The current tightening of state-sanctioned measures in Berlin’s cultural landscape in which austerity, funding cuts, cancellations, and censorship are becoming more and more common prompts us to ponder the role of public cultural institutions in preserving and reinforcing the state’s ideology in relation to dissenting voices and demands for plurality. The crowdsourced Archive of Silence, lists 215 cases in which artists, theorists, and cultural workers have been disinvited, censored, or silenced by cultural institutions in Germany since October 7, 2023 until today. The vast extent of such cases opens the question whether the cultural institution as a self-proclaimed space that supports polyvocality, marginalised voices, and political opposition can disentangle itself from its state dependency and truly enact the promise of decentralized or participatory models of programming.
In the essay “Cultural Abolitionisms” (2021; 2023) the French artist and writer Guillaume Maraud traces the historical ties between state and cultural institutions going back to the origin of the museum as a western, colonial project that acts as a representational organ for the national ideology of the modern state. Maraud opposes contemporary art discourse around institutional critique, reformist, or corporatist demands, and instead calls for an abolitionist approach to contemporary culture. Through a materialist analysis of the history and infrastructures of cultural institutions, Maraud argues that true liberation within the cultural sphere requires dismantling existing frameworks rather than merely reforming them.
But what would it mean concretely to speak of abolitionism in the arts and culture?
How might a cultural abolitionist practice look, and how would it impact the ways we work, think, and make art together?
Historically rooted in the abolition of slavery, abolitionist movements have ever since demanded the dismantling of carceral and punitive institutions, and visibilized these institutions’ underlying racialized capitalist and white supremacist foundations. At the core of contemporary abolitionist thinking is the persuasion that carceral or policing institutions do not create safety for the majority of people, but instead uphold a system based on violence, exploitation, and control. Instead of reforming these systems, abolitionists seek to prefigure and build alternatives based on care, mutual aid, and structural change. Abolition centres its methodology around transformative justice, community accountability, and sustainable social structures. The geographist, theorist and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore considers abolitionism not as an end point, but rather as a “life in rehearsal” [1], an ongoing process of enacting change every day.
How can we learn from abolitionist struggles and strategies to conceptualize transformative approaches to art and cultural production that prefigure cultural forms beyond the confines of the institution? How could artists, collectives, and cultural initiatives approach abolition as an ongoing, everyday practice? How can abolitionism support us in self-determining the value of our work without asking for the recognition of hegemonic institutions?
With this column, we will follow these questions, looking at grassroots museums, anarchic cultural centers, solidarity-based funding networks, as well as more ephemeral, informal strategies that relativize the dominant role of state institutions. Value is not redefined through reform, institutional critique, or by patiently waiting, but rather, recognizing, in the words of the poet Diane Di Prima: “it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down.” [2] In this spirit we engage with specific strategies or methods which – rather than attempting to "fix" institutional failures – instead redefine value within the cultural practice itself, detach from state-sanctioned narratives of legitimacy and root themselves in mutual support structures, autonomous spaces, and subversive everyday actions. If cultural abolitionism is an ongoing rehearsal, then it is about embracing the spaces we already inhabit.
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- Footnotes
[1] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in: Roby Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2002), 11.
[2] Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters, (San Francisco, Last Gasp, 2005), 9.
Image credits
Cover: Courtesy of Catwings
