Hi everybody, thank you very much for joining us today. This is actually a talk that I am very excited about. It's on the topic of new nationalism and the rise of complex and not-so-pretty politics throughout the entire world. We have here some amazing people to make the conversation. actually a little bit uncomfortable, that would be the idea. We have Ryshtenka Vadovinek, who is the moderator and is a curator based in Ljubljana, director of Moderna Galleria. Zeynep Oz, who is a curator based in Istanbul.
Nikolaus Schofhausen, formerly based in Vienna, now the director of the Fogo Island project. Whatever I say wrong, please correct me. And Kojo Eshun and Angelika Segar from Author Lead Group. Amazing, amazing artists. So, Stenka is the moderator, and I very much look forward to what you have to say, all of you today. Thank you. Hello, good afternoon. It's my pleasure to start the conversation about the nationalism, new nationalism. I'm here together with, if I go from my left to right, with Angelica Sagar and Kojo Eshun from Autolit Group,
Nikolas Schauhausen, at the moment Strategic Director of Fogo Island Arts of Shorfas from Canada, and Zeynep Öz, founder of Bachar in Istanbul, and also curator of the actual Turkish Pavilion in Venice Biennale at the moment. So the purpose of our conversation is to reflect on the new old nationalism and of course populism, even new neo-fascism that we witness today not only in Europe but all around the world.
Of course nationalism is nothing new, but what is new are the circumstances. The circumstances that shape whatever we call nationalism or neo-nationalism. So the circumstances in Europe and in other places of the world are rapidly changing. And, of course, we know that the key cause of the changes is global capitalism. But there are, of course, also other things that somehow are, again, the results of this global neoliberalism.
In the first place, this is the migrant crisis. And we can go also further in the recent history. We can go to the September 11th that caused many problems to the people that have been defined as terrorists after it. So the people that are mostly of the Muslim religions. So the vocabulary in contemporary politics changed a lot. So the ideology of neoliberal politics, the key word until recently was open borders.
So today we hear a lot about the protectionism, about sovereignism, and about safety. So these are, again, the new old words that somehow defined what the frame that we can discuss nationalism in. So the nationalism, of course, today has different faces. We know the nationalism in Europe. I am coming from Eastern Europe, from Slovenia. so in the former Yugoslavia, there are many changes.
So if you go, for example, to Skopje, which is the most astonishing place at the moment in the Balkans, you will see many new nationalist monuments. So Skopje became a new brand in terms of attracting the tourists with those monuments, and also they covered modernist architecture, modernist building facades, the buildings that were built in times of socialism with classicistic facades. So in Europe, of course, Brexit is another issue. that is again something else that here in continental Europe we talk about in terms of nationalism.
In UK, the discussion of nationalism relates very much also to the people of colour. So the discourse is different there. And if we go, for example, to Asia, again, I was recently reading about new gulag in China, where one million Uyghurs and other Muslims are now undergoing the re-education programs. So the word nationalism in Europe and elsewhere is very often today accompanied with the word
fascism and we are discussing a lot whether this word is too heavy to define what is going on today. But also those who would not agree to use such a heavy word would certainly agree that on other issues that are related to fascism and this is nationalism, populism and xenophobia. So of course the debate, our debate will tackle more the question of art institution and art. So how all this new situation made impact on our work and what can we do, what can be done.
So we start, I propose we start our conversation again the way I introduced you or should we go opposite from you? Okay, with the artist. So this is Democratic Panel. We will have a conversation, but if there are urgencies from your side, please just ask, just interrupt us. So it's very open debate. So I would like to start then with Angelique, but I would first introduce very shortly the Autolid group. The Autolid group was founded in 2002 and consists of the artists and theorists of Angelica Sagar and Kojo Eshun, who live and work in London.
Their ongoing research-based collaboration draws from a wide range of resources and materials that support intergenerational dialogue with other artists and thinkers. The group also function as curators on the platform titled the Autolid Collective. This visual art duo work with moving images, installations with archival film, video photography, performance curation and publication. Their work is developed according to a shifting series of long-term research-based projects exploring the legacies and potentialities of proposals broadly informed by architecture, the Bandung Conference, the experimental theorem, trinket continentalism, cybernetics, science fiction, and kapila tozen.
The term autolid, maybe I'll leave this to you later, if somebody is interested to go deeper in the explanation of your work. So I would just start with a question to you both. So you recently opened a large-scale exhibition, the Autolid Group, Xenogenesis in Van Abe Museum. in Eidhoven, where you took the point of the departure, Octavia Butler's text, Xeno Genesis. So Xeno means strange or alien, and Genesis is becoming.
And your work in these terms relates to science fiction, inhuman, and migration. So my question would be why Butler's writing is so important for you. Why it's so relevant today? Well, Octavia Butler is an extraordinary figure for us for many reasons. Firstly, I'd suggest to everybody here, if you haven't read any Octavia Butler and you have read Ursula Le Guin or other white science fiction writers, I would urge you to read Octavia Butler because she brings a whole other energy and politics into science fiction
and that is of the inhuman or that which is considered inhuman. And she looks at apocalypse deeply and actually predicts it. She predicts kind of what is happening now. She predicted it in the 70s and the 80s. The term xenogenesis means to kind of estrange yourself and grow, I suppose, at the same time. Become alien, become estranged. And I think the question of the present in relation to this is a very, I mean, you know, one can talk about it for a long time, but, you know, when we talk about fascism,
we are not just talking about fascism in the way that we understood it before, are we, really? We're talking about it in a very, it's appearing in a very different way now. It's actually kind of like open, it's being organized and run by people who are openly stupid and are openly mobsters. It's kind of like the return of the East India Company but without any of the charm, but openly. And, you know, there is a sense that this world as it is, is ending. You know, if it's a white, patriarchal, hegemonic power that has run everything till now, which it has,
it's got to end. You know, if you leave imperialists and people who've been imperialists alone without having to deal with people of colour or women of colour or disabled people or, you know, people who are queering or people who are just struggling to base a society on difference, if you are if imperialists do not understand that those other people have rights then they will just do it again you know, which is what is happening and I think when it comes to the UK and a city like London one can say that London
is a city which has had a long history of multi-ethnic rebellion. One could say this is the left in a way, you know. Multi-ethnic rebellion has been in place since shipbuilding started due to the, you know, Enclosure Acts and all of that. So I think when we think about xenogenesis, we think about the potential that comes from thinking beyond this world and thinking of this world as an end. Thinking of the... That doesn't mean to abandon the institutions,
but it certainly means to decolonize them. So I think... Poetics is perhaps the last space of practice. All the genres have been captured. all of the I don't know it feels like everything has been kind of captured so perhaps poetics or as Denise Ferreira de Silva writes about in her text Towards the End of the World a black feminist poetics perhaps it's a poetics that we think about as a way to apprehend the idea of the essayistic in our work in our films you know I think the
the question of new nationalisms and their relation to art institutions you know that immediately compels us to to think through the notion that you know Europe has never not been nationalist so instead of or as well as pointing to the novelty of nationalism I think the continuities of nationalism are important and for me how nationalism's bear on the art institution the institution of the art fair is through the structured
subordination of the art world that's to say the segregation that structures our world. So in Europe, at the moment, you have this phenomenon of the rediscovery of artists of colour. So in Britain, the so-called rediscovery. So in Britain, you have great artists from the 1980s, such as Claudette Johnson, Claudette Joseph, rather. You have artists such as Frank Bowling at Tate Britain. you have these artists who've been working for 20 50 60 years who've all have who who have their moment 30 40 years later what this suggests is a is a is a is an unequal integration and a
hierarchical structure which is continuous with the cold war i've been researching a lot on the notion of Cold War containment, the Truman Doctrine, the 1950s. But when I look at the art world, I'm not sure we were never not in a Cold War because the logics of containment, the logics of subordination, are part of what explains the excitement around artists of colour now. Why were these artists exclusively included? you know why were they excluded in order to be partially included in art history in art surveys in so-called group shows in historical shows why is art history why is art theory why is art
practice why is curating taught at the level of unequally integrated hierarchical structured subordination of certain artists from other artists. So my initial notion is to stress the continuity of nationalism and the particular role that plays within art institutions. Of course coming from Britain, Britain has its own idioms of neo-nationalism. We don't have Trump, we have of Reese Mogg. In Britain, neo-nationalism wears plus fours and it speaks in an Etonian accent. That's the particular malaise of Britain,
which has formed us. And so the question of xenogenesis has to be put in that context, a context of the particular inflections that Britain brings to what is clearly a global crisis. I would characterize this global crisis in the words of the neo-reactionary thinker Nick Land, who doesn't use terms such as fascism or populism, but speaks in terms of drastically advanced regression. Drastically advanced regression. This is useful because it's a certain kind of diagram, a certain kind of political diagram, that lets us map a conjuncture in a very general way.
But we can see examples of drastically advanced regression all the time. We can see the combinations of belligerent regressive forces multiplied by computational algorithmic power at a massively multiplied scale. that combination of the regressive plus the digitally advanced that's i would say that i would say is what is unique to our time plus of course the the the the 11-year timeline that we are living in the timeline given to us by the ipcc who you know we we have to reduce we, whoever we are, are supposed to reduce the global temperature below 1.5.
Otherwise, as we know, the coastal regions of the planet, the island nations of the planet, and specifically the majority of people in the African continent will suffer the consequences of the 60 or 70 corporations whose names we now know. who are based in Switzerland, in the US, in the UK, and whose names are very clear. And these people are set to destroy the planet and specifically the specific numbers of African peoples who have done the least to cause the catastrophe that we are in. So we live in a world, I would say, where the challenge for us as artists is to think on an interscalar level.
We look a lot at the work of the historian of science, Gabrielle Hecht. And in her analysis of the African Anthropocene, how the Anthropocene looks from the perspective of the African continent, she talks a lot about interscalar vehicles as a way of narrating these kinds of scales that we have to confront so xenogenesis for us is a way of opening up this dimension of a vehicle narrative vehicles, image vehicles sonic vehicles which can travel across the scales of the drastically advanced regression that we are now facing. Thank you.
I think you opened a very important question of repetition, that these things like fascism and nationalism are actually part of us. So it's something probably that we need to discuss as well. So we need to probably come, maybe not here, but include in our discussion also the aspect of psychoanalysis. So I would now give the word to Nikolas Schauhausen. Of course, I would present you first. First, I thought about Zeynep, but now as I thought, as I mentioned psychoanalysis, I said,
of the Vienna, you know, the city which is strongly related to you, the city of Freud, although we are not talking about him here, but still maybe this association to have in our somewhere, it's also okay. So, Nikola Schauhausen is a curator, director, author, and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art. Since 2011, he has been the strategic director of Fogo Island Arts, an initiative of the Canadian Surefast Foundation to find alternative solutions for the revitalization of the area that is prone to emigrations.
Since 2019 Schaufhausen has been the artistic director of the exhibition an educational project Tell Me About Yesterday Tomorrow and the Munich Documentation Center of the History of National Socialism which brings contemporary artistic positions and current approaches to an exchange with institutional remembrance work. Schauhausen has extensive experience leading renowned institutions such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Kunstlerhaus, Stuttgart and Witte-David Center in Rotterdam. Schauhausen was the founding director of European Kunsthalle, conceived as a project to examine the conditions and structures of contemporary art institutions independent of local government mandates.
co-curator of the Six Moscow Biennale in 2015. Schauhausen is also a visiting lecturer at HISK, Higher Institution of High Arts in Ghent. He has curated a number of international festivals and exhibitions. And to make it shorter, in 2017 and 2009, he was the curator of German Pavilion for the 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennial, and for the 56th Venice Biennial in 2015, he curated the Kosovo Pavilion. From October 2012 to the end of March 2019,
19, Nikolaus Schauhausen was the director of the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. And this is already, this last position relates also to my first question. And now I will read the last part of his CV as he sent it to me. And this would be also a little provocation, Nicholas, for you to try to explain this, what is written here, a little bit more in detail. So it goes like that. In May 2018, he announced that he would step down his post on 31st March 2019 for political reasons.
as he saw the effectiveness of cultural institutions such as the Kunsthalle Vienna being questioned for the future in view of the current nationalist policy in Austria and the European situation. In times of right-wing populist movements, it would require a much stronger support on the part of national cultural policy. So what does it mean, Nikolaev? Well, this is a quote, what you were reading, and I re-quoted it again. I gave to a magazine, an art magazine, last year after my decision to leave,
or when I announced my departure of this institution. Indirectly, they have answered it. It's always strange to listen to a CV like this, but what it says, to make a long story short, my experience of the last 25 years were directing several institutions across Europe and partly in Canada. and after such a long record of being director of institutions, I realized that, and you know it too, I think we all know it, running institutions, institutions require reform. Every day practice.
and in a way I personally came to a dead end. I couldn't play anymore the opposition towards the audience, towards the media, towards the artists, towards people who are visiting us. I'm not so sure anymore for what we are for. So, of course, I'm talking from the institutional field, from the public institutional field. I left that position for, at the end of the day, it was a personal decision, of course. But when you look, I'm not Austrian.
I think I have to make that clear. And even as a German in Austria, I suffered from xenophobia. and know that for a white person so speaking the language how does that fit together but if you look a little bit I don't want to blame the Austrian citizenry but if you look into Austria as a very wealthy well-functioning former Western European country, I think you can learn a lot. So those institutions, all the public institutions, museums, universities, and et cetera, are operating inside a comfort zone,
which we're all aware of, but to whom, and I'm not talking about visitor numbers, to whom do we reach out and what for? And there I see the limits. I don't think that we can reform those institutions from the inside. I really think that we have to look for new models, not to attack those institutions, but for new models, getting a political backup for those institutions and make them more visible. And that means politics come into the game. So politics are really not interested in those institutions, especially not in a country like Austria or Germany or Switzerland.
We are operating in, again, for the so-called elite, in which we are definitely operating in. And this elite is important for us operating in the system itself itself, and making our, earning our money, making our life. And we are almost a very rich festival for the right wings, we consider them as right wings, all right wing parties, to be the enemy. So I think we need to be aware of this, that we are part of the enemy. And we are not really doing the right political thing
to reach out to others. I'm not to, that's, that's this, no. I think that's the dilemma and the conflict in which we are operating. And not only we as curators and directors of institutions, also artists. Because the role of artists, not only from your individual practice, from where you are arguing from. So, but the question I think in the future will be, does this really matter what you do for society? as large. And I left that position from a comfort zone, of course, not because I wanted to put myself in the victim role,
but I realized where this politics, which is definitely the nationalistic politics and policy in Austria, as an example, it's a small country, because of its smallness I think you can research it a little bit better to learn from it and do it better but this is not really happening in the country itself because it's very self-centered with their daily problems now we are already in the question of institutions and the models of cultural production
that obviously need to change. I'm also working in the institution, in the National Museum, and I think there must be something that we need to think, and we need to change the institutions with other agencies from outside institutions, so it's not enough. No, no, I think we have limits to change the institutions. We need to be more political. We need to have more political power. And also individuals, private foundations. We always talk about private foundations, how fantastic, how great they are.
But the problem is most of them are operating on their own behalf. So it means they stay again in their own system instead of trying to change the system, just giving the money away for other purposes. That's, I think, one of the main, the biggest, the whole foundation model has to change. It means the tax system has to change, the control system, the bureaucratic system has to change, and I think you will talk about this from... So we move to Zeynep then. Zeynep Öz with her rich experience as a curator based in Istanbul, currently running the project Bahar.
She's the curator of, as I said before, the Pavilion of Turkey, at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice and the BAKA Award exhibition of Marwa Rashmou at the Bonafent Museum in 2019. She was one of the interlocutors of the Sharjah Biennial 13, curating the Biennial's off-site project in Istanbul in 2017, as well as a co-curator of the Ayshe Triennial 3 in 2016. Urs was the co-founder and director of the Spot Production Fund from 2011 to 2017,
during which she curated Produce Syria 123. She also curated the film program, Greatest Common Factor, at Salt, Istanbul in 2016, the project Plastic Veins at Homeworks 6. Ashkal Alvan, Beirut 2013, and selling snails in the Muslim neighborhood at the Westfali Kuntverein Minster 2013. This has been on the curricular selection committees of home workspace program of Ashkal Alvan in Beirut since 2015. So Zeynep, we are already in the middle of discussion of different models of cultural production,
so we can continue this question with you on the institution work. And you, I think, for me, you are really special here in terms of how much you work with the production of artworks. artworks. You know, I think that we, in our conferences, wherever, we talk a lot about institutions, art in general, but not enough about the production. So this is really unique that we have you here. And so my question would be about your concrete work with art art production. And I would ask you also to relate it to the concrete situation in Turkey,
not only political, but also, you know, the situation dominated by the private sector mostly, which is not our case. Yeah, thank you. To pick up on what Nicolas is saying, Indeed, in Istanbul, it's very much the case that we have a lot of private sport. Patronage and sport comes usually from private hands. In terms of contemporary art, most of the time, public and national sport is very absent. So I think I'm trying to also think about what you said, Nicholas, and like relate it back to that.
But maybe I'll just start from my experience and extrapolate on that, and we can try to bring them together. But yeah, as you said, I usually, at least in terms of the work that I've been doing in Istanbul, where I've been based for about 10 years now, and that work is a lot about commissioning new works and trying to work with artists on the ground. And what I've found, I think what's going on a lot in the last three years, and this is not like, as you said, Produce was a series that I worked on for about seven or eight years, and that was funded by a very specific project called Spot that I co-founded. And then Bajar was actually founded as like funded by Charjard Foundation.
It was the off-site project for the Sharjah Biennial 13. But this would be something that I'm talking about in terms of the commissioning work that I do on the ground, but I'm actually... How I'm going to answer this in a commluded way, I'm coming to it. How I'm going to answer this is I'm thinking about my experience of trying to work with artists on the ground, but I'm also thinking of institutions who are on the ground, such as people like Depo, there are initiatives that are coming up like Poche, a corner in the world. There are initiatives that do a lot of the work that I do. And when I think of funding and the support and the organizational system in Istanbul,
I think there are a lot of institutions that have been ongoing for a while now that are supported by, in turn, by big institutions, be they banks or be they big families, big support, big funders. Then there are initiatives that are ongoing on the ground that are much more smaller, that are more initiative, that are more where the artistic production is going on. And something that I can talk to within the framework of our panel, which is like talking about the recent years and the rising nationalisms and the rising way in which things are Sort of going in terms of cultural policies policies like real policies are going in a certain direction
I think cultural policies are following up because they always do and then of course funding follows like just right tailing on what I've been noticing in the last two or three years is that I think the kind of funding that is for these initiatives that is more about the organic things that are going on on the ground for artists that are younger and that are you know like not as well formulated and that are not expressing things that are you know like just big and huge it's dwindling I think it's this is something that is I mean it's very easy and we always say that funding is always dwindling but I think there's a reason why this is the Vendelaink. And the reason is that I think the kind of work,
and when I say work, it means also like exhibitions, I'm also talking about publications, I'm talking about writing, thinking all of the work that is not as well established, that doesn't have that type of immunity that comes from a well, like big track record, is being, is being, is seen as too risky to be supported because it's not, it might just like crack a political nerve. It might just go on a political fault line and then something might just go off. And this is something that I think a lot of funders find too risky to stand behind. And this is why I think in the last two or three years, especially like I'm talking about the experience of Istanbul and what I've, what I've been seeing
and feeling on the ground, but I think it goes to the region that I know a little bit more about, and then I guess you could think about it bigger. I think what's going on is that these kinds of risks are having less and less of a space to be talked about. The other thing, specifically in Istanbul, that I'm seeing and I'm thinking about is that we have a lot of funds for process-based works right now, like process-based, either educational programs and residencies and all of this. And I always am for, you know, like a big supporter of these. But I think the reason, again, I'm going to tie it back to exactly what I was saying.
I think one of the reasons why this is happening is that it's not production-based. Process-based means like not production, not product focus. There's nothing that's going to come in material form and say, like, stand right here that people are going to be attacked. If you're supporting something that's very much process-based, it's amazing. Don't get me wrong. I totally am behind this. I've been advocating this forever. This is what I do. But at the same time, I think there's a reason why this is the type of infrastructure that's coming to be more and more in Istanbul. because I don't think there is as much space for very clear, full-bodied cultural and political
stance to be shown and then to be attacked because they might be attacked. So I'll maybe stop there and you can... By whom? By whom? I think everyone, I think you and me, all of us, I think there's a little bit of a like less of a room for tension. Like you spark, what do you call it? You spark a fire and it might start, you light a match and it might spark a fire, that kind of a tension going on. But I think just like, it might be something on the newspapers. It might be like a general public situation. And I think that's more of like what's scary. Very interesting. So it means also that there is still,
there are people who still believe in power of art somehow, You know, because, you know, if the art is, you know... Indeed. And I think, by the way, like, when I say these, like, I'm afraid... Like, I just want to put it, like, very well on the ground that I think censorship and self-censorship are, like, very much vitally, like, tangible. And, like, it's almost specifically right now. It's, like, it's something on our minds. It's not, like, on the back of my mind. It's on the front of my mind in a lot of people. So it's not a, like, thing. but I'm just saying I think there are ways of dealing with this. Can I ask a question? The self-censorship, not censorship, self-censorship.
In institutions, in public institutions, I think it's come in practice. We are already over that step. We all know so many curators. We also have to criticize our colleagues and curators. They do it on their own behalf, they don't want to have any conflicts, et cetera. But my question would be to the artists. So, and I don't think that you self-censor yourself, but what is your expectation from public institutions and political expectations? Beyond, you know. Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot.
Yeah. Because I grew up inside it in the middle of London, where Camden Arts Centre was actually a place you could go for extracurricular activity. You could go to Camden Arts Centre and you could learn to draw or you could go and do... It was actually like an adult education space. It wasn't necessarily just a gallery. so that sense of a public institution being almost like a kind of community center has gone you know completely gone so also something i noticed from quite a while ago was that you know suddenly after the kind of you know as kojo was talking about in relation to
artists of color in the UK, you know, remembering Chris, Steve McQueen, this kind of period, thinking, oh, well, the public institutions are interested in artists of color because of course they live in the middle of the belly of the beast and they understand how to think kind of with producing, I think of this as a kind of resistant aesthetics. in that's quite a complicated idea but I would say that that's kind of what I'm thinking about I keep thinking about that and also this space for convivial antagonism which is what you need as a space of argument with people who are different to you right a place where argument
can happen but the sense that this was kind of replaced so for instance there was a not there was a huge amount of pressure put on the Arts Council of England to say, you know, from this generation of Stuart Hall and past Stuart Hall, that art institutes, like art, publicly funded institutions need to have representation of people of colour from the UK on their boards and etc. and they need to be more attentive to their programs. Right? I did one of those programs like 20 years ago where I was literally felt like a gorilla on the front line
inside a racist institution of kind of Englishness, which was very twee and kind of impenetrable. Upper class twee Englishness. A theatre organisation calling itself International. But, you know, anyway. much you know later I started to notice that they were inviting a lot of artists from elsewhere from Africa from India as if they were kind of more authentic than artists right there in the middle of Britain and I realized maybe it's because they want to invite them so they can send them home because actually they don't have you know to deal with them like in London they don't have to deal with like loud mouths like us you know like you know who are going to be critical
of the institution they're going to be like oh welcome you know we're very happy to be here thank you for giving us your entire like floor of a museum or whatever um you know so there is that sense that uh uh always a prophet abroad but um i do expect that the public the public institutions in Britain are now like basically strangled by managerial language um so you know they have to write um you know they you have to write all these you have to your bureaucracy is just strangled it strangles you what are your key performance indicators you know and what is happening is that there is a sense that nobody is talking to people who are different to them nobody's thinking
about class. You know, education is, programs are not even that interesting anymore. You know, these institutions should be far more attentive to thinking around adult education. But all of this was kind of under, you know, a Labour government, or would be under a Labour government. but it is a complete threat to the elites to have people who are from a lower class educated and we grew up feeling like it's great to be an intellectual but we're not going to be snobs yeah after you no no no just go okay I just
so if I can like sort of think about what you're saying and like you're talking about like the I don't know the context of the UK so well, but I'm just, like, sort of going off of what you said. You're talking about, like, the race issues sort of being codified in, like, a certain kind of institutional model. That's what you're referring to. And what I feel like I'm referring to is, like, the invisibility of, like, the small institutions and production in the name of, like, bigger, like, gigantic, like, places. and I hear Nicholas sort of saying, we need new models out of these. I'm just like, actually, it's sort of a prompt to say, do you have a, I mean, this can be anyone,
and maybe, I don't know, the context of Ljubljana. I guess that's too big of a broader question to say what's a new model, but from which to jump into thinking about these models, like yeah no I don't have a specific idea what a new model can be but that's one of the reasons why I stepped out of the existing model to work on this in my working future you know which I still have this is of course I'm not talking about tomorrow but it will be definitely a long process it needs definitely new financial models to support or to new models or institutions as such.
You said you were talking about the bureaucratic structures. Suffications. And this is not just a UK problem. What I said earlier, institutions require reform. reform, we know that, and I think they do it all the time, but we also realize that this is not really working. So that means they need to be attacked from the outside. And now there are, institutions are attacked from the outside, but more from the political agendas, from the right-wing field. So we have to learn from this, and definitely to
take those strategy over. So, we only can change institutions from the outside. So, not only from the inside. Or both, of course. And if you look into who gets appointed at the moment, directors play a very important, a more important role than ever as the public faces of such institutions. And I'm a little bit worried about who gets appointed for such institutions. Most of the people are not speaking out. So, you know. It means, you know, from outside, it means also it not excludes inside. It doesn't exclude our work. So it is very important that we change the institution together with our constituencies. It's more about, you know...
I agree, but we are not enough from the inside. So we need to look for new aliens from the outside. More aliens. And this is money. so only money you know can change I think it's time for the questions from the audience my question is actually for Angelica if you were talking about can you hear me Angelica when you were talking about decoloniality I'm wondering if you situate that within the institution or without or a mixture of both I mean I wanted Kojo to talk about
I wanted Kojo to say something hopefully he was going to say something about movements there are movements going on there are groups, existing groups already doing this unlearning there are younger there are kind of groups of younger people constellations of people who are thinking not just as artists but also in terms of unions, as workers, how they can, you know, be together to rethink their spaces. There's all kinds of new groups emerging outside of the institutions. But when I talk about decolonizing the institution, yes, I think it has to be a mixture of both the outside and the inside
because, as Nicholas said, the pressure is from the right wing. The right wing want to perform multiple enclosure acts so that nobody speaks. So they want to prevent institutions from growing. It is the glass ceiling that is imbricated deep within the structure of the institution. So the glass ceilings are there. There are walls, not just ceilings now. there are walls there are cocoons there are spaces you cannot get in so um that's how i pictured it when you were talking about it so i think uh the the decolonization what is it at the services it has to be a political agenda
because the right wing don't want to deal with um multiple forms of difference they don't want to deal with different humans. They don't want to deal with what has been cast as the inhuman, which is matter. They don't want to think about the rights of other forms of life and other structures. So that is why I was talking about the end of the world. So the sense of how to restructure actually, I think, requires new technology that has to be in the hands of us. So I think about that as a black algorithm. I mean, there's several notions,
several projects underway under the umbrella term of decolonizing. On one hand, you've got the impact of the coloniality of power, theorists, Annabelle Criano, Walter Minolo, you've got the delayed response to their thinking over two decades, which has moved in as the earlier wave of post-colonial theory has somewhat receded. At the same time, you also have the ongoing work on settler-colonial thinking, the critique
of settler colonialism, figures like Glenn Coulthard. So I think you have both of these happening simultaneously, and then both of these are charged by the fatalism and euphoria of climate catastrophe, which creates a certain kind of it charges all these existing debates such that they overflow their academic complexes and start to circulate. So for us, there is a lot of energy
in trying to connect to these debates, which are disputes and arguments over the future of the world. The debates in America around Afro-pessimism, figures such as Christina Sharpe, figures such as Sadia Hartman, older figures such as Hortense Spillers, these black feminist thinkers have a huge impact in Britain. our students our friends are studying these people all the time their theories are they impact on people's thoughts at the same time all of this travels through us through platforms
so a lot of this is coming through platform scholarship that's to say you know as many people are watching, for example, the African-American feminists who gathered around Simone Lee at Guggenheim around her Loophole of Retreat exhibition. So I'm in London, but I'm watching that because Guggenheim recorded that. So a lot of people in London spend their time studying recordings from Vimeo or Google. And in a way, building study from that.
And the term study means a lot to us. Study, as in how Fred Moten and Stefano Harni talk about black study and black studies. Black studies being the formal study of the end of Western civilization, as CLR James calls it. And then black study being what you do with your friends. In a way, study helps us to cut across the notion of research, which is somewhat stultified and somehow captured in academic credentials and academic protocols. Study moves on a diagonal between the informal and the specific.
so all of these questions to me are part of what is at stake in the question of decoloniality so I know there are specific movements in the states around decolonizing the museum and I know in Britain we have parallels but I'm much more interested in the new in the energies that effloresce when debates that begin as academic debates move and take on a certain intensity. And in a way, that's part of what Suhail Malik calls the para-academic. I mean, so Suhail is quite critical because he says, you know,
asking art spaces, I'm not necessarily talking about epic art spaces, I'm more talking about so-called small-scale organisations. Asking art to play a pedagogic role, asking it to, in a way, supplement the insufficiency of the academy, he says, is not really... That's not necessarily a progressive position to take. I can see what he means, but for me there's an energy that comes when a certain form of study emerges, and it speaks to a yearning, a yearning to upgrade vocabulary,
and to, in a way, what Reson Negro Stani calls to upgrade one's commitments, to renew one's commitments. There are commitments, but these commitments need refreshing. You should take over definitely institutions. I totally agree, but I wanted to pick up your black algorithms, what you said. I think this is extremely, Angelika, extremely important. We did a little in Munich, a little bit for the Center for National, the history of National Socialism, a bit of research about all the black algorithms. And you can learn from that a lot. So we have to work, the whole field, the critical field,
let's call it the critical art field, has to work on how to change the algorithms. And if you Google this, what we are doing here, It's all about the elite, the money, so the self-centered system we are all again operating and this is not mirroring the reality. So that goes, yeah, sorry. Unfortunately, one hour is, there is one urgent question. Yeah, okay. Short question, talking about money. Have you been to the Biennale? Some of you have been to the Biennale in Venice.
Well, if you go to the cafe bars inside the Biennale and you eat a croissant or you eat a sandwich, you have an amount of plastic that you can cover the planet. So, talking about reality and not talking about academic conceptions, I would suggest that Mr. Rukov to go and have a coffee, because it is a disaster the way that in the Biennale you are destroying the planet, which is just a paradox. Don't you think so? Well, I would say that plastic comes from people's minds. You know, you can look at particles of plastic, and they originate from the mind of masters of broken earths.
So as Catherine Youssef would write in her book, The Black Anthropocene. So it's, you know, the people, the petrochemical industry is responsible for plastic and the deadly bind that one is in that many of these art, you know, but I agree, you know, I always go around saying, where are your paper straws, you know? Okay, maybe this is a nice conclusion. We should think more about the commonalities, and this plastic is obviously the common problem. It's more and more urgent to work on our commonalities than on our differences. And, yeah, also against nationalism. Thank you very much for excellent contributions.
One hour is never enough, but we can continue later somewhere thank you to Julieta as well for inviting us yeah that's what we forgot to say at the beginning thank you Julieta