Dear collective body of KADIST
Dear collective body of KADIST, Institutions are assemblies of the human bodies who constitute and run them—with nonhumans, namely the systems, built structures, and/or objects that define and regulate them, and the ecosystems that the institutions create via their actions and alliances. Thus I am addressing this letter to all the staff members, board members, and outsourced staff members such as cleaners and technicians who compose your non profit organization, which hosts a collection that intersects contemporary art with socially and politically engaged practices, and is based in Paris and San Francisco. Through this, I am also relating to a long period throughout which you all have been composing and caring for your organization’s collection; the artists and other art practitioners you collaborate with; the exhibitions and discursive programs you have conceived and are envisioning for the future; your publications, partnerships, and mediations; your publics; and your online presence. Where bodies meet, bodies touch. It is the beginning of summer 2020, and in France and everywhere, people are experiencing how the COVID-19 pandemic has been modifying the social, environmental, cultural, and political landscapes. The incitement #stayathome exposed many social inequalities and increased domestic violence in France and elsewhere. [1] Many minorities have been largely unable to stay at home throughout the lockdown because they make up a large proportion of the so-called essential workers: supermarket cashiers, security personnel, hospital medical staff,public transport workers, truck drivers, postal workers, cleaners, delivery workers. Elísio Macamo wrote in April this year that “Covid-19 is a cruel reminder that crisis is us. As we brace up to look the pandemic in the eye, we would be well advised not to forget what our normal is, namely crisis. History has taught us that you do not master a crisis by setting the return to normality as your goal. You master a crisis by enabling yourself to act whatever the circumstances.” [2] There are numerous regions on this planet where what has been happening has never been normal, [3] as demonstrated by the long-term and now finally planetary struggle for social and racial justice, the Black Lives Matter movement. The profound social, cultural, and ecological rethinking that has been taking place should and will also have a strong dialogue with and impact on the cultural and artistic fields, as we have seen in France in the last fifteen years especially. More evident than ever is the necessity of situating oneself, other subjects, objects, and things so as to start a conversation. Situatedness entails taking responsibility for the positions from which one articulates one’s beliefs and claims. While construction and renovation work keeps KADIST closed to the public, you chose an intriguing historical work from your collection—a photograph by the Slovak conceptual artist Julius Koller, from his 1978 series U. F. O. , to display in the vitrine where passersby usually look to see what is being presented in your space. Currently, the window features a black-and-white image of a group of around thirty mostly young people, the artist himself in front, sitting in a large meadow and assembled in the form of a question mark. Universal Futurological Question Mark (U. F. O.) is indeed the title of the image. The artist had a word—anti-happening—for such moments when he interacted with groups of people or arranged a seemingly everyday situation into a cultural event. While KADIST’s premises are undergoing renovation, and while entire societies are calling for a renovation as well, the question mark is indeed the symbol that best marks this suspended time, and asks the passerby to spare a moment to reflect on what comes next. Perhaps Koller’s question mark is also intended to prompt your public to pose questions to you. For my part, as your frequent collaborator, here are a few open questions I thought of addressing to you: How do you, as the collective body KADIST, understand the pronoun “we”? Whom do you silence when you speak, and who has the right to exist? [4] What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model? [5] As I cannot answer for you, I will write a few of my own thoughts on these questions and their impact on the art-institutional landscape of which I am part. How do I understand the pronoun “we”? Following the decolonial feminist scholar Paola Bacchetta, who has written about the importance of situating oneself before beginning to write or speak, [6] I will briefly situate myself: I am a white, Eastern European, cis, heterosexual woman from a mixed working- and middle-class family, born in the former Yugoslavia. I am able-bodied, but have had an autoimmune disease since childhood and was recently diagnosed with another chronic illness. I have a university degree and have been working in the arts for many years. As a child growing up in Slovenia, the northernmost part of the former Yugoslavian republics, I was affected by the racist remarks that children and adults—seemingly reasonable people—would make about the countries from which my father’s family originates, Bosnia and Ukraine. In the white European imaginary today, these and many other neighboring regions are aligned with the racialized territories of the Global South. In the Global North, I constantly receive comments about the Slavic accent noticeable in any of the foreign languages I speak. These comments range from exoticizing to degrading. Throughout my self-education, I had to undo the overwhelming Westernized narrative that I was brought up with in the Slovenian educational system. This led me to work as a curator and writer focused on the intersections between social and political practices of art in relation to ecology, feminist activism, and environmental racism, as well as on the transformational impact of the new geological era that some call the Anthropocene, others the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Negrocene, on the field of art and on our understanding of care as a planetary task. [7] In doing so, I feel indebted to intersectional feminist thought, which according to Sara Ahmed is a lived, embodied theory. [8] “We” is an interdependence of many I’s, and should be situated each time I use it in order to do justice do those it excludes. The general “we” that is very often used in the art context does not exist, unless as a projection that too often refers to white, cis, heterosexual subjects. Whom do you silence when you speak, and who has the right to exist? While intersectionality, in the eyes of many conservative scholars and even politicians in France, is a term that should never set foot here, or at least remain in quarantine forever, it is of utmost necessity to others. “Who keeps the cube white?” is a crucial intersectional question asked by the students and activists at Goldsmiths College in London who have been protesting for better working conditions and pay for cleaners at the school for a few years now. For the generation of art professionals coming up now, the activism of these students; US-based groups such as Decolonize This Place and Gulf Labour Artist Coalition; France-based groups and places such as Décoloniser les arts, Un Lieu pour respirer, and La Colonie ; or Rhodes Must Fall at the University of Cape Town, are of immense importance. Most recently, in France’s art and educational field, the open letter published by Louise Thurin, a twenty-year-old student, resonates widely. The letter, addressed to France’s museums, asks how they can teach her and her generation about racism. [9] Around the same time, Yesomi Umolu, director and curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, published a manifesto about what museums must internalize in order to move forward with equity work. Umolu underlines “the urgent need to cultivate practices of care in our daily lives, from recognizing the indispensable caregiving provided by essential workers (many of whom are from minority communities), to the rousing calls of the Black Lives Matter movement, which asks us (yet again) to care for Black life as any other.” [10] Intersectional methodologies are related to the term “intersectionality,” famously coined in 1989 by the law professor and theoretician Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw defined it as the “view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” [11] As Crenshaw sees it, “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” [12] With neofascism acquiring greater visibility and power, intersectionality is a crucial framework for dismantling existing power structures of whiteness within institutions, and methods of working within artistic and curatorial practices. Social equality and social justice are identified as intersectionality’s central preoccupations. Practices of accountability, care, and mutual respect across individual positions should now be at the forefront of art institutional discourses. Institutions should work hard to realize intersectionality’s political potential today, transforming themselves profoundly in the process. [13] What protective measures can you think of so we don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model? Suely Rolnik recently wrote, “It becomes urgent to undo the kind of unconscious [colonial-racializing-capitalistic] regime that maintains our desire under abuse, abandoning its formations in the social field and, with them, our characters in their scenes, through the performance of new characters, their bodies and their relational field—in sum, their ways of living. In this process, the boundaries between art, therapeutics and politics become indiscernible.” [14] In May 2020, Elena Sorokina, interdependent curator and art critic, and I cofounded the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. We are starting to work with artists, asking them to share with us how they are transforming their productivity and creativity into caring, and forming solidarity around those who are the most vulnerable and fragile. Our questions are: How do we take care, but also grow care? In what ways could these gestures be part of a larger rethinking of systems of production, distribution, and mutual solidarity in the field of contemporary art? How can we try to imagine socially and culturally just and sustainable shared futures through radical care? [15] By addressing these questions through our initiative, we wish to enable an ecosystem of curators and artists in a social space built on a relationship of care, solidarity, and inclusivity from the outset. [16] We are trying to slow down our methods of working, and work in an interdependent way with artists, in order to address the harsh fact that structural racism is a public health issue. We believe that art is a space for radical care. Poetically speaking, let’s listen to Fred Moten when he invites us “to slow down, to remain, so we can get together and think about how to get together. What if it turns out that the way we get together is the way to get together? . . . Come get some more of these differences we share. Are differences our way of sharing? Let’s share so we can differ, in undercommon misunderstanding.” [17] As Isabelle Stengers writes in her 2015 book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism , in the point of view of fast science, paying attention is equated with a loss of time, whereas from the perspective of slow science, paying attention can teach research institutions and researchers to be affected and to affect the creation of the future. In opposition to accelerationism and in favor of slowing down, Stengers has been a fervent opponent of globalization and neoliberalism, especially in her support of anti-GMO activists. In many recent writings, she underlines the fact that the new politics of public research promotes only the research that can generate profit in the competitive academic marketplace. To counter this, she suggests that researchers take her “plea for slow science” seriously. Slow science, she writes, is “about the quality of research, that is also, its relevance for today’s issues.” [18] In arguing that scientific reliability should no longer be based only on scientific judgment, but also on social and political concerns, Stengers proposes slow science as an operation that would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists too often consider messy—that is, what escapes general, so-called objective categories. Drawing on the work of ecofeminists and other activists from the United States, she calls for learning to listen to each other in order to recognize the emergent values that arise only because (in my own recent words) “those who meet have learned how to give to the issue around which they meet the power to effectively matter and connect them.” [19] What sustains those moments when someone is mesmerized and forever transformed by understanding the perspective of someone else—when transformative power comes from participants thinking together—is “more similar to the slow knowledge of a gardener than to the fast one of the so-called rational industrial agriculture.” [20] I wish you great conversations and well-deliberated actions in the coming times. Take care, grow the care. Natasa Petresin-Bachelez [1] Hervé Hinopay, “A Delafontaine, les soignants sont ‘au front sans armes,’” April 13, 2020, Bondyblog , https://www.bondyblog.fr/societe/sante/a-delafontaine-les-soignants-sont-au-front-sans-armes/ . [2] Elísio Macamo, “The Normality of Risk: African and European Responses to Covid-19,” CoronaTimes.net, April 13, 2020, https://www.coronatimes.net/normality-risk-african-european-responses/ . [3] See the e-book What Was Happening Here Was Never Normal , forthcoming from Versopolis Review in August 2020, http://www.versopolis.com . [4] I thank Elisabeth Lebovici for the formulation of silencing when speaking. On the right to exist see Achille Mbembe, “The Weight of Life: On the Economy of Human Lives,” Eurozine , July 6, 2020, https://www.eurozine.com/the-weight-of-life/ . [5] Bruno Latour, “What Protective Measures Can You Think Of So We Don’t Go Back to the Pre-Crisis Production Model?,” Versopolis Review , April 24, 2020, https://www.versopolis.com/times/opinion/846/what-protective-measures-can-you-think-of-so-we-don-t-go-back-to-the-pre-crisis-production-model . [6] Paola Bacchetta and Françoise Vergès, “Who Is Speaking?,” conversation at the opening of the exhibition Show Me Your Archive and I Will Tell You Who Is in Power , Kiosk Gallery, KASK School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium, 2017, curated by Wim Waelput and myself. View a recording at https://www.internationaleonline.org/dialogues/11_who_is_speaking . [7] Jason Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016); Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65; Malcom Ferdinand, Une Ecologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Editions du seuil, 2019), 103. [8] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 10. [9] See Louise Thurin, “Chers musées . . .”: La réaction des institutions muséales au mouvement BlackLivesMatter,” June 11, 2020, https://www.artistikrezo.com/art/chers-musees-la-reaction-des-institutions-museales-au-mouvement-blacklivesmatter.html . [10] Yesomi Umolu, “On the Limits of Care and Knowledge: 15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice,” Artnet , June 25, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/limits-of-care-and-knowledge-yesomi-umolu-op-ed-1889739 . [11] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–67. [12] “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” Columbia Law School, June 8, 2017, https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later . [13] See Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “Transforming Whiteness in Art Institutions,” e-flux journal , no. 93(September 2018): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/216046/transforming-whiteness-in-art-institutions/ . [14] Suely Rolnik, short text at HFK Bremen website, January 7, 2020, https://www.hfk-bremen.de/t/vortr%C3%A4ge/n/online-vortragsreihe-freie-kunst-suely-rolnik . [15] On the recent take on the notion of radical care see Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 142, vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2020): 1–16, available at https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article/38/1%20(142)/1/160171/Radical-CareSurvival-Strategies-for-Uncertain . [16] See our website at https://www.r22.fr/antennes/sollicitude-publique . [17] Fred Moten, “Remain,” in Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument , ed. Stephen Hoban, Yasmil Raymond, and Kelly Kivland (New York: DIA Art Foundation; London: Koenig Books, 2015), 326–27. [18] Isabelle Stengers, “‘Another Science Is Possible!’: A Plea for Slow Science,” lecture given at Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, L’Université libre de Bruxelles, December 13, 2011, reprinted at https://threerottenpotatoes.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/stengers2011_pleaslowscience.pdf , quoted in Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, “For Slow Institutions,” e-flux journal , no. 85 (October 2017): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/ . [19] Petresin-Bachelez, “For Slow Institutions.” [20] Stengers, “‘Another Science Is Possible!.’”