by Ayasha Guerin (CCC)
2024

Curating Through Conflict with Care (CCC) is a project group that formed in the early days of the pandemic, on the heels of global BLM protests, when calls for decolonization of education and museums were being answered with “post-colonial” programs, “diverse” leadership appointments, and new public institutions that promised to address colonialism’s violences. It is painful to reflect on the limits of those 2020 promises. As we enter this final phase of our project four years later, we are (at the time of this writing), six months into an Israeli military assault on Gaza, Palestine. The suffering and killing of over 33 thousand Palestinians to date has been protested by millions of activists globally, while South Africans (having gone through their own experience of apartheid) have taken this case to the International Court of Justice, charging Israel, the U.S. and weapon-supplying western powers (including Germany) with enabling genocidal crimes. The week we’ll publish this text, Nicaragua will take Germany to the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of facilitating and breaching the genocide convention by supplying Israel with military and financial assistance. Meanwhile, in Germany, there is little to no media coverage of this accusation and any discussion of this violent “conflict” has been met with institutional silence and censorship [documenta fifteen] [Archive of Silence], while a cultural strike of hundreds of international artists have vowed to withdraw participation in German exhibitions and programs in response [Strike Germany]. 

CCC met in the context of the 11th Berlin Bienale’s curatorial workshop, which, for the first time, prioritized the involvement of local art workers from “the rising majority,” an identity signifier that we troubled almost immediately upon meeting one another and trying to identify shared experiences and political commitments. While the BB11, titled “The crack begins within”, explicitly explored questions of collectivity and breakthrough, the conflicts that emerged in the awkwardness of the workshops, (which suffered from having to move online after one week), were not recognized by the majority as the opportunities they were, to explore the politics that bothered us around race, privilege, exclusion, platforming, and silencing in the art world. We branched off as CCC, to realize space to think collectively about how we might use conflict as a methodology for locating and attending to violence in the arts and how we might care for each other, historically excluded from formal art spaces, as we grow change in Europe and beyond?

The votes were close, and the election was dramatic, playing out over several rounds of live counts on zoom, but with the selection of our project by nGbK membership, we could support CCC research with a two-year budget. The first phase of our project (2021-22) was a research phase, in which we read together, met to share experiences, and studied specific case studies of curatorial conflict. This timeline for this work coincided with the scandal surrounding Ruangroupa’s collective curation at Documenta15 and the public attacks on racialized artists who participated in the arts festival. The conflicts and contradictions in the Documenta case study propelled us towards the planning of our Berlin symposium in 2023. We invited people who had experienced Documenta15 and other art censorships first hand. We also held an open call to gather people who we did not yet know, but who were also invested in the central questions of our research.

With our project budget, we organized the CCC symposium, a mini residency that would host the rapid-firing of 60 minds, working in a marathon-like effort to exercise valued knowledge, bridge connections, and build trusting relationships over three days. It meant providing travel and accommodation for more than half the group to participate. Whether joining as a panel speaker or an active  listener with smaller contributions, we paid everyone a stipend to contribute their time. The majority of participants were in their 20s and early 30s, and most identified as people of color. All of us have been working, to some capacity, in Europe, (and most hold a local connection to Germany.) 

We knew this meeting would be the first to gather a new generation of art workers for private conversations about the issues that affect us. We knew that many participants, like us, straddled positions as insider-outsiders in cultural institutions: some are independent curators who are also artists and writers, others are museum educators who work for several different institutions as freelancers, many are first generation university students and workers who keep creative practices but struggle to identify as “artists.” We all rely on our relationships with institutions to pay our rent, even if they are profoundly uncomfortable places for us to do our work. 

As we prepped the working space in the hours leading up to the CCC symposium, we quickly and impulsively scrawled two questions onto paper thought-bubbles and tacked them onto a green wall: What can we demand of institutions? and How can we organize ourselves outside of the institution? These were questions that we had internally discussed over three years of project group work, comparing stories and strategies from each of our lives and working contexts.

The green wall did not fill with direct responses, but these questions lingered in the room, shaped spirited debates, prompted lists, mind-maps, and provocations that the symposium’s participants produced in pods of group work. In more than one pod, there emerged a critique of the impulse to write clear proposals for institutional change, a resistance to “do all the work for the institution for free.” Beyond the issue of wages, we agreed that a meaningful code-of-conduct requires the individuals of an institution to spend time writing and committing to their own ethical code – and that this code ought to respond to the specific contexts of the work. There is no one-size-fits all solution to “decolonizing institutions” or implementing caring protocol. To generalize an institutional code-of-conduct, would empty the text of its radical potential. 

I thought of land acknowledgements that announce an art event is taking place on stolen land without commitment to Indigenous sovereignty. Land acknowledgements, which are prevalent in Canada, where I have been working for two years, can be an important step towards reconciliation and restitution, but without the research, listening practices, and cooperation of and with Indigenous peoples, land acknowledgements become empty scripts recycled across uncaring institutions, a formality rather than a force of change. Azul’s contribution, “a Recipe for land acknowledgements” acts as an intervention and invites us into another way of accountability. [A Recipe for Land Acknowledgements.]

While we did collect a list of suggestions for institutional protocol [Link to Protocol]  the second question: how do we organize ourselves outside of institutions, was the one that produced more thought and recommendation. Perhaps because it is the approach we all have more experience trying (out of necessity), and therefore have put a bit more hope in. Some participants suggested that instead of approaching the question of how an institution should act, we should rather ask how to protect ourselves as we enter into work with institutions, expecting the predominantly white art institution (PWAI) will be violent. Perhaps we needed to be writing a roadmap for navigating PWAI institutions, something more akin to an Art World Greenbook. [Archive of Silence]

Other groups questioned whether approaching these topics defensively was the right call. Why define our strategy as alternatives to white power structures? Shouldn’t we rather be using this space to dream beyond? To make radical calls and push expectations further? 

We spoke a lot about the challenges of working collectively. Knowing where to spend your energy and when to conserve it. Coalition work is not inevitable [Do we have to like each other to care for one another?], and our capacities to do this work quickly and efficiently are usually low. Everyone was asking “why don’t we have an art worker’s union?” And if we did, what kind of things could that union negotiate on our behalf? We’ve included a Q&A on our platform with Zoë Claire Miller of BBK, the closest thing to an artist’s union Berlin has, to further some of this questioning.  

We circled back too, to the question of mentorship. What is it? And why have so few of us experienced it? Could we mentor each other? And what kind of mentoring structures could we imagine? We discussed the need to self-define our own value systems before entering into work with one another and before working with institutions. Whether as an employee or a freelance art worker, in order to navigate the institution, one needs to map one’s own value system so as not to get lost inside, alone. Reflect, what is it you care about? What do you need to feel supported to enter working relations with others? How do you build and keep trusting working relations?

None of us approach this work from the same positionality. We represent different social classes, native languages, and migration backgrounds. We’ve been shaped by different traumas and responsibilities. We come with different expertise and experiences working collectively, internationally, interculturally and intergenerationally. There are different vulnerabilities in navigating the institution as someone on payroll vs. as a freelancer. We agreed, we need ongoing research to map our distinct vulnerabilities in order to enter working coalitions that work for all of us. 

Care and Conflict were themes of the symposium, but conflict was much more attractive of a container for our conversations than care. 

“What even is care?” participants asked aloud. We need to talk about care,” we agreed. Care discourse in the museum too often stands in as reference and solicitation of feminized labor. It repulses those of us resistant to play the role of the art-world mammy, where Black/WoC curators, mediators, and educators are expected to take care of white feelings in institutions showing work about violence and conflict. During our collective reading of Tian Zhang’s Radical Care Manifesto, we considered, who cares for the care workers? We agreed, care is not charity, but solidarity. 

More importantly, we agreed we needed this space to care about the real world conflicts affecting our work, including political conflicts, like border wars and genocides that some participants have personally lived through and which shape core principles and investments. If only we had more time together… Our conversations on “Conflict” day were challenging and generative in their engagement with the differences within our group. We wrestled with definitions of complicity, agency and power. We modeled the kind of collective learning that CCC yearned for in our first meeting, at the BB11 curatorial workshop.  

Our last conversation in the symposium was marked by a complete restructuring of the scheduled program so that we could discuss the violent systems we’ve inherited and our personal and collective responsibilities to change them. I learned, there is so much value in committing time that is flexible to allow for generous listening and mutual understanding, so that the roots of our conflicts are respected as we reach towards resolution. Meaningful, inclusive, collective work takes patience. 

The reflections on this platform offer small glimpses into an art-work discourse that developed over three days and ran late into the nights at the outdoor tables of Südblock, Kottbusser Tor, despite an unusually rainy and cold August. Publishing these texts, we enter the final phase of CCC; the sharing phase. We are making collective insights available to the public via this website as we discuss how to continue our work, albeit in a less institutionally formalized way, once the official project support of nGbK is over. 

Our working group formed within conflicts and, even as we came together, the group did not progress without conflicts. We’ll end the third phase of our project working together with two fewer members than when we started. Each of us has struggled through varying capacities to contribute to the collective work in an ongoing pandemic as we’ve experienced several destabilizing challenges to our families, including an international move, a new birth, and several deaths of loved ones. It is a testament to our dedication to these research questions and to each other that we are still meeting regularly across a nine-hour time difference and organizing opportunities for others to join the conversation.