In an article published on European Alternatives entitled “The Lost Art of Organizing Solidarity”, the researcher and activist Alvaro Oleart proclaims that “In 2024, the time is ripe for more structural movement building, cohering fragments and transforming them into a broader transnational and decolonial political project.” Living in Germany, where the hegemony of state ideology or Staatsräison is imposing an iron curtailment upon the articulation of solidarity with Palestinians throughout cultural institutions and public spaces, I found myself in agreement.
Over recent months, Germany has enforced a severe regime of cultural censorship, becoming both the target and the epicenter of countermovements, which demand, within their specific fields of operation, a clear positionality of discomfort concerning the genocide in Gaza. The narrative that regards Germany’s complicity with the State of Israel’s actions as a trauma response to the Holocaust, the profit-seeking by German weapons firms, and geopolitical interests in the Middle East are largely unrepresented in the mainstream narrative. In light of these perspectives, the pledge of support to the State of Israel transcends German guilt, rather it lies in a remorseless history of suprematist and economically-concerned genocides that have crossed three continents now, ranging from Tanzania to Namibia, to the majority of continental Europe, to the contemporary Middle East. In the self-proclaimed “philo-Semitic” leftist cultural environment, we find a space financed by genocide-complicit state capital, accompanied by anti-antisemitism neo-McCarthyism.
Such performative allyship has become an obstacle to understanding the core nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Cultural Institutions have found themselves unready to include cultural products and artworks critically engaging with actions by the Israeli state, and, more generally, with Germany's colonial past. Thus, we find Palestinian rights movements, and individuals operating within the cultural field preoccupied with a double struggle: that of visibilizing deliberately obscured Palestinian experiences, and of bringing attention and resistance to the climate of undemocratic cultural suppression adopted by Germany.
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Germany’s cultural operations follow the so-called “reformist turn”, which has seen Western, white-dominated, nationally-funded cultural institutions including, in education, exhibition making, public programs, unrepresented communities, and marginalized minorities, as an attempt to show how much inclusivity and respect informs the contemporary capitalist system. However, the reformist turn commodifies community and institutionalizes diversity through assimilationism, creating recognizable social patterns to be supervised and domesticated by good post-colonial subjects. All so that museums, cultural centers, schools, and academia can profit by funneling “new practices” into old hierarchical structures, and, by doing so, advancing the institution without undermining its social supervisory function. The struggle within the cultural environment worldwide, with Germany as a prime example, rightly lays its foundation in this deeper sense of dissatisfaction with the instrumentalizing and show-and-tell methodologies of institutions, highlighting their inability to embody structurally what they preach in terms of decolonial togetherness and the prioritization of the voices of the most marginalized peoples living in the shadow of Western cultural dominion.
Imagine how a Palestinian artist, who has found refuge in Europe and who does not have a land to go back to, feels when their cultural heritage is not only effaced and destroyed by occupation but also that their work is labeled as “racist” by Western cultural institutions. Imagine the feelings of a Jewish artist who tries to speak in solidarity with Palestine but who is blocked in advance because do not comply with the narrative of the “good Jew”, by whose leave Germany has expiated its guilt. Imagine how everyone else, even those who may not come from Jewish or Muslim heritages, but who still regard the complicity with war crimes and judicially established “plausible genocide” as unacceptable, feel about the climate in which they operate. Whether the genocide occurs in Palestine, delineating how it is depicted, spoken about, or culturally oriented should be one of the priorities of cultural institutions that have capitalized on ostensible decolonial discourse over the past decade. And which, in these historically painful moments, should be listening to what those most impacted have to say, rather than reinforcing the status quo and elitist cultural convictions.
The a priori suspicion and the expulsion of everyone who feels compelled to speak up - or just to open up to the topic - from acceptable discourse has triggered a chain of gestures of public disruption, including cultural boycotts by cultural workers who see their identities as being tokenized and essentialized by German rules of (selective) cultural hospitality. The cultural system, ruled by principles of “freedom of expression”, entrepreneurship, and economic optimization of the few available public resources has responded even more introvertedly and unaccountably - doing the bare minimum, yet making statements about how culture “should not be weaponized” - all the while weaponizing anti-Semitism as the rationale for the silencing. However, whether art should be a-politicized, very politicized, intrinsically sensible to the polis, a form of militant joy, or simply an exercise in style, the structures that uphold it can never be untouched by cultural policies and forms of policing. Imagine when the cultural institution, the ultimate benevolent host, receives rejections of hospitality from an invited cultural practitioner - usually someone starved for attention and institutional validation - and the motivation they offer for their stance is that they feel uncomfortable about the silence of the cultural institution in the face of genocide. Imagine, then, that the institution does nothing to open a conversation; imagine the institution fails to introspect, but instead assumes the role of the victim. Imagine a cultural institution complicit in a new Inquisition.
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That’s the reason why the many forms taken by the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany and internationally have become devices that expose a broader dominant mindset that replicates the same dynamics as border regimes infused by capitalist accumulation, ruling-class moralism, and white supremacy within and beyond cultural frames. Alvaro Oleart, building on the work of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, therefore, has conceptualized the political imaginary of the “decolonial multitude” (Oleart, 2023) as a means to emphasize and encourage a decolonial component that transect and leads every movement, whereby the anti-colonial frame exists not merely as a theoretical construct devised and imposed from above, but as a live context that prioritizes the experiences and the voices of those impacted by the rapaciousness of the colonial system. Following the legacies of grassroots worker-led movements, we see that culture workers - as workers - possess the tools to organize from below and for the sake of egalitarian redistribution, against oppressive and unbearable conditions in order to thrive in unions and collective counter-actions. But this social memory of agency as workers seems to be erased by those tasked with replicating bourgeois cultural standards, those who keep attacking the efforts of cultural workers to revindicate a form of sovereignty against the oppressive structures of distribution.
Collectives such as Strike German, an international call to challenge German gatekeeping of cultural production, and ACAB ( Arts and Culture Alliance Berlin), which seeks to challenge surreptitious and anti-constitutional implementations of discriminatory clauses in public undertakings that conflate anti-Semitim with anti-Zionism, provide examples of this structural assessment of targeting. Alongside, and in conversation with, these two German-situated movements emerged the international movement ANGA ( Art No Genocide Alliance), which, on April 17th, the third day of preview days of the 2024 Venice Biennale, organized an action in front of the Israeli Pavillion. The action was an outgrowth of the absence of dialogue and negotiations by the fascist-leaning Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, after the rejection of an open letter initiated by ANGA requesting the exclusion of Israel from the participating nations that collected more than 24.000 signatures. For ANGA, and the international community it represents, the presence of a Pavillion which inevitably represented the state responsible for tens of thousands of intentionally murdered Palestinian civilians, created an impossible competition with the symbolic horizon sought for art.
In this impossibility of comparison, in the impossibility of cohabitation between the horror of the genocide and the vain hope of market-based artistic practices, Strike German, ACAB, and ANGA are challenging the very imperialist structures that have alienated them. Above all, they are creating a network of solidarity between art workers from different life paths and backgrounds, otherwise left atomized by cultural institutions. Imagine, then, if spaces of cultural and artistic possibility, as defined by the state, could be freed from the elitist occupation of culture, and be grounded in collective endeavors like those named above, which are by no means perfect, but which try to articulate collective approaches to reinterrogate cultural institutions’ self-embellishing colonial narrative. This is the imagination to which we could attend, in concert with the collective of art workers united, and other collectives in dialogue with each other to project and diffract this imagination towards a broader political horizon. This imaginary, and the people who act upon it, are the future tense. Imagine…
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- IMAGE CREDITS
Cover, fig. 1, fig. 2: ANGA in Venice Biennale 2024 - Courtesy ANGA.
