by Maike Siu-Wuan Storf
2024

During these three days, I am a sponge. I, who have so far spent most of my time in artificial spaces, half aquarium breeding, half table sponge, soak myself up with seawater. I let thoughts, ideas, feelings, words, people, the themes and content, the care with which this event was curated and the encounters in between flow around me. I am a very shy sponge and when the microphone makes the rounds to share the final thoughts, I am afraid that only water will come out of my mouth, salty and bittersweet, unfiltered. A moment later, I pick up my child at the subway station after the daddy weekend and dive back into the circle with him for a brief moment, letting him paddle in the light of the tender glances and being grateful that I was allowed to be part of this circle. I will tell him about it. That as a sponge I heard about what it could be like to swim with dolphins and how many stories there are to be found in togetherness.

My child has actually become a compass or a kind of symbolic figure for me in questions of art, curation and care. The responsibility for and the confrontation with this little person challenge me to go into conflict with my outside and my inside instead of fleeing into fantastic parallel worlds. This is a personal experience of my parenthood that I don’t want to generalize or presuppose in any way.

But this experience has taken me from salt-enriched fresh water to salt water. I can no longer move in the same way as before, I have to find a new form and constantly question the framework that I have given art. As a person and as an artist. 

“Social Sustainability” is the building block that I get to discuss and think about together with a school of dolphins during the symposium. We realize that we long for two forms of social sustainability. We want long-lasting solidarity, loyalty and commitment in our work contexts so that we can act without fear, and we want our work to be sustainable, barrier-free and non-elitist, accessible and effective. To dissolve the divisions and hierarchies between content and mediation. And there should be food in the process. I can imagine that the secret of implementation lies in a symbiosis of art, conflict and care. If we understand art as a form of care work with which we can confront conflicts and reinterpret care work as art that helps us to negotiate conflicts. This may be too simplistic, but it could also be a small rock in wild waters that I cling to and continue to take in water from there. Art could be the playing field on which we practice for a better society and formulate our demands for it.

In this respect, I know one thing for sure: if what has taken place over these three days needs a name, then the word for it is “art”. Deep down in my sponge-like cell structures, I feel that I have been part of a very special moment. I am a happy sponge. Those were three wonderful days by the sea in the aquarium at Kottbusser Tor.