Forced Migration and Art
Wits School of Arts, Spring 2022:
Course Coordinator: Nontobeko Ntombela
Invited artists and academics: Ayrson Heráclito, Bernard-Akoi Jackson, Brett Pyper, Clarissa Diniz, Duduzile Ndlovu, Greer Valley, Juan Carlos Orrantia, Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Nicola Cloete, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Noor Nieftagodien, Pamela Sunstrum, Sinethemba Twalo
Artistic Practices and Migration is a cross-campus course taught in collaboration with Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), Bard College Berlin (Berlin, Germany) and University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). The course explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the arts, students will develop individual or collaborative open-media artistic projects relating to the (im-)materialities that speak to migration.
Thematically, the course revolves around the bureaucracies that were created to curb and control migration and to react to asylum claims of those made stateless. They mirror a fundamental dilemma in all attempts to find responses to forced migration, throughout the 20th and 21st Century: On the one hand, nation-states and the international community based on nation-states have forged institutions — legal provisions and procedures, agencies, NGOs, etc., — to mitigate, to alleviate, to control and to hedge, even to “solve” the humanitarian, social and political consequences of forced migration. On the other hand, these institutions never intended to address the political causes that produced and to this day produce forced migration in the first place. Not getting at the roots of the underlying political and social problems, the institutions failed to keep the promise that every displaced, stateless person would eventually get on a road to state-citizenship, through integration, repatriation or resettlement. Instead, national and international policies and administrations have been focusing predominantly on combating migration as such, a futile endeavour that leaves a trail of bureaucratic failure in its wake, the Johannesburg course particularly focuses on how artists have observed the way in which different communities have navigated the limitations and possibilities of migration. Centering artistic practices as a starting point, the “research” dimension of the course will address the materialities of increasingly digitalised migration regimes.
We will read Sara Ahmed, Ayi Kwei Armah, Stuart Hall and Anna Laura Stoler for theoretical grounding, and share lectures and discussion sessions with our partner classes in Bogotá and in Berlin. In the “creation” dimension of the course, research-based artistic projects will be produced.
(Exhibition: Wits 2022, Rendered Passages)
Research-Creation: (Im-)Materialities of 20th/21st Century “Refugee Protection”
BCB, Spring 2022:
Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann
This cross-campus class, taught in collaboration with Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about forced migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the arts, students will develop individual or collaborative open-media artistic projects relating to the (im-)materialities of the “modern refugee”.
Thematically, the course revolves around the bureaucracies that were created to curb and control migration and to react to asylum claims of those made stateless. They mirror a fundamental dilemma in all attempts to find responses to forced migration, throughout the 20th and 21st Century: On the one hand, nation-states and the international community based on nation-states have forged institutions – legal provisions and procedures, agencies, NGOs etc. – to mitigate, to alleviate, to control and to hedge, even to “solve” the humanitarian, social and political consequences of forced migration. On the other hand, these institutions never intended to address the political causes that produced and to this day produce forced migration in the first place. Not getting at the roots of the underlying political and social problems, the institutions failed to keep the promise that every displaced, stateless person would eventually get on a road to state-citizenship, through integration, repatriation or resettlement. Instead, national and international policies and administrations have been focussing predominantly on combating migration as such, a futile endeavor that leaves a trail of bureaucratic failure in its wake.
The „research“ dimension of the course will enquire the materialities of these trails - lists, papers, forms, stamps, technological devices of all kinds for surveillance and control, and the physical traces of migrants handling of it -, as well as address the immaterialities of increasingly digitized migration regimes. We will read Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed and Ann Laura Stoler for theoretical grounding, and share lectures and discussion sessions with our partner classes in Bogotá and in Johannesburg. In the „creation“ dimension of the course, research-based artistic projects will be produced. At the end of the course, these projects will be presented in public exhibitions/events in the three cities (Berlin, Bogota and Johannesburg) and on a common website.
(Exhibition: BCB 2022, The Diasporic Pitch)
Research-Creation: Artistic Approaches to Forced Migration and the Dilemma of the Nation State
BCB, Spring 2021:
Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann
This cross-campus class, taught in collaboration with Universidad de los Andes (Bogotà, Colombia) explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the visual arts, students will develop individual or collaborative open-media artistic projects relating to the discourses of the “modern refugee” and their impacts on the lives of forced migrants.
Thematically, the course revolves around a dilemma that seems fundamental in all attempts to find humanitarian and human rights related responses to forced migration, throughout the 20th and 21st Century: On the one hand, nation-states, and the international community based on nation-states, forged institutions – legal provisions and procedures, agencies, NGOs etc. – to mitigate, to alleviate, to control and to hedge, even to “solve” the humanitarian, social and civic consequences of forced migration. On the other hand, these institutions never intended to address the political causes that produced and to this day produce forced migration in the first place. Not getting at the roots of the underlying political and social problems, the institutions failed to keep the promise that every displaced, stateless person would eventually get on a road to state-citizenship, through integration, repatriation or resettlement. The „research“ dimension of the course will address this dilemma from a European perspective with readings, lectures and discussion sessions, in close exchange with the course taught at the Universidad de los Andes, that approaches the dilemma from a Latin-American perspective. Guest lectures from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research/South Africa will add an African perspective, as much as new thinking about migration and mobility. In the „creation“ dimension of the course research-based artistic projects will be produced that will be presented in a public (online) exhibition at the end of the semester.
(Exhibition: 2021 BCB, Relational Creatures)
Research-Creation: Refugees, displaced and expelled: at the mercy of the institutions
Uniandes, Spring 2021
Instructor: Juan Ricardo Aparicio Cuervo
This course explores the contours, problems and challenges of the field of Transcultural Migrations from a cultural studies perspective interested in framing this problem through the analytic lenses of the relation of culture and power. The course interrogates from an historical perspective how the movement of people within and outside international borders became a problem for the same notion of the Westphalian nation-state and the definition of a right-bearing citizen protected by the Nation-State at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century. We will explore how this phenomenon became problematized by new legal categories and the deployment of a humanitarian response in order to take care of those who were aspiring for `the right to have rights´ and who had been expelled from the same idea of “humanity”. We will look both at the emergence of the category of the refugee and the internally displaced persons in order to understand the different contexts that gave these regimes the particularities they had. We will combine this critical analysis with case-studies, ethnographies and critical artistic practices that put in tension these regimes with the experiences and the everyday life, with the histories of political mobilizations and organization of both refugees and internally displaced persons. We will study how the movement of people and the processes of reterritorialization and deterritorialization have been crucial for the contemporary regimes of capital accumulation that have to be understood as imperial, colonial and postcolonial, racial, patriarchal and neoliberal. In one word, as synonymous of what Saskia Sassen calls as the brutal expulsions of the contemporary global economy.
(Exhibition: 2021 Uniandes, Traspasos)
Research-Creation: Migration and Ruins
Uniandes, Spring 2022
Instructor: Juan Ricardo Aparicio Cuervo
This shared course between three campuses (Universidad de los Andes-Bogotá, Bard College-Berlín, Germany, Universidad de Witwatersrand-Johannesburgo, South Africa) explores the characteristics, problems and challenges of the force migration field from a Cultural Studies perspective and its analytic lense for understanding this problem within the relation of culture and power and its inherent contradictions. It underscores the relation between the ruin and migration in order to understand how the forced displacement of people inside and outside the Nation-State illuminate many of the fractures and specters that correspond to the history of the present. Thus, ruins and their exploration through the research creation and the artistic practice become the central dimension that would allow us to (1) understand the heterogeneity of the migration experiences and their singularity (2) follow its dense materialities and failure of the discursive regimes and dispositifs displayed by a humanitarian bureaucracy to protect refugees, IDPs, asylum seekers, migrants, etc. And lastly, (3) because it allows us to link migration and the ruins both to the contradictory histories of a coloniality of power, of modes of production, environmental crisis, violent regimes of accumulation by disposession and historical violences; but also, in the inscription of these wounds in the body and the terrain of subjectivities, memories and affects. We will combine the critical analysis with case studies ethnographies and artistic practices that will help us to acknowledge the relevance of the concept of the ruin for approaching the everyday register of migration. Key readings include Stuart Hall, Achile Mbembe, Gloria Anzaldua, Laura Stoler, Gastón Gordillo and Sara Ahmed. As a course that combines the research-creation with the artistic practice, students will develop a project to dwell into the unsaid, to the affective, to the silences and desires.
(Exhibition: 2022 Uniandes, La Frontera y el Telar)
Research-Creation: Artistic Approaches to German History, Memory of Forced Migration and the War
BCB, Spring 2020:
Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann
May 2020 will see the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. While Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8 1945 brought a halt to the mass extermination and warfare that had killed between 40 and 50 million people, overwhelmingly large movements of forced migration continued well into the post-war period and eventually led to the “making of the modern refugee“ (Peter Gatrell), the international refugee regime of our day. Flight and expulsion have since then attained an integral place in collective memory in Germany, being represented in museums and memorials, as well as family verbal and artifactual archives. These memories were reactivated in the “summer of migration“ in 2015, when German society welcomed a large number of migrants with surprising openness and willingness to help, a public mood that was regarded by some as unsustainable. Through methods of research-creation this course examines the connections between the history and memory of wartime and postwar forced migration in Germany, and the history and memory of contemporary forced migration from the Middle East and elsewhere. At museums and memorial sites we experience sources from the German post-war period (films, literature, music), asking what assumptions they convey, and what stories they tell about German and non-German refugees, expellees and displaced persons after the war. Participants then develop their own individual projects, artistic in spirit and relating historical sources to today’s phenomena of forced migration, finding parallels, contradictions, and fruitful references. These projects shall in the second half of the semester be visualised, performed, translated into “art,” experimenting with new ideas and new forms to discover the underlying relationships between the histories and memories of forced migration, of war and revolution, that compete with each other and/or complement each other in today’s Germany. The resulting projects will be exhibited to a broader audience in a public event at the Centre Marc Bloch.
(Exhibition: 2020 BCB, Beyond the Modern Refugee. The exhibition and the public event had to be cancelled due to Covid19; at the time we showed the students’ works in an online showcase.)
(IL)LEGAL: New Artistic and Curatorial Approaches to the History of Migration in Germany
BCB, Spring 2019:
Instructors: Marion Detjen, Dorothea von Hantelmann
This class is a continuation of the Fall 2018 seminar “„Illegal“ and „legal“ migration in Germany since World War II”, but can also be taken by newcomers. It takes Abdelmalek Sayad's concept of „unruly thinking“ („to follow the migrant is to transgress all borders“) onto the field of the history of juridification of migration in Germany, by developing and curating individual artistic projects on questions of legality and illegality of migration. On the basis of interdisciplinary research, each student will create an artistic project, in a medium of choice (film, music, poetry/text, performance, painting, collage, etc.). The production of the individual projects will be accompanied by mentoring sessions with invited contemporary artists. Deploying artistic modes of expression to advance and enhance our previously collected research knowledge should help us to accommodate and to make productive the ambivalences and contingencies of the illegalisation and criminalisation processes connected with unwanted migration. In the first half of the semester we will work on the concepts and artistic potentials of the projects, meet with artists, go to exhibitions and discuss formats and modalities of presentation for the projects. The second half will be spent with the realisation and completion of the art works and with exhibiting/presenting them to the public.
(Exhibition: 2019 BCB, The Skin of the Law)
Research-Creation: New Approaches to the History of Forced Migration in Germany
BCB, Spring 2018:
Instructor: Marion Detjen, John von Bergen
This class is a continuation of the Fall seminar “History and Memory: Forced Migration in 20th and 21st Century Germany”. It combines artistic and conceptual approaches, taught jointly by John von Bergen and Marion Detjen. We will start with an introduction to contemporary art works based on forced migration history and memory, as well as other examples of artworks that may offer inspiration for project development . Then we will go through the concept and the experimental possibilities of “research-creation”, an approach that has been developed in social sciences and humanities to introduce creative processes and artistic practices as an integral part of research. The largest part of the class will be spent working on individual projects to visualize, melodize, spatialize or verbalize previously collected knowledge and experience, seeking to advance and enhance our knowledge with new, artistic means. The students should decide at the beginning of the class whether they wish to pursue “creation-as-research”, i.e. work on an artistic project themselves, or whether they prefer to do “research-from-creation”, i.e. analyze and interpret the works of their fellow students in their formation process. The medium of choice should be established as early as possible for logistical reasons. At the end we will produce an exhibition to present our works and to put them forward for public discussion.
(Exhibition: 2018 BCB, I am the Ghost)
Legal and Illegal Migration in Germany Since World War II
BCB, Fall 2018:
Instructor: Marion Detjen
This course is an introduction to post-War migration history in Germany, with a special focus on “legal” and “illegal” migration and the discourses, policies and concepts of legality that shaped this distinction. In the first half of the term, we will seek to understand why Germany finds it so difficult to conceive of itself as an immigration country. We also examine what kind of migration regimes the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic developed after the Second World War. As we will see, these regimes emerged within the framework of the division and subsequent unification of the two German states, and within a wider European and global context. What means of entry and exit were allowed in the period under examination? What kinds of status were accorded to migrants and refugees, and how did these alter under pressure from changing economic and political exigencies? In the second half of the course we will explore how the various parties involved dealt with the restrictions and the loopholes of the law, often combining “legal” with “illegal” means. We will compare the phenomenon of Fluchthelfer (“escape helpers,” dubbed Menschenhändler by the East German government) with people-smuggling at the European borders today, and we will discuss the connections between the fight against “organized immigration crime” and current negotiations for resettlement programs. The course offers insight into a broad range of methods of migration research and draws on both published and unpublished sources. We will interview experts on border crossings, work on a case study, and make excursions to the Berlin Wall Museum at Bernauer Straße and the NGO Flüchtlingspaten Syrien e.V. At the end of the term, you will be asked to present your own project in a visualised form, using presentation software like Prezi, or film, or collage. Your project can if you wish be continued next term in a “research-creation” class as a more elaborate work of art.
History and Memory: Forced Migration from Nineteenth to Twenty-First-Century Germany
BCB, Fall 2017
Instructor: Marion Detjen
This course is an introduction to the history of forced migration in Germany from WWI to the present day, in the light of recent experiences in Germany related to the ordeals and the designation of those who seek “refugee” status. The course proceeds from the fundamental assumption that the category of the “refugee” is a social construction, negotiated every day under specific conditions of power and hierarchy and tied closely to the memories of those who take part in this negotiation. Germany’s history has always been permeated by violent movements of forced migration. Memories of escape and expulsion have left deep marks in the culture of the country. We will acquire the historical knowledge and methodology needed to understand some of the conditions of these negotiation processes throughout the 20th century until today, and we will then seek, analyse and interpret the memory traces in German and non-German literature. Most importantly, our inquiry will be steered by the questions that the experiences of contemporary “refugeedom” in Germany impose on us. The class will include non-enrolled students and host guests with a personal background of forced migration. We will also make excursions to places where cultural memory is “institutionalized” to a greater or lesser degree.
New approaches to contemporary migration history in Germany
Spring 2017:
New approaches to contemporary migration history in Germany
Instructor: Marion Detjen
This course is a continuation of the Fall seminar course In Search of a History: Migration in Germany from World War II to the Present, focusing on students' individual projects. These projects seek to give visual, verbal, spatial, musical and general aesthetic and sensory expression to previously collected knowledge of migration history and experience. The projects need not have the ambition of entering the realm or category of "art": we consider them "notations," recording our perceptions and thoughts in the modes of articulation that suit us best. First we will review the historical data, tools, and concepts of migration history that allow us to achieve an analytical distance and conceptualize as well as historicize our material. Subsequently, we will work on a collective visualization project. The major part of the course is dedicated to developing and completing the individual projects and findings solutions for exhibiting them. We will cooperate with a number of renowned artists who will add creative, formal, and practical input and advice to our historical and linguistic framework. The course will be taught as a block seminar on three weekends in February, March and April at "BOX Freiraum" in Boxhagener Straße, Neukölln, where we will also be able to exhibit the projects in May. The exhibition is part of an international conference on migration history planned for May 11 and 12. One panel has been reserved for us to present the projects and to reflect on the relations between migration, research, education and creativity that we will have uncovered through our work. Due to its special character the course will be restricted to participation by 15 students. Those interested are asked to apply with a project that should have a clear topic and already show some progress in research and in formulation. The project should have a transnational dimension, crossing at least one national border, and take into account migrant and/or post-migrant experiences. Also, the medium of the chosen "notation" (whether it be film, photography, music, drawing or painting etc.) has to be referenced in the application, so that we can arrange to involve artists competent in the practice cited.
(Exhibitions: 2017 BCB + ]a[, Tread Softly)
In Search of a History: Migration in Germany from World War II to the Present
Fall 2016:
Instructor: Marion Detjen
This course is an introduction to post-war migration history in Germany with a special focus on Berlin, the city that has been a crossing point for migration movements ever since the settlement of the Huguenot Réfugiés in late 17th century, and is now a main center for dealing with issues arising from the so-called "refugee crisis“. In spite of constant migration, German academic historiography has until recently widely neglected this history. We will seek to understand why Germany found it so difficult to conceive of itself as an immigration country and what kind of migration regimes it developed after the Second World War, under the conditions of German separation and reunification and in a European and global context. This will lead us to ask broader questions about how history is being written and what aims and interests it serves. How do personal and collective experience shape historical knowledge, and what is the relationship between politics and history? How many narratives can be formed out of one basic chronology, and how do we find the appropriate categories for analyzing and interpreting our source material? The sources are not restricted to written documents, as we will use the city of Berlin with its rich landscape of memorials, archives and museums as our material, hearing the testimony of contemporary witnesses who wrote German migration history as outsiders. At the end of the term, students will be asked to elaborate their own perspectives on migration history, using the general tools that historical methodology provides but finding the personal modes of expression that suit them best.