I am happy to announce that I was recently awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for 2023. Of course, I am humbled and elated by this news and the foundation’s decision to allow me to continue thinking, reflecting, and writing about the beauty in this world. The novelist Annie Ernaux once wrote Mémoire de fille, “I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.” As a person from the working class who believes deeply in the power of the oppressed to dream, philosophize, and create, I hope to narrate the intimate lives and kinship structures of a diaspora whose dignity, family, and survival were often compromised. I highly recommend reading about the other notable awardees on the Andy Warhol Foundation Website and the announcement in Artforum.
With support from the foundation, I will write a series of essays animating the reproductive lives of people of African descent as portrayed by contemporary Black feminist artists, filmmakers, and sages. My writing will generate connections between the history of science and the aesthetics of the Black womb, reflecting on how the African diaspora has exercised agency through pregnancy termination. It will also conjure the rapturous texture of childlessness and infertility among those who develop alternative models to kin, including queer communities. If you know of any Black artists, filmmakers, and sages producing new exhibitions, films, or performances along these subjects, please share their upcoming events with me. Also, if you know of editors who would like to commission any literary or creative nonfiction informed by the arts, feel free to pass on my information. I can always contact you on my website, which you can access here.
Culture in Berlin
In 2003, a young woman moved with a hypnotic trance. Wearing pink tape on her nipples, the sole performer appears in a post-industrial wasteland, with the sky as her background. After a few seconds, she waves a black fag with three pink Xs and proceeds to drape the textile over her body. Looking into the camera, she chants a speech melody against an electronic beat: "I'm the kind of bitch you wanna get with." As a melodic guitar rift echoes through the air, she wavers, swinging her hair back and forth. The woman is American artist and performer Peaches, and the cameraperson is American musician JD Samson--they are filming at the Tacheles squat. This cultural space housed artists for twenty-two years. They were evicted in 2012.
Since the mid-90s, artists and writers have gathered in Berlin to make it their home. They have done so because the rent was cheap, autonomous spaces were plentiful, the people were incredible, and, as a reminder, rent was affordable. Sometimes, something raw, shocking, and provocative emerges in the Berlin art scene. For many artists I have come across, the impulse to tell a story, experiment, contemplate, or even show oneself capable of bending sight and sound. In 2019, I witnessed a Brazilian visual artist give an account of her grandmother’s life by reading an extended poem attached to her room-length gown. Shortly after the performance, the artist provided all the attendees with a meal. In 2020, a Black drag performer took to the stage, showing a collection of Grindr messages they had received from suitors. I've visited underground galleries, punk shows at squats, and community-run DJ sets and listened to readings where young Lebanese writers and transgender German writers have spoken about love. These artists, musicians, and writers have gathered, working in the center and on the periphery of Berlin's cultural institutions, often taking the time to read and exchange with each other. Of course, this is no utopia because sometimes, the people who get the most significant platform have a particular aspect, effect, or passport. Nevertheless, Berlin is changing and doing so against the things that have driven creative people from Germany, Europe, and beyond.
So long as creative people cannot afford to live, it becomes difficult for them to experiment in ways that lend themselves to shifting a field. But the transformation in the cultural scene is not just impacted by the rising housing costs. But it is also due to the growing xenophobia, rise in fascism, and criticizing of political views in the country. On the surface, this might seem like an exaggerated cry, but whether or not emerging people without inherited wealth or Western passports can be an artist in a place like Berlin (or London or Paris) isn't just about who can safely live in Europe, but whether artists--especially those who are marginalized-- can live in Europe at all.
Far-right, white Germans carry out the majority of hate crimes in Germany. And yet, German politicians would like people to believe that anti-Semitism is being imported. In 2019, an antisemitic attack of the synagogue shooting in Halle and a racist gunman killed nine people of immigrant background in Hanau 2020. For many of the people I know living in Germany at the time, we saw these hate crimes as a phenomenon that was metastasizing alongside the surge of hate groups, increased racial discrimination, and the legitimization of the far-right, anti-immigrant nationalists of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, who in the 2017 general election became the third largest political party in federal parliament. The police repression did not come as a surprise, especially in light of the German police officers having direct links to neo-Nazi groups. When it comes to far-right politics in Germany, the call is mostly coming from inside the house.
Over the past several years, self-censorship, cancellations, and condemnation have been levied at cultural institutions that express their support for Palestinians. In 2019, the German parliament passed a resolution stating that anyone who supports BDS is anti-Semitic and, therefore, is ineligible to appear at any state-funded theatre, museum, lecture hall, or cultural institution. As the Jewish American scholar Susan Neiman has described in The New York Review of Books, allegations of anti-Semitism are fodder for hypervigilant censorship: "So it isn't the absence of historical reckoning with the Holocaust but a twist on it that has led today's Germany into a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens to throttle the country's rich cultural life." Earlier this year, this was articulated at the re-opening of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where Claudia Roth, the culture minister, noted that the ceremony that the B.D.S. movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel over Palestinian occupation would not be allowed, under any circumstances.
Many people are horrified by Hamas's attack on civilians, and those who were directly impacted are mourning their relatives and the safe return of those who are still alive. Many people are also mourning the collective punishment of Palestinians living in Gaza and hope that a peaceful outcome can come from this. Its impact is strong, and this also affects the cultural sphere in Germany.
Since 7 October, that repression has taken a slightly different turn after the cancellation of the Award Ceremony for Palestinian Author Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and German politicians have suggested denying visas or citizenship to people who do not pledge support for Israel. This means that certain voices and people are not welcome in Germany. Just to be clear, these political tensions in Germany do not amount to the same repression and violence that the Israeli hostages who were kidnapped by Hamas or the Palestinians in Gaza who have been bombed by the Israeli military in recent weeks. Instead, it suggests that only certain forms of expression are allowed. The far-right AfD German party is asking to abolish Germany's "guilt cult"--acceptable—protestors are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza--anti-Semitic. Of course, we should condemn anti-Semitism in all of its forms, especially given its surge in Europe. But, as artists and writers living in Germany have indicated, curtailing freedom of speech, which calls for non-violent solutions to the Israeli conflict, is not an effective way to solve anti-Semitism.
The modern-day repression has not gone unchallenged, and an open letter from Jewish artists, writers, and scholars living in Germany recognized their horror about Jewish civilians who were harmed and killed by Hamas. Still, they also expressed their concern about the German government's accusation that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic--which has been levied on Jewish people. They argue:
As Jews, we reject this pretext for racist violence and express complete solidarity with our Arab, Muslim, and particularly Palestinian neighbors. We refuse to live in prejudicial fear. What frightens us is the prevailing atmosphere of racism and xenophobia in Germany, hand in hand with a constraining and paternalistic philo-Semitism. We reject in particular the conflation of anti-Semitism and any criticism of the state of Israel.
Peaches was one of the signatories. Germans, who have intimate knowledge of Hebrew and leftist movements in Israel, have also weighed in on the more significant implications of German politics. Writing for The Guardian, German journalist Hanno Hauenstein wrote: "Palestinians, artists and curators from the so-called global south and leftwing Israelis are regularly reprimanded, dismissed or canceled for views on Israeli policies that are deemed unpalatable." The backlash is just one of the ways that Germany and its political landscape will change, but it also means that the cultural milieu, one that was a haven for anarchists, leftists, and bohemians, might not be the case.
In early September, I saw Peaches perform a concert at a cleaner version of Am Tacheles, which has now been repurposed for Fotografiska, a Swedish photography center. She was wearing an incandescent pink outfit against the backdrop of a rainbow-coloured lining of her name. Alternating between an array of leather outfits, fur, and ruffles, Peaches belted fierce, breathy lyrics as she glanced over her admirers. At one point, her dancers wore an outfit that was shaped like a giant vagina. For two hours, sweaty flesh pounced against each other, on and off stage, making me forget that luxury apartments, shops, and office spaces surrounded me. Amazingly, her performance did not disappoint, but other than the graffiti in the stairwell, very little of Tacheles was preserved, which left me wondering what it meant for her to perform in the same space that afforded her the financial freedom to make art and function. That night, I left Peaches' concert elated, mostly wondering how people are being pushed out because living is getting more expensive.
But two months later, another question is weighing on my mind: what type of artist will be permitted to live, speak, or perform in Germany over the next few years?
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As always, thank you for reading,
OMG i wish i knew this when we bumped into each other today in the UBahn - congratulations, you deserve it all!
(and: thank you for this amazing text!)