The internal economies of different states are strongly interconnected. Now, the EU is a completely different animal than it was in 1968. So patience will be one of our commandments. If we keep the same direction with the same principles, remain engaged and slowly grow, then capitalism will bring us more and more people, because this system is not able to change its own logic. Again and again capitalism makes people disappointed.

Occupy Wall Street has a structure. All of its committees—economy, education, media and so on—already have projects which are really developed. They will hopefully emerge in one year. We are able to create a nomadic university, alternative media and so on. We are practicing alternative politics and alternative economy. So, let’s continue.

Aren’t you afraid that this enthusiasm will wear off?

We cannot be pessimistic. For the first time, we feel that we are pre-something, not post-something. But it’s very difficult to predict what’s coming. The big questions is—and I’m quoting a song from Laurie Anderson—“How do we begin again?” Finally we are in the beginning of a brand new era. But which way do we go? We should figure this out before the movement gets hijacked by the financiers, by the capital market, by the governors, by a cynical political class. We have very few chances of doing something as a society, of making a revolution. If this movement dies, we are all damned. We cannot lose enthusiasm, because it will be very difficult to pick up similar feelings again. It is not a revolution in the traditional sense, where a new structure of power replaces the old one. This is a slow process of developing a parallel society which is free from capitalism, which is free from cynical exclusive politics.

What concrete steps should be taken?

In Amsterdam, at the Congress of Social Housing, there was a Dutch politician who proposed to develop houses for members of wide class spectrum, from high to low income, in the same neighbourhood, built by citizens. The programme pays an architect to design the house, and you can apply for funds to build your house. That’s a very small reform. But we should be focused on such strategies of self-governing and self-representation. As long as we don’t destroy the mortgage system that was imposed on citizens in the early 1990s by the neo-liberal governments, we are not changing anything. It’s a very Marxist structuralist understanding of the world, but that’s the way we see it. We know that we cannot destroy capitalism, even if thousands of bank accounts were closed during the last month. Our program “take your money out of the bank” is very effective and very concrete. It is so effective that the Bank of America retreated from its fees for cash withdrawal. That’s the evidence that we have an impact. But we must remember that the biggest amount of money that bankers are using doesn’t come from us. It comes from the financial system. Through coordinated people’s actions we can hurt them, but not seriously. So, the structural change is much more fundamental. There are alternative forms of banking and health systems, which are not related to the market. If we could build it at a macro scale, it would be a fundamental change.

We consider ourselves to be conscious entities, but we actually have no control over this economic knowledge.

That’s true. Following Marx, the movement is developing a class-consciousness now. Reading his writings is really canny. Now we are pushing for the New School to get out of the Bank of America. The whole faculty is pushing for that. Isn’t it great?

The public space that is occupied here, Zuccotti Park or 60 Wall Street, is in fact privately owned. You have spent the last fifteen years fighting against such ownership. Now it’s the only space in the downtown area where police cannot easily enter. The privatised “public” space seems to be more public than the real public space.

It’s a fantastic paradox. When there are actions on Washington Square, the police evicts the participants immediately because it’s real public space. But private space can be easily used against private interests. Our working groups can sit there and think how to radically redefine the meaning of the word “private property”.

The situation of Occupy Wall Street has drastically changed, and the city removed the camp during the last month. There has also been less and less interest displayed by the media for the movement. Where does Occupy Wall Street stand now?

True, but I am certain that the eviction has benefited the movement and its strategic outreach. For the majority of us, the movement’s success has been its consolidation around operative taskforces and working-groups which continue their short- and long-term projects and local and international outreach. I believe the movement today is much more consolidated and mature, with more defined targets, concepts, and active members. We are definitely moving away from the spectacle and have begun to be focused on the underpowered neighbourhoods and peripheral urgencies that need our support. Occupy Wall Street has already drastically changed the USA itself. It has produced an unprecedented awareness, contributed to pedagogical discourse, and has brought recognition and solidarity among the millions of citizens that have had enough!

According to the media, contrary to the sensationalistic coverage Occupy Wall Street got in the first month of its activity, every coordinated mass action we have organised has been given serious coverage in the international and national press. To give you an example, last Tuesday I participated in the national day of action on housing and foreclosures; the next day, The Guardian had a video report of the action on its front news page. The press has matured together with us, and this is a great thing.

Your optimism abounds.

My trust in the movement and the quality of people engaged in it is greater than ever. We are ever more aware that a revolution is never instant; it is a slow process that requires a lot of energy and dedication, and it feels like all of us working in it have decided to stay and continue the struggle.

Christmas and New Year’s are coming up as is a cold New York winter. Will there still be a relevant movement next spring?

Absolutely! The Occupy Wall Street calendar is full of actions, from the three-month anniversary of national action on 17 December, to the occupation of the Department of Education and the Department of Buildings later in the month, and in January the Occupation of the US Congress, and so many projects that are in their early stages. The movement continues to gain energy. The difference is that the spectacle has been reduced to a minimum, and now we just have hard work to do.

What is the future of Occupy Wall Street?

We will continue our outreach in underpowered communities and develop taskforces with them. We will put into operation many projects like the Occupy Wall Street Nomadic University, extended open forums, student debt assistance, a foreclosure taskforce, a health-care system free from the market, housing alternatives and so on. And of course, more occupations!

Next year the struggle will continue! The time has come to redefine ourselves inside the active dimensions of the urban movements: 15-M, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, The Arab Spring, ¡Democracia real YA! All of us are working on structural change in reality. It’s not about urban development, art, geography, sociology, political science, architecture, politics, health care and so on. We must struggle collectively to destroy our centuries-old disciplinary silos, to merge all separated disciplines into the dynamic ecological totality of civic action, into our precarious daily lives. Then, I believe, we might be able to conceive a new direction, together. You have my hand, how do we begin again?

Gabriela Rendón is an architect and urbanist. Her work combines research, planning and design at different scales focusing on spatial processes and transformations counteracting conditions produced by market-oriented urbanization. Rendon’s areas of expertise include housing and urban policy analysis and development, neighborhood decline and restructuring, and community-based planning. Her current research is based on the politics, practices and constrains of socio-spatial restructuring through citizens active engagement in low-income neighborhoods in Western Europe and America. Gabriela Rendon is co-founder of Cohabitation Strategies, researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she has coordinated and instructed architectural and urban design studios collaborating with activist, non-profit organizations, and grassroots groups.

Miguel Robles-Durán, urbanist, is co-founder of “Cohabitation Strategies”, Director of the Urban Ecologies graduate program at the New School/Parsons in New York and Senior fellow at “Civic City”, a post-graduate design/research program based in HEAD Geneva, Switzerland. Robles-Durán has wide international experience in the strategic definition/coordination of trans-disciplinary urban projects, as well as in the development tactical design strategies and civic engagement platforms that confront the contradictions of contemporary urbanization. He recently co-edited/authored the book “Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization” that reviews the dire consequences that neoliberal urban policies have had upon the city and discusses possible alternatives to market-driven development. Robles-Durán’s areas of specialization are design/research interventions and strategies in uneven urbanization and areas of social urban conflict, urban political-economy and urban theory.

You are the initiator of the Occupy Museums group, associated with Occupy Wall Street. First you organised a protest march to MoMA, and later you occupied the New Museum and other art institutions run by, as you say, the 1%”. When the directors of MoMA asked what you wanted, you replied that you had no demands. “But,” you said, “we would continue to occupy the Museum in order to open up a conversation about economic injustice and abuse of the public values for the gain of the 1% in the art world.”

Occupy Museums is a collective, which runs by consensus. I initiated the first Occupy Museums action in October 2011. Every action and official text we create is authored by all of us, and we don’t have a single leader. Functioning in solidarity is the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We are trying to forget about the drive toward individualism and hierarchy, which is so much a part of the capitalistic regime. We also believe in individual autonomy. So first I want to make it clear that these are my own opinions; I can’t speak for the whole Occupy Museums group.

So, why do we Occupy Museums? Today museums are an important part of the neo-liberal system, which we are protesting on Wall Street. Museums are like temples of this system, actually; they reproduce the logic of the system, reify its symbols, and are financially dependent on it. Actions by Occupy Museums are about opening up a very large, honest, transformative conversation about the presence of money and power in the world of art and culture.

As much power as museums have in creating symbolic value – galleries would be the ones more directly involved in creating monetary value.

But museums hold cultural authority and carry out a supposedly purely public function that galleries and art fairs do not have. Currently, the main art-world paradigm in the US is a private market of artists that are represented by a hierarchy of galleries, and these galleries want to get their artists into the Whitney Biennial or the New Museum or, eventually, into the Museum of Modern Art. Therefore, an artist’s career and markets are built up through the cultural authority of the museums. Nothing else counts but your symbolic and financial position, and museums have the power to shape this. The problem is that, just like on Wall Street, the wealthiest 1% control nearly everything. They engage in philanthropy, of course, and sit on museum boards, and these are often also the mega-collectors who influence the markets. Actually, the whole arts infrastructure has been organising around these few individuals in the last thirty years. They concentrate political power and social prestige in their hands, perhaps even more than money, if this is possible. But real, essential culture needs distance from this power and influence in order to grow and thrive, otherwise culture becomes a luxury commodity. What will hopefully come out of the Occupy Museums is a re-thinking about the current state of culture, which is very close to a luxury item for the wealthiest. How can we reconnect our work as artists to the experience of ordinary people—the 99%? We have already found a way to connect as artists to the spirit of protest in the air. For the first stage we are publicly defining cultural injustices—inviting people to call them out in open assemblies at the museums. A lot of information about the corruption and conflicts of interest on museum boards arises from the participants in these assemblies. But maybe the most important thing Occupy Museums is doing is publically demonstrating, through solidarity, that we artists need not be silenced by these powerful institutions that wield so much cultural authority, just because the 1% sits on their boards. We are learning not to fear, but to act.

The first museums you went to a MoMA and the National History Museum. Why these two?

MoMA is an iconic New York museum, because it is “the one and only” Museum of Modern Art. And New York is a city that is supposed to have made its name on the international stage through modern art. MoMA, therefore, is very much a temple, a holy space where the local gods such as Pollock and Newman dwell. It is also transparently financially corrupted. Two MoMA trustees, James Niven and Richard Oldenberg, also have connections to the board of Sotheby’s. These trustees help to inflate prices in the art auctions, and they presumably have some vote or influence about what is shown in the museum. This simultaneous conflict of interest should be unacceptable and considered as abuse, but in the US now, it’s become accepted—we also see it in the revolving door between the US government and the biggest corporations such as banks. But people would be surprised to find these problems associated with museums, even though the art market is extremely unregulated. And it is precisely because MoMA is iconic and also beloved and trusted by many that Occupy Museums decided to go after it and make it into an example. We are going straight to the top, “storming the temple”. In fact, we do not really occupy physical places—we rather occupy people’s consciousness, symbols.

But the Natural History museum is not especially related to art.

Here we focused on the potential menace of philanthropy. We occupied the Dinosaur wing in the American Museum of Natural History, whose patron, David H. Koch, is the second richest person in New York and a major funder of the ultra right-wing in the US. For this action, we were talking to visitors at the Museum about the ideology associated with his “gifts”. David H. Koch has been the primary funder of the Tea Party, right-wing think tanks, and numerous initiatives which try to negate global warming. Often he has censored climate information in the exhibitions that he sponsors. His father, who built the family fortune, was also a right-wing ideologue in the McCarthy era who used the threat of communism to create a political platform full of racism and bigotry—this is actually the pre-history of the Tea Party. We also discussed how the funding of culture is often used to clean the image of those that make dirty money (Koch makes his money from the oil and energy business, and his companies are known for polluting). At the Museum of Natural History, we created a series of performances followed by a discussion of what alternative models of philanthropy might look like, such as more government support or support from many smaller contributions. Obviously, we are just beginning this discussion.

When the director of MoMA came to talk, you refused. Why? Aren’t you interested in a productive dialog?

For the first action, we held a General Assembly meeting in front of MoMA and read a manifesto, and then the director and a couple other staff members came down to meet us. They were very nice and said that they support the movement to some extent and asked why we were there. I answered very much in line with the manifesto, that we believe that MoMA is the temple of the 1%, and our aim is to challenge this concentration of power and wealth, which is crippling our culture and futures as artists. They were surprised and asked for our demands. I said we have no demands, but we are going to continue occupying their museum, which in this case means repeatedly coming back and enlarging the conversation until it is much more visible and spread out. Actually, for a long time, the press kept asking for demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement. So far it has been very helpful for the movement to not have demands. As soon as you have demands, you’re asking those with power to change something finite (a few things), when many feel that the problem is structural. Without demands, we focus more on developing our voice autonomously and building our movement’s solidarity, which is the base of our power. The problems of economic injustice are so big that starting out in a negotiation mode does not make sense.

Later on you  also did an action at Lincoln Center in New York…

That was our most triumphant action of 2011! The Lincoln Center, supported by David H. Koch and New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, is a potent symbol of the privatisation of public space and an abuse of cultural authority. As we stated in the press release for the action, “it is no doubt a coincidence that Philip Glass’ opera ‘Satyagraha’, which depicts Gandhi’s early struggle against colonial oppression in India, was revived in the revolutionary 2011. We immediately saw a glaring contradiction in ‘Satyagraha’ being performed while in recent weeks protestors from Occupy Wall Street have been arrested. The juxtaposition was stark. While Bloomberg funds the representation of Gandhi’s pioneering tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience in the Metropolitan Opera House, he simultaneously orders a paramilitary-style raid on the peaceful public occupation of Liberty Park, where protestors are beaten, tear-gassed, and violently arrested.” So, one evening, hundreds of protesters assembled on the steps of Lincoln Center, blocked off from the plaza by police barricades. A few who dared to cross the line were arrested, provoking shouts of “shame, shame, shame!” We took off our shoes—a Gandhian symbol of dignity—and stood barefoot on the cold pavement, conducting our assembly. When the opera ended and the opera audience exited into the plaza, they came upon this strikingly theatrical scene—real, live, non-violent protest, barefoot on the grand steps! Some protesters were chanting “We are the 99%”, which may have contributed to a sense of separation between these two parallel crowds. Our presence behind the police barricades somehow paralysed the opera audience, making them hesitant to flow toward us, even as we called them to join. Then all of a sudden Philip Glass popped up in the Occupy Wall Street crowd—he had come to read a statement using the “people’s microphone”. He called out the last lines of the opera, a passage from the “Bhagavad Gita”:

When righteousness withers away / And evil rules the land / We come into being / Age after age / And take visible shape / And move / A man among men / For the protection of good / Thrusting back evil / And setting virtue / On her seat again.

In that moment the opera audience had joined us. The buffer zone was gone. We were now one big crowd. Until late into the night we held our general assembly and many people spoke—opera singers who had been recently fired by Lincoln Center in its neo-liberal war against workers, and also Lou Reed was there and expressed his support.

Occupying Museums is very careful of not being co-opted by any institution. You refuse any collaboration, even if this is how you could reach out.

Since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, co-option has been a major concern, because neo-liberal capitalism knows very well that the best way to kill protest movements is to absorb them into the existing market and to dissolve them or use them for advertising purposes. If we started to negotiate with MoMA, they might say, “You may use the first floor for a special General Assembly, we’ll put in on the website.” In this way, they might try to throw us a bone before they deal with critique we raise. And then while negotiating, we might have our ego pumped and feel special because these famous gatekeeping institutions have opened their gates for us just a little.

It is of course not so black and white because many people who are in the movement work for art institutions; some are even powerful curators, critics, and well-known artists. We of course also need to find allies to change structures of the institutions from the inside. The question is how to proceed in this while keeping our clarity of critique?

I feel that before we join the people who run the museums, we should join in solidarity with the wider communities of New York City—artists and art lovers who are not so privileged. New York City is one of the richest and the most class-divided cities in the world. It has not much of a middle class, but a lot of very wealthy and a lot of very poor people. It also has many extremely rich artists and a vast number of poor artists. Those are the economic and racial barriers, which have been built up for generations, that we have to break. We must bring together wider communities that usually do not hang out together in the art world, and change the class and race segregation that we see in culture, even if this takes lots of work and lots of time.

So, if you were the director of MoMA what would you do in these circumstances?

It would be cool for the MoMA director to join us in an open conversation with our group. Curators at MoMA are used to having their asses kissed by artists, but maybe they would be interested in a new dynamic where everyone is equal, where people are focused on justice and mass consciousness rather than just on individual competitive gain? They could join the discussion, because then we could find out—outside the power relations—what they think as individuals. Many people want to see big changes in our world—I’m sure some museum directors do, too. We all need to get started, so they could begin by meeting us if they want. There is nothing stopping them—our group is open.

So what would institutions to do in order to join you?

You have to be ready to step into the mud. You have to be ready for a long, uncomfortable conversation. Our movement calls to question the structure of the museum boards and the flow of capital itself within culture. It calls on everyone to study their own privilege and work together to change a world that is so divided by access to money and power. We have to unlearn lots of capitalist conditioning to be able to work together. We have to spend a really long time with these conversations, be ready to fail, stay away from the easy traps of market-friendly shows and celebrity artists that we think everyone wants. We need to practice transparency and fairness in our working process. We should be aware that power and hierarchy are always to be found in human society. We have to challenge it. If we do not experiment and get messy, we cannot start finding answers. We cannot make demands right now—we need to change our minds first, then we can create a parallel economy with freedom rather than oppression as a basis.

Forty years ago the Art Workers’ Coalition, an association of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum personnel successfully put pressure on New York City’s museums—notably the Museum of Modern Art—to implement various reforms. They for instance sought a less exclusive exhibition policy, one that should include women artists and artists of colour, and they emphasised the importance of taking a moral stance on the Vietnam War. Moreover, the coalition prevailed on MoMA and other museums to implement a free-admission day that still exists in many institutions. Is it an inspiration?

Yes, and there are other good examples of artists in this tradition, like the Russian Constructivists, the Mexican Muralists, Act Up, and so on. But the Art Workers’ Coalition is very important. In fact, we recently re-occupied MoMA on one of the free nights which are called “Target Free Fridays”. Target is a large US retailing corporation, and everyone thinks that this company invented the idea of free museum days. One goal for this action was to let people know that artists (Art Workers’ Coalition) invented it, that there is a history of artists standing up for the 99%; and another was to stand in solidarity with a group of union workers.

There is an art handlers’ union, which works for Sotheby’s auction house. Sotheby’s was trying to take away their health-care and cut their pay, and when they tried to negotiate, Sotheby’s locked them out of work. So, since MoMA has a close relationship with Sotheby’s, we occupied MoMA to put some pressure on the board members to support the workers. We held a general assembly in front of Diego Rivera’s show and read a revolutionary text signed by Rivera and André Breton in 1938. We held an assembly with hundreds of artists in the main atrium of MoMA where a huge banner was displayed that stated “When Art Is Just a Luxury, Art Is a Lie!” This time, MoMA left us alone. I think that kicking out a bunch of artist activists on a free night initiated by artist activists (Art Workers’ Coalition) would have been a public relations disaster for the museum. For a couple of hours, we transformed MoMA into a forum for active discussion about money and labour in the art world.

There are concrete issues to be achieved: museums and the whole world of culture could pay artists for their labour; they could also pay the workers in the museums much better salaries. More artists could be included in an egalitarian market and earn money out of their artistic profession. We could regulate the extremely speculative art market, which helps only a handful of people—the millionaire artists and billionaire collectors. Unfortunately museums have fallen into a free-market ideology, which doesn’t recognise the importance of fairly compensating people’s labour and believes in speculation as a saviour.

Do you have the impression that something is changing?

The first step is simply to start coming together and talking. We need to realise that it is going to be messy for a while. Initially, many newspapers and blogs scoffed at the Occupy Museums protest, but recently that tendency started to change. There were articles in The New York Times that talk about the money laundering of Ronald Lauder and his Neue Galerie, or about the Guggenheim’s abuse of labour in the Middle East. There were articles in The Huffington Post about art funds for museums that disproportionately assist wealthy white audiences.
We have to wake up and remember that art is everyone’s inheritance. Big art fairs like Art Basel and the Armory Show have direct connections to New York’s museums. That’s a place for the wealthiest people in the world to shop. There are 100,000 artists in New York City, but museums show the same people that are highlighted in art fairs and feed the cult of art celebrities. With Occupy Museums, we are taking the first steps toward a future where our cultural commons are truly shared and celebrated, not hoarded by the few. Occupy a museum near you.

Noah Fischer is a Brooklyn-based artist and activist. He has also worked collaboratively with the Berlin-based performance group andcompany&Co on numerous projects.  In 2008 Fischer began a transition from “private” projects free public collaborations. This journey led to the Summer of Change: a series of numismatic rituals performed on Wall Street with the Aaron Burr Society in Summer 2011. On September 17th, 2011, Fischer joined Occupy Wall Street on its first day, donning a large silver Dime mask. Noah initiated Occupy Subways and Occupy Museums in the first weeks of OWS and currently spends much of his time working with the Occupying Museums collective . Noah is the curator of the No-Eyes Viewing Wall at Brooklyn Zen Center.

Either theatre doubts its own social relevance, or it delegates this relevance to specific political, but not necessarily artistic, action. Or then again it resorts to old aesthetic devices that are essentially restricted to frontal, critical presentations of grievances, but finds no proper (that is, itself political) form for this strategy.

Yet there exists again, after a period of mainly narrative theatre in the 1970s and 80s, followed by post-dramatic forms that focused on the medium and its aesthetics themselves, a strong desire for political theatre. A theatre that finds not only access to important social issues, but is itself a political space and public sphere. Yet there is no longer a common short organum for the theatre (Bertolt Brecht, 1948) that we could follow. We find ourselves in a period of experimentation, of searching – on the part of both artists and audience. There are, however, plenty of artistic approaches that make clear again the potential of political theatre.

Of course it is a provocation: after hundreds of years of fighting for the autonomy of art, after decades of learning that the essential quality of art is ambiguity, after years of repeating that art poses rather than answers questions, there is suddenly this persistent call for an art that is useful, for direct commitment, for artistic activism, for intervention in the political reality of our society and economy.

This call is not new; it has precursors – the Productivists, for example. Contradicting Naum Gabo’s stipulation that Constructivism in post-revolutionary Russia should be committed exclusively to abstraction, artists such as Aleksei Gan, Alexander Rodchenko und Varvara Stepanova demanded a practical, socially useful role for art. In 1973, some fifty years later, Joseph Beuys opened his Free International University (FIU) and proclaimed: “To be a teacher is my greatest artwork”.

Ich habe ein Problem damit, die Silent University als Kunst-Projekt zu sehen. Ich sehe die Silent University sehr positiv – aber ist sie ein Kunst-Projekt? Ich glaube nicht. Natürlich kann man sagen, dass es eine Initiative ist, bei der Künstler mitwirken, ein Projekt, das von einem Künstler entwickelt wurde, aber das macht es noch nicht zu einem Kunst-Projekt.

Das wird wahrscheinlich eine offene Frage bleiben. Jeder, der mit der Silent University zu tun hat, beschreibt sie unterschiedlich. Wir betrachten sie unter anderem deshalb als Kunst, weil sie mit institutioneller Präsentation spielt. Indem man sie als Universität bezeichnet, bezieht man sich auf das Modell einer Institution. Aber in der Realität, auf einer Verwaltungsebene, ist sie keine wirkliche Universität. Sie ist eine fiktive Struktur, es instituiert sich, aber sie ist keine Institution. Sie spielt mit der symbolischen Ordnung, mit Repräsentation. Nicht nur durch ihre Form ist sie ein künstlerisches Projekt, sondern auch weil sie durch die Verwendung repräsentativer Modelle in die Gesellschaft interveniert. Man kann die Silent University als Nichtregierungsorganisation oder als ein Gemeinde- oder ein staatliches Projekt sehen. Es ist schwer zu beschreiben, worin die institutionelle Körperschaft besteht oder welche Art von politischer Sprache dort wer mit wem spricht. Es ist wichtig, dass man nicht genau beschreiben kann, was die SU eigentlich ist. Ein weiterer Grund, sie mit Kunst zu verbinden, ist natürlich, dass sie für gewöhnlich mit einer Kunstinstitution verbunden ist …

… nun ja, aber das kommt daher, dass Künstler involviert sind und das sind die Kontakte, die sie haben. Was wäre der Unterschied, wenn sie von einer Schule oder einer politischen Organisation beherbergt würde, die keine Verbindungen zur Kunstwelt hätte?

Aber es geht auch darum, über die Strategien der politischen Strategien hinauszugehen, über Erziehungspolitik, institutionelle Politik, Regierungspolitik usw. Die Silent University in einer staatlichen Institution zu etablieren, wäre nicht so einfach, denn man müsste sich mit den Prinzipien der Silent University auseinandersetzen, die selbstorgansiert, autonom und kollektiv betrieben werden muss. Es gibt eine/n Koordinator/in, aber die Initiative geht von vielen Menschen aus. Die meisten Institutionen, auch große Museen, wollen im Grunde keine Geflüchteten und Asylsuchenden auf Dauer in ihren Räumlichkeiten beherbergen. In dieser Hinsicht sind kleinere Kunstinstitutionen leichter zugänglich.

Ich finde es etwas übertrieben, wenn die Leute sagen, ich bin Künstler, also ist alles, was ich tue, automatisch ein Kunstprojekt. Ich würde es eher in die Kategorie von „Kunst-Aktivismus“ oder „Artivismus“ stecken. Für mich ist das eine Form von politischer Praxis. Die Silent University ist definitiv ein politisches Projekt, und künstlerischer Aktivismus ist ein politisches Projekt, das künstlerische Strategien einsetzt, beispielsweise hinsichtlich Fragen von Repräsentation, wie sie für die Silent University von Bedeutung sind. Das ist vor allem eine Frage der Gewichtung, aber es ist eine wichtige Unterscheidung, eine methodische Frage: Viele Aktivisten stehen Künstlern als Teil der Kunstwelt sehr kritisch gegenüber – sie glauben, dass man nicht in Museen oder Galerien arbeiten oder an Biennalen teilnehmen kann, wenn man kritische Kunst machen will.

I was thinking about what it would mean to lend the ritual of the Yom HaShoa – the Israeli memorial day for the victims and heroes of the Holocaust – to Germany. Every year on this day sirens in public spaces sound all over Israel, and the whole country comes to a halt to observe two minutes of silence.

I have been exploring state and social rituals for many years in order to understand how they form national identity. The first work I made about this was Trembling Time (2001), a video about the Yom HaZikaron, the Israeli Soldiers Memorial Day, which functions in practically the same way as the Holocaust Memorial Day. These rituals are national ceremonies and anchored in state law. In Trembling Time I tried to come to a more distant and at the same time more personal interpretation of this very emotionally charged ritual. What does it mean for an individual – for me as a citizen of the state of Israel – to be raised with such collective rituals? How can one stay an individual and self-responsible within this situation?

But do collective commemorations then make sense for you at all? Or is that something that can only be done individually anyhow?

Well, the purpose is to create a narrative of a nation, an identity for the state – that is not unique to Israel. I am not against that but I want to question and to analyze it.

The regulations on how to commemorate are quite defined, there is only a small established path on which one can move. It means that commemoration becomes a pre-formulated routine – instead of being lived and lived up to.

I strongly feel that Germany needs to create alternative moments of commemoration which, for example, also include newcomers – a ritual that refers to the present day and future and not only to history. Thousands of younger Israelis have moved to Germany in the last years. And many of them – like me – live in mixed relationships. That makes it even more obvious. We have to deal with our history together. So rather than talking about guilt, it is more about what history means to us today. We ought to commemorate the past but acknowledge the present.

15 years ago, when German theatre maker Christoph Schlingensief set up his now legendary container-installation Bitte liebt Österreich! (Please Love Austria!, 2000) right in the centre of Vienna, Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel had just made his devil’s pact with the right wing demagogue Jörg Haider, and the other EU-countries were discussing sanctions against the fellow member state. Austria debated passionately about immigration policy, as well as about the limits of art. And Europe watched with some bewilderment.

Under the dominating banner ‘Ausländer raus’ (‘Foreigners out!’) Schlingensief staged a Big Brother-type game show with asylum seekers. The containers housed a group of immigrants who could be watched via CCTV on the internet, and the Austrian population was invited to vote them out of the country one by one. The scandal was enormous: conservatives felt insulted by the seeming parody of their argumentation, and the left was disgruntled by the supposedly cynical display.

If political theatre can only exist in a context in which the world is believed to be changeable, in which theatre itself wants to be part of that change, and where there is an audience that is willing to actively engage in the exploration of what that change should be — then it becomes clear why it is so difficult to think of such a theatre today in a society paralysed by the symptoms of post-political ideologies that tend to disguise themselves as positivistic pragmatism, lachrymose resignation, or cheerful complacency. Where the credo of ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) is considered common sense and the belief in the possibility or even desirability of political imagination is fading, theatre is hit at its core. All its political potential seems disabled.

It was a different time in the 1970s and 1980s when political theatre in Europe actually was (in different ways on either side of the Wall) a relevant factor in many public debates. With ideologies still going strong and the division between east and west clear cut, theatre engaged in everyday politics by representing all the world’s miseries — from the Vietnam War or Apartheid in South Africa to the small daily adversities of a local working class family. Either in new drama or modernised classics, radical interpretations of the text were a key feature of a Regietheater (director’s theatre) which, despite its many new approaches, stayed mostly in the realm of the mimetic. In the east it was a game with hidden messages, in the west open provocations were an important part of the repertoire, and audiences slamming doors while leaving was a rule rather than an exception.

No wonder that large parts of the public still consider this period almost synonymous with ‘political theatre’ itself. But even though the theatre during this period was often able to propose an understanding of the structural reasons behind the presented evils, it couldn’t avoid the dilemma that in the end its representations were just another repetition of the very miseries it wanted to fight. Brecht called this phenomenon ‘Menschenfresserdramatik’ (‘cannibal’s dramatic art’), which he described in the early 1930s in his notes on “Die dialektische Dramatik”: ‘The physical exploitation of the poor is followed by a psychological one’ when the pitied character is supposed to produce feelings of sadness, guilt or even anger in a spectator, who most likely — at least structurally — is part of keeping the very system of exploitation alive. In the end they continued what Brecht had already analysed in his Short Organum for the Theatre (1949): ‘The theatre we know shows the structure of society (represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced by society (in the auditorium).’ Not only the play onstage but the whole theatrical set up (not to speak of the hierarchies within the institution itself) merely reproduced the system they wanted to criticise.

I’ve learned a lot since we set up the first branch of Silent University in London in 2012. It took a while to turn it from a project into a small-scale organization. Within this process, my position and involvement have been transformed too. First I was the artist who initiated it, I then became a co-coordinator and co-organizer, now I mostly act as a supervisor, and I hope soon I will become just an ordinary member, a contributor, and a guest.

My original plan was four years of direct involvement as an initiator, staying in one city, London. But in reality things worked differently. Now, after four years, we have three active branches in Mülheim, Hamburg, and Stockholm and new autonomous branches on the way in Athens and Amman. We have also had a failed branch in Montreuil, Paris which operated for over a year and a largely inactive branch in London because after the third year we lacked the long-term collaboration of an institution.

In the beginning I thought a process of preparation would be required to reach the point where the community could take over and establish its own autonomous organization. We would start by working together with institutions, securing a budget for at least one year. At first this might look like a top-down process, but it should evolve towards a bottom-up-organization. In terms of long-term stability, I thought it was a good idea to start by having institutions, a budget, a place to meet, and a local co-coordinator, while acknowledging from the outset that it was a parasitic organization.

I still think this is the best way to start in some countries. But nowadays we are also trying the bottom-up model in cities like Athens and Amman, starting with a group of engaged and motivated people, not with an institution or budget. We still do not know which strategy will create a more sustainable and independent autonomous organization.

So the institution should accept a facilitating role which always adapts to local needs. Since there is a high turnover of participants—because they may move on, may have to move on etc.—the support of an institution can help to achieve stability but it should step back as soon as possible.
However, there is another question. So far you have always collaborated with art institutions. This has advantages. For example: they are able define their field of operations very broadly, they can make things possible and they can give a certain symbolic value to the people involved in the Silent University. However, the art world has the tendency to render things harmless. Everything it touches becomes “art”. It is part of a certain market and it has the tendency to create mainly symbolic value for its own purposes.

I am interested in how we use the facilities art institutions can provide. We often underestimate these facilities and what they can achieve. Whether they are a large institution like Tate Modern, or medium scale institutions like The Showroom, Tensta Konsthall or Impulse Theater Festival, even smaller organizations can achieve a lot in a short period of time. How can we place something like SU inside an art institution? Not just within existing formats such as events or temporary engagements, but also by making it part of an accredited system for students, giving the Silent University’s participants direct access and even paying them to give classes. Good intentions are not enough. There is an obvious danger of turning SU into a harmless tactical collaboration. It requires an on-going process of daily negotiation to work with an art institution.

Saskia Sassen made a point in her keynote speech at the Creative Time Summit in Stockholm in 2014 about the importance of something being unauthorized but recognized. It’s not about replacing or imitating the existing university structure or neoliberal education system. It’s time to revolutionize, de-colonize and really transform it in an ambitious way, but by starting on a small scale. Working with art institutions and established universities is one way to gain recognition, rather than by trying to establish a new and independent group which will effectively be marginalized. Instead, we can use the facilities of those existing institutions as progressive tools. But to be able to truly do that, those institutions need to transform themselves.

I have a problem with seeing the Silent University as an art project. I am very positive about it, but is it an art project? I don’t think so. Of course you can say that it is an initiative in which artists are implied. It is a project that was designed by an artist, yes, but that does not make it an art project.

That will probably remain an open question. Everyone involved in the Silent University describes it differently. One reason why we see it as an artistic project is because it plays with institutional representation. By calling itself a “university,” it references an institutional model. But in reality, on the level of governance, it is not a real university. It is a fictive structure. While it might institute something, it is not a real institution. It plays with the symbolic order and with representation. It is an artistic project, not only in its form but also by being an intervention in society using representative models. The Silent University can be seen as an NGO but it could also be seen as a municipal or government project. It is hard to describe what its institutional body is and what kind of political language it uses to speak to whom. It is important not to be able to describe what the Silent University really is. Another reason to link it to art is, of course, because it is usually hosted by an art institution.

But that is because there are artists involved, and those are the contacts they have. What would be the difference if it was hosted by a school or a political association with no links to the art world?

But it is also about going beyond the policies—educational policy, institutional policy, governmental policy etc. Establishing the Silent University in a government institution won’t be easy because it has to be run in a self-organized, autonomous, collective way. There is a coordinator but there are many people who provide initiatives. Some of these people might not have papers. Most institutions, including big museums, don’t really want to host refugees and asylum seekers permanently in their spaces. In this regard, smaller art institutions are easier to access.

I find it a bit exaggerated when people say: I am an artist, so what I do is automatically an art project. But if you insist on relating it to art, I would rather put it in the category of “artistic activism” or “artivism.” For me, this is a form of a political practice. The Silent University is definitively a political project, and artistic activism is a political project that uses artistic strategies, for instance regarding the questions about representation. So it is a political project with an important aesthetic, artistic dimension—but it is not primarily a artistic project.

At one end of the spectrum there are artists who want to make a political intervention—at the other there are activists who use artistic strategies. It is mainly a difference of emphasis, but this is an important distinction, a methodological question. I am in favor of both. Both are important but there are also important differences: many artivists are very critical toward artists working in the art world—they believe that if you want to make critical art you can’t work in museums, galleries or take part in biennials.

So is it possible to make a meaningful political intervention within the field of art or, more generally, from inside an institution? Or is one required to do so from the outside—if one can make meaningful political interventions at all?

Many people believe that you can’t make any kind of critique in the art world because you are automatically involved. I don’t agree with that. I’m always defending a pluralistic position: one should try to occupy all the places where one can make an intervention. If you have the chance to do so in a museum, in a gallery, do it! But don’t believe that this is the only way. One needs to recognize the multiplicity of spaces. That is what I am really interested in when I am thinking of those interventions in the form of artistic practices: How they can contribute to the counter-hegemonic struggle? That’s what is important for me.

And I think one can contribute to that struggle in many different ways and in many different places. In this regard the Silent University is an important form of practice—whether you call it “artistic” or “artivist.” It is important for the counter-hegemonic struggle because it is trying to facilitate the voices of people who are silenced. That’s very, very important.

Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality,
but a hammer with which to shape it. Attributed to Marx, Brecht, Mayakovsky…

When mathematician and philosopher Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá in 1995, the city was considered one of the most dangerous in the world, a community destroyed by drugs, crime, corruption, and machismo. Mockus, not a professional politician at all, had run his campaign with no party support and virtually no budget but with the strong belief in the possibility of convincing people that a different world was possible. He believed that the most important thing to do as a mayor was to encourage people to trust themselves, to take their lives in their own hands and to strengthen their feeling of responsibility for the society they were part of. And he invented the concept of citizen culture, cultura ciudadana, as he describes in this book: a kind of civic selfeducation method based on play, symbolic actions, and staged situations.

But most significantly he claimed: “When I am trapped, I do what an artist would do.” Borrowing strategies from contemporary art meant for him decontextualizing everyday situations, framing them, making them graspable. And, at the same time, it meant a feeling of internal freedom, the ability to see things in their complexity from a distance, and thereby making change possible. He called his strategy subart: a modest art without symbolic pretentions, a way of borrowing from high art whatever could be useful and introduced into direct political action. His measures as mayor became world famous. He exchanged weapons for toys (counting on kids to put pressure on their parents), he publicly wore a “super citizen” costume to make fun of his own presumed power, as well as to illustrate that everybody in democracy has the ability to govern, that power should always be shared. He cut the form of a heart out of his bulletproof vest to demonstrate his commitment to nonviolence—and actually risked his life. He founded libraries in the most neglected parts of the city, running completely on trust, with no need to show ID to borrow a book. He organized performances at open graves to talk about violence and homicide, and he fired the corrupt traffic police and replaced them with more than 400 mimes in the belief that being ridiculed would be more of a deterrent for Columbians than any fine. And… he succeeded. Within three years water usage dropped forty percent, traffic fatalities over fifty percent, and the homicide rate fell seventy percent. 63,000 Bogotá citizens voluntarily agreed to pay ten percent higher taxes.

Mimes, cutout hearts, performances at open gravesides—all this might not exactly be considered good art by the standards of our esthetic discourses. But how often does art have such a direct impact?

Art and politics have always had an intense love-hate relationship. Artists positioned—or sometimes just found—themselves between servile obedience to the powers-that-be and critical distance, between constructive cooperation and outright antagonism. There is no way to place oneself outside the empire, even as an artist, hard as some might have tried. Even inner exile exists only in relation to the outer world.

But, despite repeated claims, this does not mean all art is political. Engaged art is more than mere relational reflection or esthetics. It takes a stand, or provokes others to take a stand. It does not only want change; it wants to be an active part of this change, or even to initiate it. It is not by chance that the artistic tools used in this struggle are often developed, or at least radicalized, at moments of social turmoil, at moments when the relationship between art and society is at a turning point in general: right before and after WWI (Dada, futurism, constructivism…), the 1960s, and the early 1970s (performance, concept, installation art…)—these were times of artistic and philosophical but also political avantgardes.

So it is not surprising that politically and socially engaged art gained fresh momentum after 1989, with the fall of the eastern bloc, the end of the cold war, the acceleration of capitalism and the corresponding rise of anti or alterglobalization movements. But only with the manifold political and economic crises all over the world in the last couple of years has the idea of activist art become more pointed and recently even a main topic even within the more mainstream contemporary art world. Whether in Tahrir, Zuccotti, Syntagma, Taksim, or Majdan Squares, in front of the Kremlin, in Japan after Fukushima, or in the midst of the iconic architecture of Brasilia, artists are always among the first to get involved. But one question constantly reoccurs: what role should art play in this?

It looks like we are witnessing another paradigm shift in the relationship of art and politics. A generation of philosophers who derived their theoretical concepts from their very own concrete political experiences and engagements (Michel Foucault fighting for human rights in prisons with the “Groupe d’information sur les prisons,” Alain Badiou being engaged in migration and asylum policies in the “Organization politique,” Jacques Rancière as a short term member in a Maoist group, Antonio Negri even sentenced to prison for his engagement in “Autonomia Organizzata,” to name but a few) was followed by new generations of philosophers (and artists, curators, etc.) who built on these thoughts and abstracted them further—but too often without binding them back to their own contemporary reality. So we got used to calling philosophical theories and art works “political,” even if they are only very distantly based on thoughts that themselves were already abstracted from the concrete political impulses that sparked them. A homeopathic, secondhand idea of political philosophy and art has become the main line of contemporary cultural discourse.

That classic leftist idea of the 1970s—“the personal is political”—was meant to politicize the private. But by now it seems rather to have privatized the political. The idea of “the esthetic is the political” was meant to politicize the esthetic. But it seems that over the years the political has been estheticized instead.

The constant awareness of the complexity of the notions of truth, reality, or even politics seem to have maneuvered us into a blind alley: either we are too simple or we are too complex, too populist or too stuck in hermetic eremitism. Either we include too much or we exclude too many. We have reached a point where the necessary awareness that everything is contingent has often become an excuse for intellectual relativism.

Departing from the observation that (1) artist organizations are founded by artists, (2) artist organizations choose the form of the organization, (3) artist organizations seek for structural engagement, and (4) artist organizations propose social/political agendas, the AOI sought to explore the artistic value, political potential, and performative characteristics of the artist-organization, as well as the possibility for transnational collaborations and alliances between them.

This fundamental turn in artistic practice was mirrored spatially in the HAU Theater, transforming the stage into the seating section of the audience, and vice versa. The modular neo-constructivist lecterns were repositioned for each session, displaying an ongoing composition – an ongoing construction – parallel to the attempts of allying the different artist organizations participating to the AOI.

www.artistorganisationsinternational.org

Moderators: Ekaterina Degot, Charles Esche, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Maria Hlavajova, Matteo Lucchetti, Margarita Tsomou. Respondents: Ulf Aminde, Libia Castro, Galit Eilat, Christoph Gurk, Alex Karschnia, Urok Shirhan.

Curators: Florian Malzacher, Jonas Staal, Joanna Warsza / Producer: Younes Bouadi / Project coordinator: Renée In der Maur / Communication: Suzie Hermán, Henry Procter, Imara Limon / Architect: Paul Kuipers / Construction: Kasper Oostergetel / Graphic designer: Remco van Bladel / Photographer: Lidia Rossner / Website developer: Charlie Berendsen

Commissioned by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin

A conversation between Florian Malzacher and Maayan Sheleff in a cafe in South Tel Aviv, April 2019

Was vor rund fünfzehn Jahren als Trend, das «echte Leben» auf die Bühne zu holen, begann, hat sich vor dem Hintergrund tiefgreifender politischer, sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Krisen vielfach in das Bedürfnis verwandelt, sich selbst und oft sehr konkret mit seiner Kunst in das «echte Leben» einzumischen. Nicht die Bühnenbretter bedeuten mehr die Welt, sondern draußen gilt es, mitzumischen. Der «social turn» vor allem in den Bildenden Künsten ist – wie die Kunsthistorikerin Claire Bishop analysiert hat – auch eine Wende hin zum Performativen: Oft sind es die Mittel und Strategien des Theaters, die genutzt werden, wenn Künstler politische Bewegungen gründen, die Grenzen zum Aktivismus verwischen, neue Gemeinschaften schaffen, konkrete Veränderung suchen. Doch ausgerechnet das Theater selbst – das Medium, das Hannah Arendt als politische Kunst par excellence bezeichnet, weil sein einziger Gegenstand der Mensch im Verhältnis zu anderen ist – tut sich überraschend schwer damit, seine eigenen Repräsentationsmechanismen hinter sich zu lassen oder zumindest radikal zu hinterfragen. Zwar sind kollaborative Praktiken und spielerische Publikumsbeteiligung en vogue, doch kaum je werden die ureigenen Qualitäten des Mediums konsequent genutzt: Eine temporäre Gemeinschaft zu bilden, Verfahrensweisen von Gesellschaft zu erproben und ihre eigenen Grundbedingungen zu hinterfragen, zu verhandeln oder gar neu zu definieren. Einen agonistischen Raum zu bilden, in dem konträre Meinungen ausagiert werden können, ohne sie in billigem Konsens aufzulösen.

Neue Kriterien 

Doch der Trend, reale soziale Situationen zu erzeugen, bringt andere Anforderungen als geschlossene Kunsträume mit sich. Nicht nur werden ästhetische Kriterien verschoben, vor allem tauchen Fragen auf, mit denen auch soziale Initiativen konfrontiert sind: In wie weit sind die beteiligten Personen selbstbestimmt? Wie lang muss man einer eingegangenen Verpflichtung folgen? Wer profitiert am meisten? Ist es nachhaltig? Solche Fragen haben nicht immer die gleichen Antworten, je nachdem, ob man sie aus der Perspektive der Kunst oder des Aktivismus oder gar der Sozialarbeit betrachtet. Denn: Partizipative Kunst ist eine Kunst «in which people constitute the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of theater and performance», wie es Claire Bishop formuliert. Damit ist eine mögliche Trennlinie zwischen sozial engagierter Kunst und Aktivismus markiert: Auch wenn Aktivismus ebenfalls mit Menschen umgeht, sie organisiert, sie benutzt, vielleicht sogar manipuliert, würde Bishops Definition den meisten Aktivisten als zynisch gelten. Und selbst wenn viele Künstler eine solche Formulierung ebenfalls vermeiden würden: Sozial engagierte Kunst muss eben nicht im Konsens mit dem involvierten Menschen geschehen. Sie muss nicht einmal eine positive Erfahrung für sie sein. Sie kann auch auf direkte Konfrontation zielen, mit Misskommunikation oder gar Missbrauch spielen.

Die Arbeiten des spanischen Künstlers Santiago Sierra beispielsweise sind bekannt für die verstörende Radikalität, mit der er Menschen als Material benutzt, ihnen ein Mindestgehalt zahlt für offenkundig bedeutungslose oder erniedrigende Aktionen, beispielsweise wenn er sechs junge Kubaner anheuert, sich eine Linie auf ihren Rücken tätowieren zu lassen (250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People, 1999). Indem er Ungerechtigkeiten, finanzielle Abhängigkeiten, Machtmissbrauch (meist westlicher) Gesellschaften im Rahmen eines Kunstwerks reproduziert, wiederholt Sierra die Mechanismen, die er verachtet, um sie zu kritisieren. Und macht uns zum Teil des Dilemmas. Der niederländische Künstler Renzo Martens verwendet in seinem Film Enjoy Poverty (2008) eine vergleichbare Strategie, wenn er kongolesische Fotografen davon überzeugt, mitzuverdienen an den schlechten Nachrichten, die ihr Land westlichen Medien liefert. Statt Fotos von Hochzeiten oder anderen Feiern zu machen, fotografieren sie nun den Krieg, oder, konkreter “raped women, corpses, and, let’s add, malnourished children”. Die Argumentation ist kristallklar und rational – und zutiefst verstörend, weil sie direkt auf unsere eigene Hypokrisie zeigt.

Auch die Arbeiten des Berliner Zentrums für Politische Schönheit lassen sich in dieser Reihe sehen: 2012 setzten sie im Rahmen der Berlin Biennale 25.000 Euro Belohnung aus für jede Information, die zu einer Verurteilung eines der Besitzer des Rüstungsunternehmens Krauss-Maffei Wegmann führen würde. Da der Waffenhandel selbst – das tatsächliche moralische Verbrechen – nicht strafbar ist, sollte nach jedwedem anderen justiziablen Vergehen gesucht werden. Die eigentliche Anklage aber waren die Plakate und die Webseite mit den Namen und Gesichtern der Waffenfirma-Eigentümer in Western-Steckbrief-Manier. Ein legitimes Anliegen – aber legitime Mittel? Diese künstlerisch produktive Ambivalenz steigerte das ZPS, als sie die Gedenkkreuze für Berliner Mauertote klauten, um sie vermeintlich an die EU-Außengrenze zu bringen – zu den Mauertoten der Gegenwart. Seinen vorläufigen Höhepunkt erreichte das Kriterien-Dilemma als die Künstleraktivisten die Leiche einer syrischen Geflüchteten aus einer Kühlkammer bargen und in Berlin beisetzten – mit all der theatralen Unklarheit des Als-ob.

Die Bühne, die das Zentrum für Politische Schönheit nicht nur bespielt, sondern mit jeder seiner Aktionen erst erschafft, ist der öffentliche Raum – ein agonistischer Raum, im Sinne Chantal Mouffes, die davor warnt, durch vermeintlichen Konsens unterschiedliche Meinungen nur zu unterdrücken, bis diese sich am Ende nur noch in feindlichem Antagonismus ausdrücken können:

Gegen das Aufgreifen dieses Motivs durch Dana Schutz regte sich schnell Protest schwarzer KünstlerInnen: Eine weiße Künstlerin habe nicht das Recht, sich dieses Bild anzueignen und davon symbolisch und vielleicht auch finanziell zu profitieren. Die in Berlin lebende Künstlerin Hannah Black forderte in einem offenen Brief nicht nur die Entfernung, sondern gar die Zerstörung der Arbeit.3

In Deutschland hat vor allem die Überstreichung des von Student- Innen als sexistisch empfundenen Gedichts «Avenidas» (1954) von Eugen Gomringer an der Fassade der Berliner Alice-Salomon-Hochschule 2017 für große Aufregung in den Feuilletons gesorgt.4 Aber auch weniger schlagzeilenträchtige Diskussionsabbrüche, schnelle Eskalationen in Facebook-Kommentarspalten, hier und da abgesagte Vorstellungen und Vorlesungen zeigen: Das Diskursklima ist auch in Kunst und Theater rauer geworden und bringt einige Verunsicherung mit sich.

Dabei ist die Vehemenz, mit der im Umfeld von Black Lives Matter, #MeToo und anderen analogen wie virtuellen Bewegungen alltägliche Diskriminierung, Belästigung, physische, psychische und symbolische Gewalt diskutiert wird, nicht wirklich überraschend: Was sich über Jahr- zehnte, Jahrhunderte aufgestaut hat, entlädt sich nicht immer präzise oder wohldosiert. Das Vertrösten darauf, dass sich alle Nebenwidersprüche (wie Rassismus, mangelnde Gleichberechtigung von Frauen oder Umweltverschmutzung) schon von allein auflösen würden, wäre erst einmal der Hauptwiderspruch (zwischen Arbeit und Kapital) beseitigt, war allzu lang Teil linker Argumentationsfolklore.

Sztuka nie jest lustrem, w którym przegląda się rzeczywistość. Jest młotem, za pomocą którego się ją wykuwa. Powiedzenie przypisywane Marksowi, Brechtowi, Majakowskiemu…

Kiedy matematyk i filozof Anastas Mockus został wybrany na burmistrza Bogoty w 1995 roku, uznawano ją za jedno z najniebezpieczniejszych miast na świecie. Jej mieszkańcy byli wyniszczeni przez narkotyki, przemoc, korupcję i maczyzm. Mockus, który nie był zawodowym politykiem, prowadził swoją kampanię bez wsparcia jakiejkolwiek partii politycznej i prawie bez żadnych funduszy, tylko z silną wiarą w możliwość przekonania ludzi do tego, że inny świat jest możliwy. Uważał, że głównym zadaniem prezydenta miasta powinno być zachęcenie ludzi do budowania wzajemnego zaufania i wzięcia życia we własne ręce, wzmocnienie ich poczucia odpowiedzialności za społeczność, której są częścią. Wymyślone przez siebie pojęcie kultury obywatelskiej, cultura ciudadana, przedstawia w umieszczonym tutaj tekście jako metodę oddolnej edukacji, wykorzystującą zmysł zabawy, działania symboliczne i zaaranżowane sytuacje.

Co jednak najważniejsze, Mockus stwierdza: „Kiedy nie widzę wyjścia z sytuacji, robię to, co zrobiłby na moim miejscu artysta”. Strategie artystyczne oznaczają dla niego zdolność do dekontekstualizacji sytuacji z życia codziennego, wrzucenia ich w inne ramy, ponownego ich ujęcia. Jednocześnie sztuka wiąże się z poczuciem wewnętrznej wolności, umiejętnością zdystansowanego postrzegania skomplikowanej natury spraw, tym samym umożliwia ich zmianę. Swoją strategię nazwał subsztuką: skromną, bezpretensjo­nalną sztuką, która zapożycza ze sztuki wysokiej wszystko, co może być użyteczne i zaaplikowane w bezpośrednim politycznym działaniu.

Środki, których używał jako prezydent miasta, przyniosły mu międzynarodowy poklask. Zorganizował wymianę broni na zabawki (licząc, że dzieci wpłyną w ten sposób na swoich rodziców). Biegał po mieście w stroju „superobywatela”, śmiejąc się ze swoich rzekomych mocy i ilustrując swoje przekonanie o tym, że w demokratycznym społeczeństwie wszyscy mają kompetencje do rządzenia i że rządzący powinni dzielić się władzą. W swojej kamizelce kuloodpornej wyciął dziurę w kształcie serca, ażeby zademonstrować swój sprzeciw wobec przemocy i ryzykował tym samym własne życie. W najbiedniejszych częściach miasta zakładał biblioteki, z których można było wypożyczyć książkę nawet bez okazywania dowodu tożsamości. Organizował performans przy otwartych grobach, podczas którego mówił o przemocy i fali morderstw. Wyrzucił z pracy skorumpowanych funkcjonariuszy drogówki i zastąpił ich 400 mimami, założywszy, że w przypadku Kolumbijczyków śmiech będzie skuteczniejszy niż mandat. I… osiągnął sukces. W ciągu trzech lat zużycie wody spadło o 40 procent, liczba wypadków drogowych – o 50 procent, liczba morderstw – o 70. Sześćdziesiąt trzy tysiące obywateli Bogoty z własnej woli zgodziło się płacić wyższe podatki.

Mimowie, wycinane serca, performans przy otwartych grobach – wszystko to mogłoby zostać uznane za kiepską sztukę, gdyby oceniać te działania na podstawie kryteriów estetycznych. Ale jak często jakakolwiek sztuka wywiera tak duży wpływ na rzeczywistość?

Sztuka i polityka wchodzą ze sobą w intensywne związki, łatwo przechodzą od wzajemnej miłości do nienawiści. Artyści zajmują pozycję – a często po prostu znajdują się – gdzieś pomiędzy uległym poddaństwem wobec dysponentów władzy i krytycznym dystansem, pomiędzy konstruktywną współpracą i otwartym antagonizmem. Nie można opuścić imperium, nawet jeśli jest się artystą, choć niektórzy tak bardzo się o to starają. Nawet emigracja wewnętrzna funkcjonuje jedynie w relacji do świata zewnętrznego.

I strongly disagree with the view that the time for leftist populism is over and that now it is time to return to traditional left politics, meaning: class politics. When you look at Podemos in Spain for example: people are complaining that the movement did not achieve what was hoped for. But expectations were just too high, the hope that everything would change immediately. That is a wrong understanding of left populism. Left populism is not to be envisaged in terms of what Antonio Gramsci called a “war of manoeuvre”, a fast insurrection, but instead in terms of a “war of position”, a complex struggle that needs time. We should not imagine a movement that emerges and then straight comes to power. It is a process, a hegemonic struggle. What is at stake is the construction of a new hegemony. The argument that the momentum for left populism has passed is therefore based on a wrong understanding of this strategy. It is always going to be a process, a war of position in which there will be moments of advance and moments of retreats.
We see that clearly in Latin America. After the ‘pink tide’ there was quite a setback – but now we see the return of national populist movements to power in several countries. For Europe, we will see… Obviously Corbyn did not win the election, but the struggle continues. Let’s see what happens in France with Jean-Luc Mélenchon – I am not very optimistic that he will win next year, but it is not completely impossible. And even if he doesn’t win – that does not mean that left populism is finished. I am convinced this is the only strategy for the left to win, the only type of politics that corresponds with the current situation. I don’t see any other way. Certainly not returning to traditional politics. And the pandemic shows this even more clearly.

How do you define left populism?

It is a political strategy in which we can basically distinguish three main features: First of all, it requires defining an adversary, drawing a political frontier – a frontier between those ‘from below’ and ‘those from above’. You might argue that this is what traditional Marxists always have been saying. And yes, with this point I agree. But for a traditional Marxist this frontier is between the working class and the capitalist class. In the times we are living in, we can’t just limit the project of the left to the interests of the workers. Their interests are important and socialist parties have for too long abandoned the working class. But in our societies, there are also many other important issues like ecology, feminism, anti-racism and LGBT+ demands.
So that is the second feature: a leftist populist strategy aims at the construction of a ‘people’, a transversal collective will in which many different democratic demands, coming from a variety of sectors are taken into account. The demands of the working class have to be articulated with the demands of other social movements. So you need to construct a ‘people’ that is an articulation of what Ernesto Laclau and I in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy called “a chain of equivalence” between several democratic demands. This is a clear difference to the traditional Marxist strategy.
The third important feature is that in the construction of this collective will it is vital to take account of the affective dimension, the part of common affects that I call ‘passions’. This collective will is not going to be created solely on the basis of arguments and a good program. We need to acknowledge the crucial role played by passions – I cannot repeat that often enough. The left is much too rationalistic

The question is now what to do with this function in a moment of conflict. Should we – as curators – use it to emphasize struggles, to silence them, or for something else? And if we are placed at the intersection of reproducing power on the one hand and reclaiming radical change on the other, on which side are we on?

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is proud to announce the new line-up of its new global series, SEGAL TALKS. Since the beginning of March the series featured close to 100 talks with 150 artists from 50 countries. New York, US, and international theatre artists, curators, researchers, and academics will talk daily during the week for one hour with Segal Center’s director, Frank Hentschker, about life and art in the Time of Corona and speak about challenges, sorrows, and hopes for the new Weltzustand — the State of the World.

This program is presented in collaboration with HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College.

At least, when we create concepts, we are doing something.

Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for 100 concepts on the subject of war, formed and presented at four two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin, each featuring twenty-five contributions of scientists, artists, theorists and practitioners. As lectures, performances, films, slide shows, readings, concerts in strict alphabetical order as a marathon discourse. From ABC weapons to civilian population, from parachute invasion to facts on the ground, from potato to collateral damage, from infowar to radar surveillance, from homesickness to resistance.
The aim was to (re)create key concepts that already play a significant role in current discussions of war, had so far been neglected, or had yet to be created. Dictionary of War served to scrutinise a reality that characteristically obfuscates existing power relations the more people talk about war and peace.

War as an armed confrontation between sovereign (nation) states seemed to be a thing of the past. Today it is rather: new war, post-modern war, global war, immanent war… War becomes a “constitutive form of a new order” (Alliez/Negri) that no longer knows inside or outside, that not only destroys, but also produces life. In this new world order, there is no difference between war and non-war: war is perpetual and everywhere.

Dictionary of War set out to intervene in this war and, at the same time, to appeal for desertion from a war of words in which facts are created and asserted with such a tremendous deployment of communication and propaganda that they can no longer be challenged. The concept formation of Dictionary of War, in contrast, remained transparent and took the form of open process in which people can and should intervene.

When in 1989 the Berlin wall and one Communist regime after the other fell, it came as a surprise to almost everyone. As a result many things were done hastily, the change often was just a sell-out. Today we witness the results: Ruined social systems, broken biographies and the rise of right-wing populism.

In Cuba the road to change turns out to be driven in slow motion. Since 1989 it is clear change will come. But it still didn’t yet. How to use the time till the inevitable will happen? How to prepare? What is plan A, plan B or even plan C? What does one want to keep, what to change? Who wants to play a role?

¿Cómo estar preparado para lo (im)predecible? was a half day marathon with performances, readings, lectures, surveys, talks, and a party resulting from a workshop given by Joanna Warsza and Florian Malzacher on invitation of Tania Bruguera at INSTAR – Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, her newly found institute for artistic activism in Havana. In its rigid, fast rhythm the marthon produced a feeling of urgency that contrasts the seemingly lethargic political atmosphere in Cuba. The fragmented, sometimes improvised character of the presented works by young Cuban artists enabled the audience to interfere, react, discuss, go along – and created an atmosphere of open, engaged, brave and generous exchange. Tania Bruguera says that INSTAR exist when there is a feeling of freedom. That night her private house became a public space.

With Luis  Manuel Otero Alcántara, Boris González Arenas, Yuri Obregón Batard, Fernando Bon, Tania Bruguera, Julio Lópiz Casal, Yaser Castellanos, Yimi Conklase, Miguel Coyula, Abel González Fernández, José Ernesto Alonso Fernández, Iris Ruiz Hernandez, Hamlet Lavastida, Adonis Milán, Yanelis Nuñez, Amaury Pacheco, Nonardo Perea Lia Villares

It matters that as bodies […] we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its voice. […] We sit and stand and move as the popular will, the one that electoral politics has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, time and again, persisting, imagining the phrase, ‘we the people’. Judith Butler, Occupy Wall Street, 2011

Soon it was no longer stage versus auditorium, but one big assembly hall, one big battlefield, one big demonstration. Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre (1929)

The last ten to fifteen years have been marked by countless social and political movements around the world. Whether in Tunis, Cairo, Madrid or Lisbon, in Athens, New York, London or Istanbul, in post-Fukushima Tokyo, amidst Niemeyer’s iconic parliamentary architecture in Brasilia, under the umbrellas of Hong Kong or on the streets of Minneapolis: what characterises the majority of these movements and distinguishes them from many of their predecessors is their search for alternative forms of coming together, of arguing and deciding, of negotiating community and society. The potential of these assemblies lies not merely in their demands. They change reality not only by designing radical models of democracy but simply by living them.

At the same time, a new interest in models of assembly and the public sphere has awakened in the arts, in concepts in which society is not only mirrored, but constantly tried out, performed, tested, rethought or even reinvented. Court hearings on artistic freedom, religion or censorship; summit meetings at which climate targets or cultural policy are negotiated; parliaments in which the otherwise voiceless raise their voices: staging forms of gathering that tread the fine line between art and reality, theatre in particular has become a democratic arena of radical imagination.

Since 2021, the ongoing nomadic lecture series and internet platform “The Art of Assembly” has brought together more than 80 protagonists from various fields of art, activism and theory on stages in cities like Vienna, Berlin, New York, Oslo, Helsinki or Bucharest to speculate on the potential and limits of human assemblies at a time when there seem to be no certainties.

All dates, lectures, videos, podcasts etc. at:
art-of-assembly.net

Co-produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Goethe Institut / Performing Architecture, Neumarkt Theater Zurich, Ruhrtriennale

2017-2019. Supported by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Goethe Institut Torino & Mondriaan Fund.

trainingforthefuture.org

Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for the production of terms. The project’s website documents 100 terms on the topic of war that were formed, presented and published by scholars, artists, theorists and activists in four public events, each lasting two days, in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin over the past twelve months. The contributions in the present volume form an independent supplement and expansion of these already elaborated 100 terms.

With contributions by The Erroists, Jonathan Allen, Eric Alliez, Franco Beradi Bifo, Ulrich Bröckling, Jordan Crandall, Dietmar Dath, Katja Diefenbach, Felix Ensslin, Avery Gordon, Stefan Heidenreich, Darius James, Lawrence Liang, Sylvère Lotringer, Raqs Media, Ariane Müller, Antonio Negri, Jan Ritsema, Irit Rogoff, Martha Rosler, Saskia Sassen, Florian Schneider, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Nicolas Siepen, Ingrid Strobl, Ines Weizman, Eyal Weizman, Meir Wigoder, Raul Zelik

Project Webseite
Dictionary of War

Not Just a Mirror maps a movement of artists from all over the world searching for the political theatre of today. A theatre that wants to engage with society both in its contents as in its form, creating a contemporary community in which social and political actions can be deployed and in which societies in their — actual or possible — varieties are played out, performed, expanded, tested, or even invented.

Not Just a Mirror is comprised of eight essays, two interviews, and 15 case studies of political theatre makers, and investigates the performing arts as a political laboratory of the present. It explores how theatre, dance, and performance reveal their essential agnosticism, provoking the potential to actively change society rather than merely serving as a cover-up for the dysfunctions, fractures, and wounds of society.

With contributions by Julian Boal, Boris Buden, Matan Cohen, Annie Dorsen, Galit Eilat, Monika Gintersdorfer, John Jordan, Alexander Karschnia, Hervé Kimenyi, Beatrix Kricsfalusi, Bojana Kunst, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Judith Malina, Florian Malzacher, Tala Jamal Manassah, Oliver Marchart, Carol Martin, Lloyd Nyikadzino, Giulia Palladini, Roman Pawłowski, Jeroen Peeters, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Christian Römer, Sylvia Sasse, Francesco Scasciamacchia, Michael Sengazi, Vassilis Tsianos, Margarita Tsomou, Benjamin Wihstutz and Franck Edmond Yao.

Not Just a Mirror offers a multitude of perspectives on the complex relationship between theatre and politics… Juxtaposing thought-provoking contributions from practitioners, critics, and researchers from diverse fields, thereby providing a remarkably rich variety of concerns and contexts for this investigation with an explicitly international outlook, the book… offers a kaleidoscopic overview of current strands in political theatre… By offering fresh and provocative perspectives on contemporary performance, politics, and culture, [the book] will certainly stimulate critical discourse in the field of twenty-first-century theatre and performance. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

Perceived well before the Occupy movement began and happening almost shortly after its first anniversary, the TIC Marathon Camp brought together more than 200 artists, activists, and theorists, in the city of Graz, Austria. They were joined by 100 students and young professionals, as well as by a local and international audience, to meet on the small but common territory of art and activism: a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week marathon camp with 170 hours of lectures, performances, productions, discussions to pool useful strategies and tactics in art and politics. The Marathon machine ran nonstop—often too fast, sometimes too slow—all day every day and all night every night. It produced thought, arguments, knowledge, but it also created frustration and exhaustion.

Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics takes the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and looks for direct action and concrete knowledge: for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that not only acts for the sake of acting but searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.

This handbook emphasizes the “usefulness” of the different artistic approaches collected. It is a toolbox and a manual with contributions by key protagonists in this field. One hundred texts describe very different strategies and tactics, written by their inventors and/or practitioners from all over the world, mapping the broad field of engaged art and artistic activism today. Additional essays focus on the philosophy, structures, and modalities behind the many battles to make this world a better place.

Original contributions by Adbusters, Jonathan Allen, Udi Aloni, Hector Aristizábal, Artleaks, Andy Bichlbaum / The Yes Men, Reverend Billy, Leah Borromeo, Andrew Boyd, Tania Bruguera, Center for Political Beauty, Church of Kopimism, Santiago Cirugeda, Minerva Cuevas, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Stephen Duncombe, etcetera, Charles Esche, Femen, Forensic Architecture, Ganzeer, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Marina Gržinić, Núria Güell, Erdem Gündüz, Hans Haacke, Stefano Harney, Carl Hegemann, Khaled Hourani, Iconoclasistas, The Institute for Human Activities, International Institute of Political Murder, Janez Janša, Khaled Jarrar, Jeudi Noir, Anna Jermolaeva, John Jordan, Janice Kerbel, Omer Krieger, the laboratory of insurrectionary imagination, André Lepecki, Lexxus Légal, Lawrence Liang, Geert Lovink, Matteo Lucchetti, Florian Malzacher, Oliver Marchart, Leónidas Martín, Tomislav Medak, Thomas Meinecke, Antanas Mockus, monochrom, Mosireen, Chantal Mouffe, Jean-Luc Moulène, Rabih Mroué, Marina Naprushkina, Neue Slowenische Kunst, Ahmet Öğüt / The Silent University, Dan Perjovschi, Sibylle Peters, The Pinky Show, Srđa Popović / CANVAS, Public Movement, Pussy Riot, Raivo Puusemp, raumlaborberlin, Gerald Raunig, Richard Reynolds, Irit Rogoff, Florian Schneider, Gregory Sholette, Stevphen Shukaitis, Jonas Staal, Mladen Stilinović, Kuba Szreder, Claire Tancons, Teatro Valle, Nato Thompson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ultra-red, the vacuum cleaner, Dmitry Vilensky / Chto Delat?, Joanna Warsza, WHW, WochenKlausur, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jacob Wren, Stephen Wright, Wu Yuren, Slavoj Žižek, and many more

The dialectic between crystal-clear analytical thinking and concrete demands for action is what makes this volume so highly inspiring. Christine Wahl, Theater Heute

An important reference book and reader on the subject of engaged art. Wiener Zeitung

Anyone interested in the theory and practice of engaged art should buy this book! Kunstbulletin

A veritable treasure chest between orange-coloured book covers, carefully edited and beautifully designed. For the first time, it brings together working methods of very different artists from many parts of the world and thus represents a valuable collection of their projects and practices. nachtkitik.de

The 2022 edition focussed on chronopolitics: the politics of time in a moment we are out of time. Artists, philosophers, activists as well as non-human presences led trainings on time travel, deep listening, radical slowness, the subconscious present and plant based time to reclaim the means of production of our future.

The architecture of the training camp shaped the content and practical engagement: fossil ammonites from a family of polyps and octopuses that was wiped out in the 5th mass extinction 66 million years ago next to used tyres – symbol of the Turin car industry and the Italian economic boom, but also simply hardened petroleum, fossil heritage whose burning accelerates the destruction of our shared futures.

trainingforthefuture.org

Artist: Jonas Staal / Curator & co-progammer: Florian Malzacher / Coordinator Studio Jonas Staal: Nadine Gouders / Architect: Paul Kuipers / Visual Identity: Remco van Bladel / Photo and video documentation: Ruben Hamelink / Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: Curators: Irene Calderoni and Bernardo Follini / Assistant Curator: Rosita Ronzini / Curatorial Assistant: Carlotta Bandieramonte / Technical production manager: Giuseppe Tassone / Technical Production: Chiara Casassa, Fabio Di Camillo and Kimitake Sato / Logistics: Carla Mantovani / Educational Department: Elena Stradiotto and Francesca Togni / Accessibility: Annamaria Cilento / Accessibility Consultant: Diana Anselmo

Commissioned by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. Supported by Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam; Goethe-Institut Turin. Special support by Direzione Rifiuti, Bonifiche e Sicurezza Siti Produttivi della Città Metropolitana di Torino; Amiat Gruppo Iren; Turin Carta.

Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. David Graeber, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant (2013)

The increasingly large gap between rich and poor, the accelerated climate change and most recently the state of emergency of the Corona crisis leave no doubt about the need for profound social and economic changes.

On the discourse platform Work in the Crisis, artists, theorists and activists with different focal points are looking for answers to fundamental questions – with a special focus on what can be learned from artistic processes about the nature of production and work today:

How secure and sustainable are global financial, economic and social systems based on value creation? How do material and immaterial production relate to each other? How do digitality and artificial intelligence change work and production? How must work change in the face of climate catastrophe? What new connections between local, regional and planetary thinking must now be found? How can new forms of collaboration and collectivity, how can social production be thought as a whole?

A Project by the LVR-Industriemuseums Kraftwerk Ermen & Engels (Engelskirchen) And the NRW KULTURsekretariats (Wuppertal) on Occasion of the200.birthday of Friedrich Engels. Supported by Regionale Kulturförderung des Landschaftsverbandes Rheinland.

The supervision of machinery, the joining of broken threads, is no activity which claims the operative’s thinking powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. Friedrich Engels, The Situation of the Working Class in England (1845)

What comes after work, at least after the kind of work that prevents the “mind from being occupied with other things”? On the occasion of Friedrich Engels‘ 200th birthday ten artistic positions in Engelskirchen examined the intellectual and political legacy of the influential political thinker and activist: What does work mean today, in a time of serious crises and changes? How much is our life interwoven with work – hasn’t it even become a form of work itself? Who stands in the light, who remains invisible? How many of our occupations are activities that no one really needs, but which are often far better paid than those that are actually “system-relevant”? So what is it today anyway: the “working class” – in an era of global markets and networks, digital monopolies and new class struggles?

The history of the municipality of Engelskirchen is closely linked to that of each of the Engels family: in 1844, the Ermen & Engels cotton spinning mill began production, a factory based on the efficient English model. Apart from favourable transport routes and the Agger river, which supplied both energy and water for dyeing the yarns, there was another good reason for the choice of location: sufficient women and children as cheap labour. So while Engelskirchen was preparing to become one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels Jr. wrote his seminal book on The Condition of the Working Class in England, which can be read in passages as a description of what was then just beginning in this region.

With contributions by Florian Malzacher, María do Mar Castro Varela, Chantal Mouffe, Ahmet Öğüt, Rubia Salgado, Pelin Tan, and the Silent Universities in Amman, Athens, Hamburg, London, Mülheim/Ruhr, and Stockholm.

In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world’s ills, but instead acts to change them.

Elegantly written.The New Yorker

There is much to learn from Malzacher’s approach to political theatre. Peter Eckersall, PAJ – Performing Arts Journal

A knowledgeable foray through the landscape of political theatre. Shirin Sojitrawalla, taz

A very good overview of current postdramatic events, bringing together a great deal of empirical material. Simon Strauß, FAZ

An important book, one that every theatre scholar should read and make use of in their seminars. Twenty years after Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre, it is almost just as indispensable as a reference point for current approaches. Peter M. Boenisch, Aarhus Universitet

A stimulating book that brings you up to date with the latest discursive thinking without overwhelming you with theory. An ideal side effect. Karin Cerny, profil

Florian Malzacher revitalises the concept of ‘political theatre’ at exactly the right moment. An exciting read! Matthias Lilienthal

Rarely have the pitfalls of representation as the cornerstone of theatre been explained so elegantly. Berliner Zeitung

A clever analysis, enjoyable and accessible even for the theory-shy. A briefing on the state of the discourse and a declaration of love for theatre. Suzanne Zahnd, WOZ

Together with Armen Avanessian, the author discusses central theses in his book and presents examples from the performing, visual and activist arts (from Christoph Schlingensief through Anta Helena Recke, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Rimini Protokoll, Lotte van den Berg, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Pussy Riot, Jonas Staal, Public Movement to Milo Rau and many more) as examples for a theatre that insists – in a way that is simultaneously playful and serious – on its own, specific capabilities between the poles of representation and participation.

This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews, and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

With contributions by etcétera; House of Tupamaras; Savitri D and Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir; UGATLahi Art Collective and Concerned Artists of the Philippines; Zayaan Khan; Rojava Film Commune; Lorenzo Marsili and Studio Rizoma; S.a.L.E. Docks and Extragarbo; Army of Love; IG Hallenleben; Antonio Scarponi; Public Movement; Institute of Human Obsolescence; New Centre for Research and Practice; Maya Felixbrodt, Germaine Sijstermans and Samuel Vriezen; Irational; Center for Jineology Studies; Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland and glokal e.V.; Women on Waves; Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and Sjef van Gaalen; Not An Alternative; School of Transnational Activism / European Alternatives; ARRiVATi & Schwabinggrad Ballett; and Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.