The Kindness of Others in the German Art Education System
by Felisha Carenage
2024

Pflegen and sorgen are German words for causing as well as caring. Unbehagen pflegen can be used in the sense of für Unruhe sorgen;  creating or causing unrest or discomfort. Unbehagen pflegen can also be literally interpreted as caring for discomfort; approaching conflict with care. 

Unbehagen Pflegen is thus the name of a project that I initiated at the beginning of the 22/23 academic year. The yearlong educational concept for fine art and design students at the Muthesius University in Kiel, Germany, includes collective reading, collaborative writing, and visiting exhibitions, lectures and installations with a mind towards Critical Race Theory and Social Engagement. I suppose that this essay will show how I fell into the trap of art mediation ¹ which is an exhausting kind of Minority Tax that people pay when their critical positions aren’t well-received. In any case I am trying to navigate this circumstance to find and build community.

Summer 2022

The first post-pandemic, post-George-Floyd, post-Zoom summer in Europe was filled with multiple art biennials, a Triennale, Art Basel and 100 days of documenta ² , an exhibition that occupies the entire city of Kassel every 5 years, which was founded in the 1950s on the basis of repairing Germany’s image in the art world ³ .

I spent a weekend at documenta fifteen and attended the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art on multiple occasions, being familiar with the curator’s and his collaborators’ Social-Justice-oriented work from an institution that never reopened after 2020; La Colonie ⁴ in Paris, where I had lived since obtaining my German MFA in 2017. Aside from this, there was a lot of cultural funding being given out for decolonial work in institutions, especially for artists with a so-called ‘migrant background.’ I was excited to see so many young, interesting artists, writers and curators in spaces of exchange, and was soaking up information and impressions and strategies. 

In Kassel, at documenta fifteen, I was housed at the Alice Yard space ⁵ , exchanging with other bi-and trilingual artists and cultural workers, some of whom had entered Germany in their teens, during the ‘long summer of migration‘ ⁶ . In talking about my postgrad research on harbour cities in North Germany, I mentioned that through structural and infrastructural discrimination, a lot of people were invisibilized, so that it is not widely accepted that Germany is a post-migratory society ⁷ . In response, a colleague pulled up the English-language Wikipedia article on the country of Germany, to find statistics to demonstrate that in fact, non-white people were a democratically insignificant minority. 

What does it cost to go look at a painting? 

Travelling to these spaces and being able to experience artworks and dialogues first-hand is an integral part of the education which I had received in the pursuit of my Masters of Fine Art, and of which I was now an active part. Since 2017, I have had modest teaching contracts at the Muthesius University. The freedom with which I chose my topics was typical of the German art education system, which is at once famously liberal and infamously beholden to the ego of one’s professors ^{8 9} .

What is, however, a non-negotiable for entry into most German university Programmes – especially art schools – is the language requirement. Non-European, non-German students must have extremely advanced German-language proficiency in order to be matriculated, in order to get a visa. Permission to reside in Germany, purchased with the complicity of living one’s life and developing one’s artistic practise in a language that is often violently xenophobic ¹⁰ , meant access to all of Europe, to art in museums, galleries , fairs and open spaces. 

The 22/23 Winter semester started just as the 59th Biennale del Arte in Venice was closing; this exhibition is practically the Olympic Games of exhibitions, with artists‘ work shown in pavilions accorded to countries, rather than, necessarily, with galleries or independent associations. It was to Venice, then, that I first took my Unbehagen Pflegen students, and it was here that one of them who had arrived late and intoxicated, so confident of his place in my class, in the school, in Europe, advocated his right to remain a disturbance in my seminar with the words, “Wir sind hier in Deutschland!” ¹¹ .

The Kindness of Others

The anti-racist pedagogy that Unbehagen Pflegen requires is built on that from which I had benefited in my own education at Howard University and the University of the West Indies, institutions which were founded as nerve centres of resistance and futurity. The precarity in which my weak passport and personal circumstances placed me means that, for almost 4 decades, I have been dependent not only on scholarships and visas, but on the kindness of others in institutions, often ones designed to uphold white supremacy. 

However, because of apparently radical educational systems like those at HBCUs ¹² and in the English-speaking Caribbean, I had come to see some institutions not as safe spaces, but as safer spaces, where doubts and fears and immaturity and inexperience could be addressed. That which made these systems radical was their practise of being ethical ¹³ ; their pedagogy meant to factor the fragilities and concerns not just of educators, but that of students as well. 

This is the crucial difference between educators, students and practising artists who are committed to Social Justice, and those who feel they would be negatively affected by changes in the Status Quo. Being invested in the professionalisation of graduates means preparing students for careers in an art world that demands they advocate for themselves, that denies them the comfort of apoliticism. I don’t exclude privileged students with financial, language and passport privilege from this, and it is the task of the institution to do so, as well. This, I learned in Germany, is a big ask of educators and administrators whose lives are completely unaffected by their free use of the word N****. 

Artmakers in a nation-state that is so fractured, so guilty, are plagued by especially potent fragilities. How can we be kind to each other, to ourselves?