Gesture as a Hinge. From East Berlin, 1989, to Gezi Park, 2013, to Tehran, 2022

A conversation between Elske Rosenfeld and Burak Üzümkesici

This text was first published in Turkish on the feminist website https://www.5harfliler.com/dogu-almanyadan-geziye-jestler-ve-toplumsal-mucadelelerin-dili-elske-rosenfeld-ile-soylesi/ in April 2023

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Burak Üzümkesici – Your work “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” is an exploration of the ways by which we remember and make sense of social movements or historical turning points. It takes its materials from quite different historical moments, ranging from the last days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989/90, to the Gezi Park protests of 2013, or the so-called Arab Spring from 2011 onwards. The primary concern of your work is the “embodiment of revolt and revolution” and you seek this embodiment in what you call “revolutionary gestures”. You seem to be suggesting that there is a distinct grammar offered to us by these events, and that we don’t yet have the means to speak this particular language, or that we don’t yet know what to do with the elements of this language. If I am not mistaken, you have been working on this project on a regular basis since 2013 – and you showed a selection of four works as part of the multi-part, site-specific installation “Archive of Gestures” at last year’s Berlin Biennial. What was your initial point of departure, and how does this revolutionary vocabulary resonate with you now?

Elske Rosenfeld –It is true that this project has accompanied me for a long time. 2013 was when I first formalized my research under the title “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures”  into a number of gestures and corresponding artworks and texts. However, my interest in revolution, and in particular the events of 1989/90, dates back much further. If you will, it began in 1989/90 when I, as a young person, joined the protests in the streets in my hometown in Halle. The months from the first demonstrations in October 1989 to the so-called German reunification in October 1990 were politically formative for me. I got deep into the practices of self-emancipation that we lived through collectively: the discussions which I took part in, for example at school and during political marches and meetings, about how to organise a more just, democratic, equitable, and also ecological society. I was equally deeply disappointed when the accession of the GDR to the Federal Republic cut this powerful reappropriation of collective life short. The takeover of the revolution into a different – conservative, nationalist –project not only put an end to the practices of bottom-up self-empowerment and collective debate that I had lived through, but also eradicated these from the realm of the politically imaginable once more. I have come to experience this disconnect between how the history of this revolution has come to be told – as a restoration of national unity and the triumph of capitalism or liberal democracy – and the radical self-enfranchisement that I experienced and practiced as a protagonist as a form of speechlessness. But this disconnect, this perceived gap, has also stayed with me as strong impulse to think and to create.

The idea to approach this gap and this experience through the notion of gesture – that is through a number of figures that connect somatic, geometrical, philosophical and affective aspects of revolution – arose from a number of observations: Firstly, there was the fact that whenever I tried to talk with other protagonists about the events, our shared inability to find a fitting language manifested not just as an absence or lack, but also as a bodily animation. My conversation partners were dismissing our self-empowerment and our visions in the vocabularies that dominant historiography has made available to us: as “naïve”, as “utopian”, as always already doomed to fail. But at the very same time their bodies were alive with all of the things these words could not contain: the hope, the joy, the disappointment and pain – which were all so quick to come to the surface, as if no time had passed since 1990 at all. The second important insight, or let’s say methodological cue, came in 2011, with the beginning of the new wave of global revolutions and movements: the Arab Spring and the occupy movements that it inspired. People talk about “triggering” in a negative sense, where the story of another makes you re-live an old trauma. But for me, following the uprising through the news, but more importantly also through the facebook feeds of some Egyptian friends, tapped directly into my own earlier experience. Talking to my friends from Cairo, and later also friends in Istanbul during Gezi, and then again, more recently, with people involved in the uprisings in Ukraine in 2014 and Belarus in 2020, I felt that there was finally a new chance to work on a shared vocabulary – across times and places – for what we all in our different contexts and locations lived through.

The “Vocabulary of Gestures” was a way to formalize and work with these insights. Following reporting and documents from these different events, I amassed a collection of actual images as well as more abstract motifs – physical, geometrical, temporal figures and physical movements and gestures – that repeated themselves across all of these different places and times. These became the starting points of artistic and textual articulations, like the artworks of the “Archive of Gestures” described above. In these works, the gestures become hinges between different historical events, making it possible to think about 1989 through footage from Cairo or Istanbul or Minsk – and the other way around. Not only was I able to learn something about 1989 through its resonances with these present uprisings, but my work on 1989 seemed to resonate with the protagonists of these events – just as it did with you. These moments of mutual recognition and exchange are the tools, but at the same time also the rewards of my work.

– At the Biennale last year, you exhibited four installations from this research as an “Archive of Gestures.” In Speaking (Statements for the Future), a 1-channel video installation from 2019/2022, you are reperforming declarations, manifestos, and demands made by political figures and groups in the uprising in 1989/90 in the GDR. In Interrupting (A bit of a Complex Situation), a 2-channel video-installation from 2014, you conduct a close reading of a scene from the same period, in which a Round Table meeting of representatives of the state and the new political groups in the GDR is interrupted by the sounds of a demonstration gathering outside. Circling (Another Round) was a new video installation, where you “revolve/circle” around the camp on Tahrir square after the end of a wave of protests: an edit of a video you shot spontaneously during a visit to Cairo in 2012, where an Egyptian friend and you try to come to terms with the end of a protest as a particular historical moment. And in the site-specific video installation Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers), also from last year, you invite us to “stand” before – or behind – the Standing Man at the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul in 2013. A fifth work, Repeating (Versuche/Framed) from 2018, which you included via a QR code to be watched online, is a re-framing of some footage that had initially been shot for campaign video for one of the former citizens’ movements in 1990 and shows protagonists rewatching footage of themselves from a year before, at the Round Table.

ER – The “Archive of Gestures” was a way to show the different works of the project in the way they were conceived, namely, in relation to each other. Each of these works exists only because I was able to think these different historical moments through each other. This new iteration of my project also has an online life on www.archiveofgestures.net – a platform that I use to archive and share my research, but also to initiate new works and collaborations. This year, for example, I will add the gesture “Being In/visible” – an online collage and performance that I am developing with the Belarusian artist Olia Sosnovskaya.

BÜ – I would like to single out a word/gesture from this series; stand, or standstill; in order to dwell on the idea of the gestures as hinges between the events you have chosen to work with. In the last thirty-five years, we have witnessed the political power of standing, of stillness, from the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, to Rachel Corrie in Gaza, to the Standing Man in the Gezi protests, and from Vida Movahhed’s headscarf protest in Iran to the thousands of women in the feminist uprising today. That brilliant article written by L from the streets of Iran[1], which received a lot of attention in many places last year, was emphasizing the silent action of Vida Movahhed, in contrast to the women who made videos to verbalize their outrage. She compared the powerful impact of the circulation of Vida’s photographic image with these videos. For her, the image of this standing figure was “a transition from the narration of an everyday circumstance to the creation of a historic situation.” A moment of silence that intensifies all the problems in a single image, without establishing a representational link. A photographic image, circulating from one hand to another, of a figure who revolts against the way life just goes on, disrupting the flow and continuity. I find it very insightful when she emphasizes that this image of standstill embodies a promise and the way she connects the stillness with the mobilization of people. Strikes, occupations, blockades, that is, actions to stop the flow, have recently been on the rise again in different geographies. “That things ‘go on like this’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin’s well-known phrase, is like the motto of current struggles.

ER – Yes, this text by L was beautiful! Her text talks so powerfully not only about standing still – persisting, taking a literal stand as well as arresting time to create an image –, but also about a circular relation between protest and image and, of course, a practice of mimicry, and repetition. For me, the images that Iranian activists create, or rather, become, as they inhabit certain poses, are militant images – that is, images that are, as you rightly said, not about representing the revolt to the outside, but about keeping it going. This way of using images is something I observed in many of the recent revolts. In Cairo, in 2012 for example, I was impressed by the work of activists from the Mosireen Collective/Tahrir Cinema, who were screening footage from recent protests in impromptu outdoor “cinemas” set up in different popular neighbourhoods – which performed precisely that function at the time.[2] When I was in Istanbul in 2014, one artist we spoke to told us that there was an agreement – whether spoken or unspoken I cannot remember – that artists should refuse the demands of the international art community for instant images, instant representations of the protests. I found this a very powerful position to take; avoiding among other things, the instant commodification of protest[3], even for the “alternative” economies of attention of the critical art world.

In my work on 1989, I also look at how images were used in the revolutionary process, albeit with the more limited technological possibilities of the time. The footage of the Round Table that I use in Interrupting, for example, appears to me to be part of what I would call a militant film practice. During the Round Table’s first meeting, an independent documentary filmmaker, Klaus Freymuth, had been invited to record the session informally. He was there as a member of one of the new political groups. He then went and positioned himself and his camera not at the best vantage point, that is, a place from where he would get a “good” frontal shot, but, in accordance with his political affiliation, behind the oppositional side to which he belonged. This positioning produces a particular, skewed image, where the row of faces and bodies on the most active – the oppositional – side of the Table are seen from the side, from slightly behind. This way, their bodies are staggered one behind the other, often blocking each other out or merging into one body with multiple heads or limbs. The fragmented and fused collective body, that is produced by this affected camera is fascinating to me. But my work also asks about the political function such images can take on after the revolution, when they testify to a historical reality that has disappeared, or been erased from the historical narrative, but might still be recovered through such documents.

BÜ – It is indeed curious to see how positioning oneself changes the way one remembers the past. As long as we are not in an active effort to keep the memory of our own experience alive, the language of the sovereigns sitting on the other side of that table, sinks into our language too, as you just said, by making us see ourselves as naïve utopians. People who crack open the doors to another world with their own hands and experience social liberation through their own bodies, whether in Gezi or in another geography, eventually end up reproducing the sovereign discourse. Once the trajectory of our thinking is reduced to the binary of success and defeat with regard to criteria such as disorganization, lack of a leadership or political agenda, failure at overthrowing the government, etc., we cannot explore the layers of our struggles that we could not recognize at the time. The subsequent feeling of pessimism and surrender, the trivialization of one’s own power, that comes in the aftermath of the event, must have something to do with this fact.

You say in one of your articles in the context of art: “Western understandings of art made not only East German art practices disappear from view, but also, and perhaps more crucially, the material and discursive contexts in which their aesthetics and politics could be read.”[4] I think what causes that constitutive amazement in events like Gezi, what causes us to perceive things in a completely different way, stems from the fact that we set up new “contexts”, or in other words, we set up our own stage, as Georges Didi-Huberman emphasizes, the stage on which our political expressions appear.[5] Therefore, in the wake of the event, or to say, after the stage disperses, we need more insights that can resist the colonization of our minds and that rationalize these exceptional moments of collective experiences. In the absence of such revolutionary moments, art provides us with a context in which to carry out these experiments, and artistic practices like yours provide the toolkit for them.

ER – You are addressing a very important point here: the fact that recent revolts and revolutions are not produced by, but must produce the vocabularies – the sense-making contexts or “stages” – in which their success or failure can be discussed. One thing that the revolutions from 1989 onwards have in common is that, just as they don’t tend to have any clear leaders, they also lack a prior vision or blueprint for a post-revolutionary future. This lack of a clear goal has often been thought of as the reason behind these revolutions’ or protests’ failure to achieve real, structural change. But I think that the disappointing outcomes of these revolutions were not so much the product of their internal failure, – their lack of coherent visions, or their internal contradictions – as of their defeat (this a distinction I take from Bini Adamczak’s writing on the Russian revolution) from the outside. Different sets of players, either from among the old elites, or, in the East German case from among the ruling West German conservatives, often with much more ample resources, imposed their own agendas, before the revolutionary process itself has the chance to institutionalise into its own new political and societal forms. And with this takeover also ends the process in which the revolution creates its own language – with the result you describe above: that the revolutionaries have to borrow the unchanged vocabularies of the status quo (or as Benjamin put it, of the victors of history) to make sense of their own history. Art can then become a space, where those parts of the revolutionary experience that become unintelligible in this dominant historiography, can once more be shared.

– In her writings on Paris Commune and May ’68, Kristin Ross also includes the approaches of sociologists and historians among the external factors that feed into this “defeat” narrative. Sociology, she says, “has always set itself up as the tribunal to which the real—the event—is brought to trial after the fact, to be measured, categorized, and contained.”[6]

ER – Which is a pity, because a more militant form of sociology might be a great tool for approaching the new politics that these revolutions unfold in their lived forms. You know this of course, from the camp at Gezi Park: how it organized basic necessities such as food, shelter and protection, without leadership in the traditional sense. For the Egyptian case, Asef Bayat[7] has done wonderful research into these forms of self-organisation that explode during uprisings and occupations, but also predate and outlive the revolutionary period to some degree. I think there is work to be done, both on the empirical and the conceptual level to understand how revolutions unfold their politics as practice, often even beyond their actors’ own intent or comprehension. We need political concepts and methodologies that go beyond the older Marxist understanding of revolution as system change, but also beyond more recent concepts of the Political as a mere interruption, mere negation, like that of, for example, Jacques Rancière. Feminist approaches that look at the day to day of revolution are useful here, like those of Judith Butler[8], Veronica Gago[9], or Ewa Majewska[10],  all of who have developed their analyses of recent revolts and revolutions close to their participants’ bodies. They understand the politics of revolution as something that happens between the registers of the minor and the major: between those “small” acts of care and sustenance, that earlier feminists have allowed us to recognize as political, and the revolutions’ exceptional “heroic” moment. What I find so helpful about these approaches is that by looking for the ordinary in the extraordinary, they also allow us to find the potential for radical change in the most unexceptional everyday. In my work I am interested in this question of how the revolution manifests in bodies – but also in how it survives there as an emancipatory knowledge or impulse after a revolution’s declared end. I think this is where my work on the revolution of 1989/90 – in my art projects, but also in my upcoming book – can add something to the conversation, simply because in this case the tension that exists between official history and an embodied counter-knowledge has been there for a much longer time.

BÜ – Let’s also talk about the physical tension in bodies during the uprisings, taking another example from the “Archive of Gestures”. On June 17, 2013, two days after the police forcibly evacuated Gezi Park, the eight-hour long still-act of Duran Adam (the Standing Man, Erdem Gündüz) took place. And with that, the police not knowing what to do, the staggering effect it had on the raison d’état, the people who appeared in squares all over Turkey and stood for days… And this time, Duran Adam is standing in the center of Berlin, inside the Akademie der Künste building on Pariser Platz, on the threshold of its glazed façade. You placed two parallel monitors connected to one another by a metal structure. One monitor displays Erdem’s face and turned towards the biennial site, in a position to welcome those entering the building. The other monitor displays his back, facing the Brandenburg Gate, and the parliament building a little further away. With this set-up, it appears to be a digital sculpture of resistance for tourists, exhibited on the edge of the square. There is also an impressive contrast between the sumptuous rearing of the imperial symbol quadriga above the Brandenburg Gate and the standstill of Duran Adam. When we put on the headphones, we hear the sounds of Taksim Square and of Vito Acconci’s 1971 video work, “Centers”, in which he stands still for 23 minutes with his index finger pointed at the camera. The gesture that characterizes Duran Adam and Acconci’s work is standstill. Both performances are characterized by persistence, tenacity and even stubbornness. Both play with the audience’s expectation of progression and change, the expectation of a transition to a new state. And the “new” does not emerge. The social tension generated by that expectation is joined by the tension that condenses in the artist’s body, in the muscles, nerves, joints. Therefore, what we name as standstill is actually a challenge, a threshold experience between the psycho-physical dynamic inside the body and the social dynamic between the body and the exterior. As an artist, you take over this persistence and steadily point your camera at these gestures or hold your microphone to their sounds, both replicating and amplifying them and intervening in them and the way they are received.

ER – My work with Erdem Gündüz’ gesture differs from my other works with found footage in that it is a dialogue with another artist (or, I should say, with other artists, because I also respond to Vito Acconci’s work, as you rightly point out). Gündüz’ gesture is an artwork as well as a form of protest and it is extremely rich. I am glad that you picked up on some of the aspects of his gesture that my work responds to and riffs off on, as it moves the gesture into this specific location and the context of an art exhibition. Let me add a few more thoughts. One thing that interested me is that Gündüz produces a temporary sculpture and I would say, a non-heroic sculpture, in the sense that the sculpture is made up of his living body which makes it absolutely impermanent and vulnerable. For the sound that one hears through the headphones, I used samples from video footage I found online, where Gündüz is searched by the police who touch Gündüz’s body all over, which is very violent. In my rendition, by being integrated into an upright metal structure, Gündüz’ gesture becomes even more sculptural – it becomes a kind of monument. But it is still not static, it is, in fact, trembling. By filming the photos of Gündüz’ protest with a handheld camera, the still image that his gesture turned into and that then circulated across the globe is reanimated. This way, standing still is revealed as the multiplicity of micro-movements, the dense vibration that it actually is, physiologically speaking. But this time it is my body, not Gündüz’, that is trembling and producing an image that is shaken up, that is instable, unfixed. The minimalism of my intervention (or non-intervention) repeats the minimalism of his gesture. In my work this minimalism becomes an invitation to the viewer to become still, to slow down in watching. I am interested in the possibility that, if the viewer quietens herself, she might attune her perception to notice more, in the work, around the work, in herself.

Thirdly, as you rightly observe, the positioning of the monitors is important. On Taksim Square, Gündüz was facing a portrait of Atatürk. Some of my Turkish friends are uncomfortable with his gesture, because of this Kemalist, nationalist orientation. In my take on the gesture, of course, Gündüz turns his back on the Brandenburg Gate – a national symbol, or a symbol of nationalism, that has a particular resonance for me as an East German. It is, of course, my back, that is turned to the symbol of the German unification, and the way it happened that was anathema to my experience of and my hopes for that revolution. That said, the site-specificity of the installation at the Akademie der Künste was an added layer for me. The idea for this work predates the invitation of the Biennale and, as it were, stands on its own for me.

– The struggle over symbols also seems to be escalating. We live in a time when “heroic” statues and monuments symbolizing colonialism are toppled and the work on decolonization is intensifying. Meanwhile, in the heart of Berlin, a replica of the imperial palace has been rebuilt on the rubble of the GDR parliament. Named the Humboldt Forum, it opened as a museum in July, 2021. In Germany, the GDR past is, if not a taboo topic, a narrative that strictly focuses on its oppressive aspects. When I came to Berlin a few years ago, I attended a German language course. In one of the lessons on the history of Berlin, I was quite surprised by the way in which the GDR past was presented. Imagine, you are in a language course, you have just arrived, you don’t know anyone and you find yourself in the midst of anti-communist propaganda. As though this was the worst, repressive, shameful period in German history, and foreigners should have been informed about it immediately. Even in the films on the GDR that I sometimes saw at festivals, I found that a narrative of trauma was dominant. Was there really not a single positive impression or experience? A dynamism that we can draw from the past to the present, revolutionary aspirations, dreams or wishes that can feed current struggles? In that sense, it seemed to me like there was a strange silence about the GDR in general.

ER – Of course the experience of living in the GDR was not all negative. People lived complex, contradictory and rich lives under, despite and in response to the model of socialism that had been implemented by this country’s rather dogmatic and paranoid regime. The memory of the GDR is woven through with different traumas, some of which pertain to experiences of violence and repression in the GDR, some of which pertain to the trauma of the biographical, social and economic rupture after unification, and some of which are, finally, connected to the revolution itself, the hopes it raised and then failed to redeem. The trauma caused by the repressive nature of the East German state – itself a result of the failure of the emancipatory project of state-socialism in its Leninist and Stalinist mould – is a complex issue and one that has not been served well by the simplifying, reductive, and largely ideologically motivated anti-communist forms of commemoration and historicisation the unification has put into place. The process of undoing and complexifying this narrative is a formidable task that is only just being taken up.

Regarding the trauma of the economic shock transformation and cultural erasure during the 1990s there has been a big shift in recent years from a purely celebratory attitude to the (post-)unification to a more factual approach. A younger generation of east Germans, that grew up during those years have begun to enter the media and other institutions in a way earlier generations had not – and have been able to break the silence surrounding those years. It has become possible to speak of the unification as failed or at least as partially failed.

However, what interests me in particular, and what I believe is still completely, and tellingly missing from this conversation, is the trauma of the end of the revolution. This is the speechlessness about the revolution that I talked about in the beginning – and a phenomenon that I have heard people talk about with regard to other revolutions und political movements – Gezi, the Arab spring, the Solidarność movement in Poland in the early 1980s – that are considered as failed. This is the trauma of having invested yourself wholeheartedly in a project of self-empowerment that was then defeated and, after being defeated, dismissed by the new or old custodians of the status quo as utopian, misguided, or naive. This left people embarrassed by their own former hopes, by their belief – which was in fact not a mere belief but a lived, if brief, experience – that it is possible to reorganize life collectively, based on a presumption of equality.

Unlike the trauma of the neoliberal shock transformation that can now be talked about because it is, in fact, over, the conditions that created the trauma of the post-revolution are still with us. The sense of disenfranchisement that followed a great self-enfranchisement remains unbroken – we are still in the post-revolution, in this sense. Which makes this trauma much harder to see and talk about. In Germany, the disappointment that many post-revolutionaries felt after unification was quickly depoliticized and pathologized. Almost two decades of east German discontent and protest (against the mass privatisations of the early 90s, and against the social cuts of the early 2000s) have been filed away as irrelevant under the trope of the “Jammerossi” – a depiction of east Germans as ungrateful and unpolitical. It is only after the protests took a drift to the right – in their language and aims – after 2014 that they were taken seriously. This again, is a big topic, but, I think, an important one that ties the question of the historicisation of revolt and revolution – the question of an adequate vocabulary for its enduring emancipatory promise – intimately to our ability to respond to the crises of the present. It hugely impacts people’s trust in their ability to shape their own future or, conversely, their susceptibility to the authoritarian counter-offer. In this sense, I see both our work on the (counter-)narrativization of the emancipatory projects we lived through in the GDR in 1989, in Turkey in 2013 as much more than pure historiography: as the arena in which our ability to act in the present comes to be either constrained and closed down or bolstered and expanded.

 

Burak Üzümkesici holds an MA in Art History from İstanbul Technical University and is currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His areas of research mainly focus on forms of political action, artistic practices, mimesis theory, media and mediation.

 

References:

[1]Figuring a Women’s Revolution: Bodies Interacting with their Images”, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44479 and https://www.e-flux.com/notes/497512/women-reflected-in-their-own-history.

[2] For Rosenfeld’s speech in Cairo in 2012, see “Pictures that refuse to go back inside. An artist talk on revolutionary images”, https://www.eipcp.net/projects/creatingworlds/rosenfeld/en.html

[3] For a recent and an important discussion on the commodification of protests in the context of Iran, see “The Commodification of Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) by Art Institutions in the West”, https://www.another-screen.com/films-from-iran-for-iran

[4]Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies”, http://dissidencies.net/signals-gestures-collective-bodies/

[5] Georges Didi-Huberman, “Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 27, no. 55–56 (2018): 8–22.

[6] Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4.

[7] Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021).

[8] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Reprint edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

[9] Veronica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything, trans. Liz Mason-Deese (Verso, 2020).

[10] Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common (London: Verso, 2021).

»Revolutionäre Gesten« Sprache finden durch Protest und künstlerische Praxis

Ein Gespräch zwischen Elske Rosenfeld und Burak Üzümkesici

Burak Üzümkesici sprach mit Elske Rosenfeld über künstlerische Zugänge zu »revolutionären Gesten« und »militanten Bildern«, über politische Bühnen, die körperliche Erfahrung gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche und deren Scheitern.[1]

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Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Marie Egger.

Erschien im November 2024 in: Melanie Franke (Hg.) “Selbsterzählungen und Umbruchspuren im Œuvre von Künstler:innen aus der DDR”, permant Verlag

Burak Üzümkesici: Elske, in deiner künstlerischen Praxis beschäftigst du dich mit politischer Dissidenz und untersuchst, wie sich historische Ereignisse durch das, was du »revolutionäre Gesten« nennst, verkörpern. Dein künstlerisches Forschungsprojekt Archive of Gestures erkundet, wie wir uns an soziale Bewegungen und an historische Wendepunkte erinnern und ihnen Sinn zu geben versuchen. Dein Material stammt von verschiedenen historischen Ereignissen: aus den letzten Tagen der DDR 1989/90, von den Gezi-Protesten 2013 oder vom Arabischen Frühling. Du zeigst, dass es eine Grammatik für die (Körper-)Sprache solcher revolutionären Ereignisse gibt, von der wir (noch) nicht wissen, wie sie zu sprechen oder was mit dem Vokabular dieser Sprache anzufangen ist.

Auf der Berlin Biennale 2022 hast du vier ortsspezifische Installationen aus deinem Langzeitprojekt ausgestellt, an dem du seit 2013 arbeitest: In der Videoinstallation Speaking (Statements for the Future) von 2019/22 performst du Erklärungen, Manifeste und Forderungen von politischen Persönlichkeiten und Gruppen während des Aufbruchs 1989/90 in der DDR (Abb. 1). Die Videoinstallation Interrupting (A bit of a Complex Situation) von 2014 ist ein Close-Reading einer Szene aus derselben Zeit, in der eine Versammlung von Vertreter:innen des Staates und neuer politischer Gruppen der DDR am sogenannten Runden Tisch von den Geräuschen einer am Versammlungsort vorbeiziehenden Demonstration unterbrochen wird (Abb. 2 und 3). Circling (Another Round) von 2021 ist eine Videoinstallation, die zeigt, wie du den Tahrir-Platz nach dem Ende einer Protestwelle mit einer Kamera umkreist (Abb. 4 und 5). Du hast das Video spontan während eines Besuchs in Kairo im Jahr 2012 aufgenommen, man hört dich darin mit einer Freundin aus der Stadt über diesen historischen Moment – das Ende einer Revolution – sprechen. Die ortsspezifische Videoinstallation Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers) von 2021 lädt dazu ein, vor oder hinter dem »Standing Man« der Gezi-Park-Proteste in Istanbul 2013 zu stehen (Abb. 6). Was war der Ausgangspunkt für diese komplexe Arbeit, und wie wirkt das Vokabular dieser Revolutionen heute auf dich?

Elske Rosenfeld: Das Projekt begleitet mich schon lange. 2013 habe ich unter dem Titel A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures meine künstlerische Forschung erstmals in einer Reihe von Gesten, Kunstwerken und Texten formalisiert. Mein Interesse an Revolutionen, insbesondere an dem Umbruch von 1989/90, liegt aber in meiner Biografie begründet. Ich habe 1989 als Schülerin an den Protesten in meiner Heimatstadt Halle teilgenommen. Diese Zeit von den ersten Demonstrationen im Oktober 1989 bis zur sogenannten deutschen Wiedervereinigung im Oktober 1990 hat mich, wie so viele, politisch nachhaltig geprägt. Ich sah mich als Teil der kollektiven Emanzipation – einer Demokratisierung von unten –, die wir damals gemeinsam erprobten. Ich nahm in der Schule und in anderen Gruppen und Zusammenhägen an Diskussionen teil, in denen besprochen wurde, wie eine gerechte, demokratische und ökologische Gesellschaft organisiert werden könnte. Umso mehr enttäuschte es mich, dass diese machtvolle Aneignung des kollektiven Lebens mit dem Beitritt der DDR zur Bundesrepublik abrupt abgeschnitten wurde. Die Übertragung der Revolution in ein konservatives und nationalistisches Projekt beendete nicht nur die Praktiken der kollektiven Gestaltung neuer politischer Formen, die ich erlebt hatte, sondern löschte diese im selben Moment auch wieder aus dem Bereich des politisch Vorstellbaren. Die Diskrepanz zwischen der offiziellen Erzählung dieser Revolution als Wiederherstellung der nationalen Einheit, als Triumph des Kapitalismus oder der liberalen Demokratie, und der Art, wie ich diese Revolution als Protagonistin erlebt und mitgestaltet habe, empfinde ich heute als Sprachlosigkeit.

Diese Leerstelle ist für mich aber auch ein starker Impuls für mein Denken und Schaffen. Ich nähere mich ihr durch den Begriff der Geste an – das heißt, durch Figuren, die somatische, geometrische, philosophische und affektive Aspekte der Revolution hervorheben und miteinander verbinden. Dieses Vorgehen beruht auf mehreren Beobachtungen: Zum einen zeigte sich, wann immer ich versuchte, mit anderen Protagonist:innen über die Ereignisse zu sprechen, ein gewisses Unvermögen, unsere Erfahrung, aber auch unsere damaligen Hoffnungen und Vorstellungen in Worte zu fassen. So kommt es, dass heute viele Protagonist:innen all jene Aspekte des Erlebten, die sich in der gängigen Erzählung der Ereignisse oder innerhalb unseres Verständnisses von Politik und Revolution nicht fassen lassen, als »naiv«, »utopisch«, oder »immer schon zum Scheitern verurteilt« abwerten. Gleichzeitig kommunizierten unsere Körper aber im Gespräch außerhalb der Sprache all die Dinge, die sich nicht erklären oder begründen lassen: die Aufregung über das, was damals möglich schien, die Trauer und Wut über den Verlust dieser damals kurzzeitig durchaus greifbar gewordenen, neuen politischen Möglichkeiten. In den Körpern meiner Gesprächspartner:innen sind diese Affekte noch quicklebendig, als wäre seit 1990 keine Zeit vergangen.

Einen weiteren Impuls erhielt ich ab 2011 durch die neue Welle globaler Revolutionen, angefangen mit dem Arabischen Frühling und der Occupy-Bewegung. Während ich diese Ereignisse in den Nachrichten und in den Facebook-Feeds meiner ägyptischen Freund:innen mitverfolgte, kamen meine eigenen Erfahrungen wieder hoch; ich fühlte mich – im positiven Sinn – getriggert. Ich habe damals viel mit Freund:innen aus Kairo und während der Gezi-Proteste 2013 mit Freund:innen aus Istanbul gesprochen und später auch mit Menschen, die an den Aufständen in der Ukraine und in Belarus beteiligt waren. Aus den überraschenden Resonanzen zwischen dem, was wir in verschiedenen Kontexten über Zeiten und Orte hinweg erlebt haben, versuche ich also, ein gemeinsames gestisches Vokabular zu entwickeln.

Die Gesten dieses Vokabulars sind es, die zwischen den verschiedenen historischen Ereignissen vermitteln. Sie ermöglichen es mir, über den Umbruch von 1989/90 auch anhand von Bildern aus Kairo, Istanbul oder Minsk nachzudenken. Ich sammle also in Berichten und Dokumenten solcher Ereignisse Bilder und Motive – zum Beispiel bestimmte physische, geometrische und zeitliche Figuren und körperliche Bewegungen –, die sich in den unterschiedlichen Kontexten wiederholen. Dieses Material ist der Ausgangspunkt für meine Arbeit am Archive of Gestures.

Burak Üzümkesici: Ich würde gern ein Beispiel aus diesem Archiv aufgreifen, um deine Idee von der Geste als Scharnier zwischen verschiedenen revolutionären Ereignissen zu vertiefen, die Arbeit Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers) von 2021. Das Bild einer stehenden Person kann im Kontext von Revolutionen als Ausdruck politischer Handlungsmacht gesehen werden. In den letzten drei Jahrzehnten haben wir die politische Kraft des Stillstehens immer wieder beobachten können, angefangen mit dem unbekannten »Tank Man«, der sich 1989 auf dem Platz des Himmlischen Friedens in Peking vor einen Panzer stellte, über Rachel Corrie, die sich 2003 in Gaza israelischen Streitkräften entgegenstellte, und den »Standing Man« Erdem Gündüz bei den Gezi-Protesten in Istanbul 2013 bis hin zu Vida Movaheds Kopftuchprotest 2022 im Iran. In ihrem vielgelesenen Text hat die iranische Autorin L. die stille Aktion von Vida Movahed mit den Frauen, die Videos drehten, um ihre Empörung verbal zu verbreiten, verglichen und dabei die große Wirkmacht der Zirkulation von Vidas fotografischem Bild hervorgehoben. Für sie war das Bild dieser stehenden Person »a transition from the narration of an everyday circumstance to the creation of a historic situation«.[2] L. schreibt, das Bild verkörpere den Stillstand als Versprechen, und sie erörtert, wie dieser Stillstand in die Mobilisierung von Menschen mündet.

Elske Rosenfeld: Sie spricht in ihrem Text nicht nur über das Stehenbleiben und das Anhalten der Zeit in einem Bild, sondern auch allgemein über die Beziehung zwischen Protest und Bild und über Nachahmung und Wiederholung. Aus meiner Sicht werden die Posen der iranischen Aktivist:innen durch ihren Entstehungskontext und durch ihre mediale Verbreitung zu militanten Bildern. Bei Fotos wie denen von den protestierenden iranischen Frauen, von Erdem Gündüz, Rachel Corrie oder dem »Tank Man« geht es nicht darum, die Revolte abzubilden oder zu dokumentieren, sondern darum, sie am Laufen zu halten. Dieses Phänomen des Gefrierens einer Pose zu einem militanten Bild lässt sich bei vielen Aufständen beobachten.

In meiner Arbeit untersuche ich auch, wie diese Art Bilder 1989/90 entstand und eingesetzt wurde. Das Filmmaterial vom ersten Treffen des Zentralen Runden Tischs in Ost-Berlin, das ich in meiner Arbeit Interrupting (A bit of a Complex Situation) von 2014 verwende, würde ich sogar als Produkt einer militanten Filmpraxis bezeichnen. Der unabhängige Dokumentarfilmer Klaus Freymuth war damals als Mitglied des Neuen Forums bei dem Treffen anwesend und wurde von den Beteiligten spontan gebeten, es mit seiner Kamera mitzuschneiden. Er positionierte sich und seine Kamera dann aber nicht an einem Punkt, von dem aus er eine möglichst professionelle, »neutrale« Aufnahme hätte machen können, sondern er stellte sich auf die Seite des Tisches, der er sich politisch zugehörig fühlte. Durch diese Positionierung der Kamera sind die Gesichter und Körper der Oppositionellen nicht von vorn, sondern von der Seite beziehungsweise von hinten zu sehen. Die Körper sind hintereinander aufgereiht, verdecken sich gegenseitig oder verschmelzen zu einem Körper mit mehreren Köpfen oder Gliedmaßen. Der zersplitterte und verschmolzene »kollektive Körper«, den diese Kameraposition erzeugt, ist ein Aspekt, der mich in meiner Bearbeitung interessiert hat.

Burak Üzümkesici: Ich komme noch einmal auf deine Arbeit Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers) zurück, da wir anhand ihrer gut über eine bestimmte Spannung im menschlichen Körper während politischer Aufstände sprechen können: Zwei Tage nach der gewaltsamen Räumung des Gezi-Parks in Istanbul durch die Polizei protestierte am 17. Juni 2013 der Tänzer und Choreograf Erdem Gündüz, indem er acht Stunden lang regungslos auf dem Taksim-Platz stillstand. Die Polizei wusste nicht, wie sie auf diese Art des stillen und friedlichen Protestes reagieren sollte. Man empfand es als einen – wenn auch kaum greifbaren – Angriff auf die Staatsgewalt, was noch dadurch verstärkt wurde, dass die Menschen in den folgenden Tagen auf Plätzen in der ganzen Türkei stillstanden. Deine Arbeit platzierte die Geste des duran adam, wie es auf Türkisch heißt, während der Berlin Biennale an einem ebenso zentralen wie historischen Ort, im Foyer der Akademie der Künste am Pariser Platz, sodass im Hintergrund durch die Glasfassade hindurch das Brandenburger Tor zu sehen war (Abb. 4). An einer Metallskulptur befestigt zeigten zwei Monitore Erdem Gündüz’ Oberkörper einmal von vorn und einmal von hinten – sodass Besucher:innen ihm beim Eintreten in die Ausstellung frontal ins Gesicht schauten. So entstand eine digitale Skulptur seines widerständigen Aktes. Über Kopfhörer waren Geräusche aus Videos von Gündüz’ Protest auf dem Taksim-Platz zu hören, die du mit dem Soundtrack einer Videoarbeit von Vito Acconci, Centers (1971), hinterlegt hast. Acconci steht in jenem Video 23 Minuten lang still und richtet seinen Zeigefinger auf die Kamera. Man hört, wie sein Atem dabei mit der Zeit vor Anstrengung immer lauter wird. Beide Performances, auf die sich deine Arbeit bezieht, die von Gündüz und die von Acconci, spielen mit der Beziehung zwischen Bewegung und Stillstand. Ihre Zeitlichkeit fordert unsere Vorstellungen von Fortschritt, Veränderung und Transformation heraus, die wir normalerweise mit Revolutionen verbinden. Es scheint nichts zu passieren. Die Spannung, die aus dieser enttäuschten Erwartung entsteht, scheint sich auch in dem gezeigten Körper zu verdichten, seinen Muskeln, Nerven und Gelenken. Stillstand beschreibt hier also einen Konflikt: zwischen der inneren Dynamik des Körpers und der Dynamik zwischen dem Körper und seinem Außen.

Elske Rosenfeld: Meine Arbeit mit der Geste von Erdem Gündüz unterscheidet sich von meinen anderen aus gefundenem Filmmaterial produzierten Gesten dadurch, dass sie in einen Dialog mit einem anderen Künstler beziehungsweise mit zwei anderen Künstlern tritt. Gündüz’ Geste ist sowohl ein Kunstwerk als auch eine Form des Protests. Mich interessiert, dass er eine temporäre Skulptur herstellt; eine nichtheroische Skulptur, die aus seinem lebenden Körper besteht, was sie unbeständig und verletzlich macht.

Der Ton stammt von Videoaufnahmen von Gündüz’ polizeilicher Durchsuchung. Die Polizisten berühren Gündüz am ganzen Körper, was sehr gewalttätig ist. In meiner Version wird Gündüz’ Geste dadurch, dass ich sie in eine aufrechte Metallstruktur integriere, noch ein wenig skulpturaler. Sie wird eine Art Denkmal. Gleichwohl ist sie auch hier nicht vollkommen statisch. Indem ich das Foto von Gündüz mit einer frei gehaltenen Handykamera abfilmte, versetzte ich, insofern, als meine Hand mit der Zeit immer heftiger zitterte, seinen Körper wieder in Bewegung. So wird Gündüz’ Stillstand als die Vielzahl von Mikrobewegungen erkenntlich, die er eigentlich, physiologisch betrachtet, ist: Stillstehen ist immer auch ein Vibrieren, ein Kreisen um die eigene Körpermitte.

In meiner Arbeit ist es jedoch mein Körper und nicht der von Gündüz, der zittert und der ein durchgeschütteltes und instabiles Bild erzeugt. Ich wiederhole den Minimalismus von Gündüz’ Geste aber auch dadurch, dass ich mein Eingreifen bei meinem filmischen Wiederholen seiner Geste ebenfalls minimal halte.

Auf diese Weise lädt meine Arbeit die Betrachter:innen dazu ein, ebenfalls still zu werden und während des Betrachtens zur Ruhe zu kommen. Es kann sein, dass sich die Betrachter:innen, wenn sie sich auf die Zeitlichkeit der Arbeit einlassen, auch beruhigen, um dann in der Arbeit und in sich selbst mehr wahrzunehmen. Sie könnten dann vielleicht auf die Positionierung der Monitore aufmerksam werden. In meiner Arbeit wendet Gündüz dem Brandenburger Tor den Rücken zu, was natürlich mit meinem persönlichen Bezug zu diesem Ort zu tun hat. Denn eigentlich ist es natürlich mein Rücken, der diesem Symbol der deutschen Einheit hier zugewandt ist. Die Art und Weise, wie die sogenannte Wiedervereinigung umgesetzt wurde, war natürlich das Gegenteil von dem, was ich und andere uns von dieser Revolution erhofft hatten.

Burak Üzümkesici: Es ist tatsächlich bemerkenswert, wie sehr die eigene historische Position die Erinnerung an die Vergangenheit beeinflusst. Solange Dissident:innen sich nicht aktiv darum bemühen, ihre Erinnerungen lebendig zu halten, wird die Logik der offiziellen Version der Geschichte auch in ihrem Sprechen Raum greifen. So kommt es dazu, dass alternative Vorstellungen im Rückblick als naive Utopien erscheinen. Auf diese Weise reproduzieren Menschen, die an ihren eigenen Körpern eine soziale Befreiung erfahren haben, am Ende doch unweigerlich immer wieder dominante Diskurse. Solange Revolutionen in einem binären Schema als erfolgreich oder gescheitert bewertet werden, lassen sie sich weder beschreiben noch eingehender erforschen. Und so kommt es dann auch, dass Protagonist:innen von Revolutionen ihre eigene Macht und ihre einstigen Wünsche im Nachhinein abwerten oder leugnen. In einem Artikel schreibst du Ähnliches auch über marginalisierte Kunstgeschichten: »Western understandings of art […] made not only East German art practices disappear from view, but also, and maybe more crucially, the material and discursive contexts in which their aesthetics and politics could be read.«[3]

Ereignisse wie Gezi können hingegen dazu führen, dass wir aus diesen Deutungsmustern ausbrechen und die Dinge wieder anders wahrnehmen. Das Staunen über sie rührt meiner Meinung nach daher, dass Proteste gänzlich neue Kontexte herstellen können. Sie installieren, mit Georges Didi-Huberman gesprochen, neue Bühnen, auf denen politische Äußerungen möglich werden.[4] Nachdem das Ereignis vorbei ist und die neuen Bühnen sich wieder aufgelöst haben, müssen Protagonist:innen sich also dagegen wehren, dass ihr Denken wieder in andere Logiken übereignet wird. Sie müssen ihre außergewöhnliche kollektive Erfahrung selbst rationalisieren. Denkst du, Kunst kann das ermöglichen? Und können künstlerische Praktiken wie deine womöglich die Werkzeuge dafür liefern?

Elske Rosenfeld: Du sprichst hier davon, dass die genannten Revolutionen die sinnstiftenden Kontexte, in denen ihr politischer Wert oder ihre Bedeutung besprochen werden könnten, eigentlich selbst erst hervorbringen müssten. Den jüngeren Revolutionen, mit denen ich mich beschäftige, ist gemeinsam, dass sie weder klare Wortführer:innen noch ausformulierte Visionen oder Pläne für eine postrevolutionäre Zukunft hatten. Dieser Umstand, dass es den jüngeren Protesten an dieser Art klaren Zielen fehlt, wird oft als Grund dafür angesehen, dass sie keine strukturellen Veränderungen bewirken konnten. Ich meine aber, dass die enttäuschenden Ergebnisse dieser Revolutionen nicht auf ein inneres Scheitern zurückzuführen sind, sondern eine Niederlage darstellen, dass sie, wenn man so will, besiegt wurden.[5] Damit meine ich, dass Akteur:innen der alten Eliten oder – wie im ostdeutschen Fall – der westdeutschen Konservativen einfach viel größere Möglichkeiten hatten, ihre eigene Agenda durchzusetzen, bevor der revolutionäre Prozess sich politisch und gesellschaftlich überhaupt institutionalisieren und zu neuen Strukturen verstetigen konnte. Und diese Entwicklungen – diese Umdeutung und Umlenkung, die stark von außen beeinflusst wurde – machten es dann auch unmöglich, in der Praxis ein immanentes Verständnis der eigenen Politik und ihrer Ethiken und Ziele zu entwickeln.

Das führt zu dem Ergebnis, das du beschrieben hast: Die gescheiterten Revolutionär:innen waren, da sie noch keine eigene Theorie ihres spontanen Handelns hatten entwickeln können, gezwungen, die Logik der »Sieger der Geschichte«[6] übernehmen, um der eigenen Geschichte Sinn zu geben. Kunst kann einen Raum dafür bieten, genau solche, unter einer nicht passenden Sprache verschütteten Erfahrungen wieder zu offenzulegen – Erfahrungen, die in der dominanten Geschichtsschreibung unverständlich oder unsichtbar geworden sind.

Burak Üzümkesici: Die Romanistin Kristin Ross zählt auch die Arbeit von Soziolog:innen und Historiker:innen zu den externen Faktoren, die in Narrative von Niederlagen einfließen. Sie sagt, die Soziologie »has always set itself up as the tribunal to which the real – the event – is brought to trial after the fact, to be measured, categorized, and contained«.[7]

Elske Rosenfeld: Ja, eine andere Soziologie (die dann aber vielleicht keine Soziologie im engeren Sinne mehr wäre) könnte ein großartiges Instrument sein, um Revolutionen zu verstehen. Du kennst das aus den Gezi-Park-Protesten: Grundbedürfnisse wie Nahrung, Unterkunft und Schutz wurden dort außerhalb hierarchischer Strukturen organisiert. Für die ägyptische Revolution hat zum Beispiel Asef Bayat diese Formen der Selbstorganisation beschrieben.[8] Empirisch und konzeptionell gilt es noch besser zu verstehen, wie Revolutionen sich jenseits von Ideologien, Plänen oder erklärten Absichten im konkreten Handeln ihrer Akteur:innen entfalten. Es bedarf politischer Konzepte und Methoden, die über das marxistische Verständnis von Revolution als Systemwechsel, aber auch über jüngere poststrukturalistische Verständnisse des Politischen als bloße Unterbrechung oder Negation des Bestehenden hinausgehen. Hier könnten feministische Ansätze hilfreich sein, die die jeweils konkrete Praxis der Revolutionen betrachten, etwa von Judith Butler, Verónica Gago oder Ewa Majewska.[9] Sie haben ihre Analysen am Körper entwickelt und verstehen Revolution als etwas, das sich zwischen der Mikro- und der Makroebene der Politik ereignet: zwischen »kleinen« Handlungen der Fürsorge und des Unterhalts, die wir heute dank der Arbeit früherer Feministinnen als politisch verstehen, und dem »heroischen« Moment der Revolution. Diese Ansätze sind hilfreich, weil sie das Gewöhnliche im Außergewöhnlichen suchen und weil sie dazu motivieren, Veränderungsmöglichkeiten auch jenseits des Ausnahmemoments Revolution zu suchen. Mich interessiert in dem Sinne vor allem, wie Revolutionen sich körperlich manifestieren und wie sie als emanzipatorisches Wissen oder als emanzipatorischer Impuls auch körperlich, »unter der Sprache«, fortbestehen. Meine Arbeit zu dem Umbruch von 1989/90 kann zu solchen Überlegungen beitragen, weil offizielle Geschichte und verkörpertes Gegenwissen hier schon länger in Spannung zueinander stehen.

Burak Üzümkesici: Auch das öffentliche Erzählen der DDR-Vergangenheit konzentriert sich vornehmlich auf ihre bedrückenden Aspekte. Als ich vor einigen Jahren in Berlin einen Deutschkurs belegte, überraschte es mich, dass die DDR-Vergangenheit dargestellt wurde, als sei sie die schlimmste, repressivste, beschämendste Zeit der deutschen Geschichte gewesen. Auch in Filmen über die DDR herrscht dieses Narrativ vor. Gab es wirklich keine positiven Eindrücke und Erfahrungen? Keine Dynamik, die sich auf die Gegenwart übertragen lassen könnte, keine revolutionären Bestrebungen, keine Träume oder Wünsche, die aktuelle Debatten befruchten können? Mir scheint, als herrsche in Deutschland ein seltsames Schweigen über die DDR.

Elske Rosenfeld: Natürlich wurde das Leben in der DDR nicht nur als negativ erfahren. Die Menschen lebten, während sie sich an der widersprüchlichen Realität des Staatssozialismus rieben, komplexe, widersprüchliche und reiche Leben. Das Erinnern an die DDR ist aber auch von traumatischen Erfahrungen durchzogen, die in dem gewaltvollen und repressiven Wesen des DDR-Regimes begründet lagen – auch seiner Unfähigkeit, sich von den militaristischen und faschistischen mentalen Strukturen ihrer deutschen Vorgängerregime zu lösen. Die sogenannte Aufarbeitung der DDR beschäftigt sich vor allem, und auf eine recht einfach gestrickte Weise – mittels eines sehr reduktiven Opfer-Täter-Schemas –, mit diesem Trauma und lässt dabei wenig Raum für positive Lebenserfahrungen und die Vielfalt und Kreativität widerständiger und dissidenter Praktiken im weiteren Sinne.

Zu diesen positiven wie negativen Erfahrungen kam nach 1990 das neue Trauma der rasanten und absolut rücksichtlosen Umstrukturierung des Ostens, der Entwertung hiesiger Erfahrungen und Biografien, hinzu, das in den letzten Jahren aber immerhin als ein wichtiges ostdeutsches Thema angegangen worden ist – wobei es natürlich eigentlich ein gesamtdeutsches Thema ist. Einer jüngeren Generation von Ostdeutschen ist es gelungen, das Schweigen über diese Jahre zu brechen. Und es ist möglich geworden, von der Wiedervereinigung als gescheitert oder zumindest als teilweise gescheitert zu sprechen.

Für mich ist aber letztendlich auch das Scheitern, der Verlust der Emanzipation von 1989/90 ein Trauma, um das sich, durch die Art, wie die Ereignisse heute erinnert beziehungsweise eben nicht erinnert werden, ein weiteres, schmerzhaftes Schweigen hüllt. Für mich hat diese Sprachlosigkeit zum einen mit einer krassen, aber kaum thematisierten Herabsetzung der Ostdeutschen zu tun, die sich genau im Moment der »Wiedervereinigung« vollzog: Am 3. Oktober 1990 wurden die Träger:innen der Revolution in der DDR, die sich in den Vormonaten gerade erst in einer gewaltfreien, von unten organisierten Massenbewegung von einem autoritären Regime befreit und dabei ganz eigene demokratische Formen erfunden hatten, nun von den neuen Oberen – den konservativen westdeutschen Eliten – im Nachhinein zu Kindern erklärt, denen man die Demokratie erst noch beibringen müsse. Aus dem ostdeutschen demokratischen Vorsprung wurde über Nacht ein demokratisches Defizit. Durch die narrative Entwertung der revolutionären Begehren schämten sich die Leute nun für ihre Hoffnungen und ihren Versuch, ihr Leben gemeinsam und auf der Grundlage der eigenen Erfahrungen umzugestalten.

Gleichzeitig folgte auf ihre radikale Selbstermächtigung nun noch dazu die absolute Entmächtigung in Form der neoliberalen Überformung des Ostens und der Behauptung, dass diese alternativlos sei. Man schob dem ostdeutschen demokratischen Gestaltungswillen also umgehend mit der funktionalen Vernunft des »ökonomischen Sachzwangs« wieder einen Riegel vor.

Mit dem Klischee des »Jammerossis« wurde die Enttäuschung, die viele Bürger:innen dementsprechend nach der Wiedervereinigung empfanden, schnell entpolitisiert und pathologisiert. Fast zwei Jahrzehnte ostdeutscher Proteste – gegen die Massenprivatisierungen der frühen 1990er-Jahre sowie gegen die Sozialkürzungen der frühen 2000er-Jahre – wurden unter dieser Trope als politisch irrelevant, als pures Gejammer abgetan. Bitter ist vor allem, dass man die ostdeutschen Unmutsäußerungen erst ernst zu nehmen begann, als sie ab 2014 schließlich vermehrt und offensiver unter rechtem Vorzeichen stattfanden.

Auch, um dieser rechten Aneignung ostdeutschen Dissenses entgegenzutreten, ist eine neue Erzählung der Revolution von 1989/90 und ihres Nachwirkens, eine Anerkennung ihres uneingelösten emanzipatorischen Versprechens nötig.

Die Art, wie wir vergangene politische Bewegungen erzählen, hat aber auch über den deutschen Kontext hinaus einen großen Einfluss darauf, was wir uns heute als politisch möglich vorstellen können. Erfahrungen wie die von 1989/90 und ihr kollektives Erinnern haben enorme Auswirkungen auf das Vertrauen der Menschen in ihre Fähigkeit, ihre Zukunft selbst zu gestalten beziehungsweise, wenn sie abgewertet werden, auf ihre Empfänglichkeit für autoritäre Gegenangebote. In diesem Sinne sehe ich die Arbeit an einer (Gegen-)Narration der emanzipatorischen Projekte, die wir in der DDR und in der Türkei erlebt haben, als weit mehr als pure Geschichtsschreibung an. Sie ist ein Wirkungsfeld, in dem wir unsere gegenwärtige Handlungsfähigkeit und unseren Vorstellungshorizont entweder einschränken und verringern oder stärken und erweitern können.

 

Kurzbiografien:

  1. ELSKE ROSENFELD forscht als Künstlerin, Autorin und Kulturarbeiterin zur Geschichte der Dissidenz in Osteuropa und zu den Ereignissen von 1989/90. In ihrem aktuellen künstlerischen Forschungsprojekt »Archive of Gestures« untersucht sie den Körper als Austragungsort und Archiv politischer Ereignisse. Seit 2018 ist sie Mitglied im Kuratorium der Stiftung Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte, Berlin, die sich der Förderung der Ideen der Bürgerbewegungen der DDR widmet. 2019 kokuratierte sie das Festival Palast der Republik am Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

BURAK ÜZÜMKESICI, M. A., studierte Kunstgeschichte an der Technischen Universität Istanbul und ist derzeit Doktorand in Philosophie an der Freien Universität Berlin. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in den Bereichen politischer Aktionsformen, künstlerischer Praxis, Mimesis-Theorie, Medien und Vermittlung.

 

[1] Eine Version dieses Textes wurde 2023 auf der feministischen Website 5Harfliler veröffentlicht: »Doğu Almanya’dan Gezi’ye Jestler ve Toplumsal Mücadelelerin Dili. Elske Rosenfeld ile Söyleşi [Gesten und die Sprache sozialer Kämpfe von Ostdeutschland bis Gezi. Ein Interview (von Burak Üzümkesici) mit Elske Rosenfeld]«, 17.4.2023, https://www.5harfliler.com/dogu-almanyadan-geziye-jestler-ve-toplumsal-mucadelelerin-dili-elske-rosenfeld-ile-soylesi/ (15.2.2024).

[2] L., »Figuring a Women’s Revolution. Bodies Interacting with their Images«, übersetzt von Alireza Doostdar, Jadaliyya, 5.10.2022, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44479 (15.2.2024).

[3] Elske Rosenfeld, »Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies. Uncovering the Dissident Feminism of Gabriele Stötzer’s Art«, Dissidencies, 6.10.2022, http://dissidencies.net/signals-gestures-collective-bodies/ (15.2.2024).

[4] Vgl. Georges Didi-Huberman, »Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images«, in: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Bd. 27, Heft 55/56, 2018, S. 11, https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v27i55-56.110720 (15.2.2024).

[5] Vgl. Bini Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution. 1917, 1968 und kommende, Berlin 2017.

[6] Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), Frankfurt am Main 1974.

[7] Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, Chicago 2002, S. 4.

[8] Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life. The Everyday of the Arab Spring, Cambridge (Mass.) 2021.

[9] Judith Butler, Anmerkungen zu einer performativen Theorie der Versammlung (2015), übersetzt von Frank Born, Berlin 2016; Verónica Gago, Für eine feministische Internationale. Wie wir alles verändern (2019), übersetzt von Katja Rameil, Münster 2021; Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism. Counterpublics of the Common, London 2021.

Doğu Almanya’dan Gezi’ye Jestler ve Toplumsal Mücadelelerin Dili

Burak Üzümkesici found me in outside the opening at bb12 this summer to ask me about my work with the Archive of Gestures. He said he was still trying to process his experience during the Gezi Park occupation ten years ago and was writing about it through the notion of repetition. This turned into a conversation about the communicability of and between – supposedly failed political struggles – that continued through the autumn and winter, and that became very meaningful for both of us. Out now in Turkish on the feminist website https://www.5harfliler.com/dogu-almanyadan-geziye-jestler-ve-toplumsal-mucadelelerin-dili-elske-rosenfeld-ile-soylesi/

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Sanatçı ve akademisyen Elske Rosenfeld,* 12. Berlin Bienali’ne, 1989/90 devrimi sırasında Doğu Almanya’daki mücadele deneyimini, Gezi Parkı ve Tahrir Meydanı ile birlikte ele alan video enstalasyonlarıyla katılmıştı. Rosenfeld ile devrimci jestlerden, egemen dilin politik dile nasıl yerleştiğine ve devrimcileri kendi deneyimlerine nasıl yabancılaştırdığına, feminist teorinin açtığı olanaklardan, günümüz küresel hareketlerine uzanan bir hatta konuştuk. Söyleşinin çevirisi de yine Burak Üzümkesici’ye ait .

Burak Üzümkesici – 12. Berlin Bienali’nde yer alan işlerinle başlayalım. Geride bıraktığımız aylarda, iki ayrı mekânda, Hamburger Bahnhof ve Akademie der Künste’de, toplam dört ayrı video enstalasyonu ile programa dahil oldun: Gezi Parkı ve Tahrir günlerinden birer ve Doğu Almanya’nın (DDR) son günlerine odaklandığın iki video. Buradaki işlerde “isyan ve devrimin nasıl cisimleştiği” sorusunu odağına alarak, bu cisimleşmeyi devrimci jestler üzerinden okumaya çalışıyorsun.

Seçkideki işlerden biri, 2019/2022 yıllarından tek kanallı bir video enstalasyonu olan Konuşma (Gelecek için Bildiriler). DDR’deki 1989/90 ayaklanmalarına katılan politik figürlere ve gruplara, onların deklarasyonları, manifestoları, talepleri aracılığıyla “konuştukları” konulara eğiliyorsun. 2014 tarihli 2 kanallı bir video olan Kesinti’de (Vaziyet Biraz Karışık), devlet temsilcileri ve yeni siyasi grupların yaptığı yuvarlak masa toplantısının dışarıda toplanan kalabalığın sesleriyle “aksatıldığı/kesintiye uğratıldığı” bir sahneyi izliyoruz. Döngü’de (Bir Tur Daha) ise, protesto dalgasının sona ermesinin ardından Tahrir Meydanı’ndaki çadırların etrafında “dönüyor/tur atıyoruz”. Yine aynı yıla ait, mekâna özgü bir enstalasyon olan Durma’da (Duran Adam/Merkezler) ise bizi Taksim Meydanı’nın “merkezinde” hareketsiz duran adamın önünde -ya da arkasında- “durmaya” davet ediyorsun. Ek olarak beşinci bir iş, bir QR kod aracılığıyla çevrimiçi olarak izlenebilen 2018 tarihli Tekrarlama (Denemeler/Çerçeveli). Yuvarlak Masa toplantısında bulunan bazı kişilerin, kendi siyasi yapılarının seçim kampanyası için reklam hazırlamaya çalıştıklarını görüyoruz. Çalışmalar başarısızlıkla sonuçlansa da, sen 1990 yılına ait bu video klipleri yeniden ortaya çıkarıyor ve onlara yeni bir çerçeve ekliyorsun.

 

Elske Rosenfeld, Repeating (Versuche/Framed) [Tekrarlama (Denemeler/Çerçeveli)], 2018, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; ekran resmi, sanatçının izniyle

Yanılmıyorsam, 2013 yılından bu yana “Devrimci Jestler Lügati” adını verdiğin bu projeye belli aralıklarla devam ediyorsun. Toplumsal hareketleri ya da 1989 gibi tarihsel kırılma anlarını hatırlama ve anlamlandırma biçimlerimize dair bir arayış bu. Bu olayların bize önerdiği farklı bir gramer var ve biz henüz bu farklı dili konuşacak araçlara sahip değilmişiz gibi ya da onlarla ne yapacağımızı bilemiyormuşuz gibi bir tez ileri sürüyorsun sanki. Neydi çıkış noktan ve geldiğin nokta itibariyle oluşan jest dağarcığı sende nasıl yankılanıyor?

Elske Rosenfeld – Öyle gerçekten, bu proje epeydir yoldaşlık ediyor bana. Yaptığım araştırmaları “Devrimci Jestler Lügati” başlığı altında bir dizi jeste ve buna bağlı olarak da sanat pratiğine ve yazılara dönüştürmeye 2013’te başladım. Bienal’de bu dört enstalasyonu “Jestler Arşivi” başlığıyla sergiledim. Projenin bu yeni sürümü www.archiveofgestures.net adresinde çevrimiçi olarak da varlığını sürdürüyor. Orası, her biri araştırma materyallerinden yola çıkarak hazırlanmış bir video ve yazı içeren farklı jestleri birarada sunmama imkân veren, ayrıca mevcut işler ve yenileri etrafında projeler ve işbirlikleri başlatmama olanak tanıyacak bir araştırma arşivi veya platformu işlevi görüyor.

Devrime ve özellikle de 1989/90 olaylarına olan ilgim çok daha eskilere dayanıyor tabii. 1989/90 döneminde gençtim ve memleketim olan Doğu Almanya’nın Halle kentinde eylemlere katılıyordum. Ekim 1989’daki ilk gösterilerden Ekim 1990’daki Almanya’nın sözde yeniden birleşmesine kadar geçen ayların benim için politik olarak belirleyici bir etkisi oldu. Kolektif olarak yaşadığımız özgürleşme pratikleri bende derin etkiler bıraktı; mesela okulda ya da yürüyüşler ve toplantılar sırasında, daha adil, demokratik, eşitlikçi ve ekolojik bir toplumun nasıl örgütleneceğine dair yaptığımız tartışmalar geliyor aklıma. Bir süre sonra o sahiplendiğimiz kolektif yaşam sekteye uğradığında ise o ölçüde derin bir hayal kırıklığı ile kalakaldım. Devrimin yerini muhafazakâr, milliyetçi bir projeye bırakması, aşağıdan yukarıya öz-güçlenmeyi ve kolektif tartışma pratiklerini sona erdirmekle kalmadı, aynı zamanda bunları neredeyse bir kez daha politik olarak tahayyül edilemez hale getirircesine sildi.Bu devrimin tarihinin -ulusal birliğin restorasyonu ve kapitalizmin ya da liberal demokrasinin zaferi olarak- anlatılma biçimi ile bir öznesi olduğum radikal özgürleşme pratiklerimiz arasındaki o kopukluk ise bir tür suskunluk olarak karşılık buldu bende. Yine de bu kopukluk, hissettiğim bu boşluk, düşünme ve üretme yönünde güçlü bir itkiye dönüştü.

 

Elske Rosenfeld, Circling (Another Round) [Döngü (Bir Tur Daha)], 2012/22, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; 12. Berlin Bienali enstalasyon görünümü, sanatçının izniyle

Bu kopukluğa ve bu deneyime jestlerle, yani devrimin bedensel, geometrik, felsefi ve duygulanımsal yönlerini birbirine bağlayan bir dizi figür aracılığıyla yaklaşma fikri birtakım gözlemlerden kaynaklanıyor: İlk olarak, ne zaman diğer katılımcılarla olaylar hakkında konuşmaya çalışsam, buna karşılık gelen bir dil bulma konusundaki ortak yetersizliğimiz hep o eksikliği veya boşluğu gösteriyordu. Aynı zamanda bunun bedensel bir karşılığı olduğu gerçeği de ortaya çıkıyordu. Konuştuğum kişiler, “naif,” “ütopik,” “yenilmeye mahkûm” gibi, egemen tarihyazımının kendi sözlüğünden dilimize soktuğu kelimeleri kullanarak kendi öz-güçlenmemizi ve vizyonlarımızı yadsıyorlardı. Halbuki o anda bedenleri bu kelimelerin içeremeyeceği şeylerle doluydu: umut, neşe, hayal kırıklığı ve acı – hepsi sanki 1990’dan bu yana zaman hiç geçmemiş gibi hızla yüzeye çıkıyordu. İkinci önemli sezgi, ya da metodolojik ipucu diyelim, 2011 yılında yeni küresel devrim ve hareket dalgasının başlamasıyla geldi: Arap Baharı ve onun esinlediği işgâl hareketleri. İnsanlar olumsuz anlamda “tetiklenme”den bahsediyor, hani bir başkasının hikâyesi eski bir travmayı yeniden yaşamanıza neden oluyor ya. Gel gör ki, benim için ayaklanmayı haberlerden, daha da önemlisi bazı Mısırlı arkadaşlarımın facebook paylaşımlarından takip etmek, doğrudan kendi geçmiş deneyimlerimle bağlantı kurmamı sağladı. Kahire’deki, daha sonra Gezi sırasında İstanbul’daki arkadaşlarımla, hatta sonrasında 2014’te Ukrayna’daki ve 2020’de Belarus’taki ayaklanmalara katılanlarla konuştuğumda, nihayet farklı yer ve zamanlarda yaşadığımız deneyimleri kat edecek ortak bir lügat üzerinde çalışmak için yeni bir şans doğduğunu hissettim.

“Jestler Lügati” bu sezgileri işleyip onlara biçim vermenin bir yoluydu. Bu olaylara ilişkin rapor ve belgelerin peşine düştüm ve tüm bu farklı yer ve zamanlarda tekerrür ettiğini gördüğüm gerçek görüntülerden ve daha soyut motiflerden -fiziksel, geometrik, zamansal figürler ile fiziksel hareket ve jestlerden- oluşan bir koleksiyon topladım. Bahsettiğim “Jestler Arşivi” işlerinde olduğu gibi, sanat çalışmalarımın ve metinlerin çıkış noktası bunlar oldu. Bu çalışmalarda jestler olayları birbirine eklemleyen mafsallar gibi, 1989’u Kahire’den veya Gezi’den görüntülerle düşünmeyi mümkün kılıyor, ya da tam tersi. 1989 ve bu ayaklanmalar arasında oluşan rezonans sayesinde 1989 hakkında bir şeyler öğrenmekle kalmadım, aynı zamanda 1989 üzerine çalışmam da bu olayların aktörlerinde yankısını bulmuş gibi görünüyordu – tıpkı sende bulduğu gibi. Bu karşılıklı tanıma ve etkileşim anları çalışmalarımın bir parçası ama aynı zamanda ödülleri de.

Burak – Mafsal olarak jest fikri üzerinde durmak istiyorum, lügatten bir kelime/jest seçerek: Durma veya durağanlık. Yaklaşık son otuz beş yıla baktığımızda, Tiananmen meydanında, tankın önünde duran adamdan, Gazze’de Rachel Corrie’ye, Gezi eylemlerindeki Duran Adam’a ve İran’da Vida Movahhed’in başörtüsü eyleminden günümüzde feminist ayaklanmadaki binlerce kadına, durmanın, durağanlığın politik gücüne tanık olduk. Geçtiğimiz yılın sonlarına doğru, İran sokaklarından L imzasıyla yazılan ve çok ses getiren o muazzam yazıda[1] video çekerek öfkelerini dile getiren kadınlardan farklı olarak, Vida Movahhed’in sessiz eylemine vurgu yapıyor ve onun fotoğrafının dolaşıma girmesiyle ortaya çıkan güçlü etkiyi bu videolarla karşılaştırıyordu: “Gündelik bir durum anlatısından tarihsel bir durumun yaratılmasına geçiş” anlamına geliyordu onun için bu durağan figürün imajı. Temsili bir ilişki kurmadan, tüm sorunları tek bir imgede yoğunlaştıran bir sessizlik anı. Elden ele dolaşan bir fotoğraf imajı. Hayatın öylece akıp gidişine isyan eden, akışı ve sürekliliği sekteye uğratan bir figür ve onun imajı. Bilhassa durağan imajın bir vaat içerdiğini vurgulayışı ve durağanlığı insanların harekete geçmesiyle ilişkilendirmesi çok ilham verici. Dediğin gibi, benim için bir jest aracılığıyla, İran ve Gezi arasında çekilen bir hat; mücadelelerin birbirleriyle girdiği diyalog. Diğer coğrafyalarda da, yol kapatmalar, grevler, işgal ve blokajlar gibi, akışı durdurmaya yönelik eylemler yeniden yükselişte. “Her şeyin ‘olduğu gibi sürüp gitmesi,’ budur felaket.” Benjamin’in bu meşhur sözü, güncel hareketlerin mottosu gibi.

 

Elske Rosenfeld, Speaking (Statements for the Future) [Konuşma (Gelecek için Bildiriler)], 2019/22, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; 12. Berlin Bienali enstalasyon görünümü, sanatçının izniyle

Elske – Evet, L’nin o metni çok güzeldi! Metin sadece durağanlık -kararlı olmak, gerçek anlamda bir duruş sergilemek ve bir imaj yaratmak için zamanı askıya almak- hakkında değil, aynı zamanda protesto ve imaj arasındaki döngüsel ilişkiye dair, tabii bir de taklit ve tekrar pratiği hakkında da çok güçlü sözler sarfediyor. İranlı aktivistlerin yarattıkları, daha doğrusu kendilerinin de dönüştükleri imajları ben militan imajlar olarak görüyorum, yani senin de haklı olarak vurguladığın gibi, isyanı dışarıda bir yerlere temsil etmeyi değil, onu nasıl sürdüreceğini dert edinen imajlar. İmajların bu şekilde kullanılması, son dönemdeki isyanların çoğunda gözlemlediğim bir şey. Örneğin 2012’de Kahire’de, Mosireen Kolektifi/Tahrir Sineması’ndan aktivistlerin çalışmalarından çok etkilenmiştim; farklı mahallelerde kurdukları seyyar açık hava “sinemalarında” protestoların görüntülerini gösteriyorlardı, ki o dönemde sırf bu amaca hizmet ediyordu bu sinemalar.[2] 2014’te İstanbul’dayken konuştuğumuz bir sanatçı, uluslararası sanat camiasından gelen protestoların anlık temsillerini, anlık görüntü taleplerini reddetmeleri gerektiği konusunda sanatçılar arasında -konuşularak mı yoksa kendiliğinden mi varıldığını şimdi hatırlayamadığım- bir anlaşma olduğundan söz etmişti. Oldukça güçlü bir tavır bu bence; diğer şeylerin yanı sıra, eleştirel sanat dünyasının “alternatif” duyarlılık ekonomilerine burun kıvırıp, protestonun anında metalaştırılmasına da direndiği için.[3]

1989 üzerine yaptığım çalışmada, dönemin nispeten sınırlı teknolojik olanaklarına rağmen, devrim sürecinde görüntülerin nasıl kullanıldığına da bakıyorum. Örneğin, Kesinti’de kullandığım Yuvarlak Masa görüntüleri bana militan bir film pratiği olarak adlandırabileceğim bir şeyin parçası gibi görünüyor. Yuvarlak Masa’nın ilk toplantısı sırasında, bağımsız bir belgeselci olan Klaus Freymuth oturumun gayri-resmi kaydını tutmak üzere davet edilmişti. Yeni siyasi gruplardan birinin üyesi olarak oradaydı. Gidip kendisini ve kamerasını en iyi görüş noktasına, yani “iyi” bir cephe çekimi yapabileceği bir yere değil, siyasi mensubiyetine uygun olarak, bağlı olduğu muhalif kanadın arkasına yerleştirdi. Bu konumlanma, masanın en aktif -muhalif- tarafındaki yüzlerin ve bedenlerin biraz yandan ve arkadan görüldüğü tuhaf, çarpık bir görüntü üretiyor. Böylece bedenler kademeli olarak birbiri ardınca sıralanıyor, genellikle birbirlerinin önüne geçiyor ya da birden fazla baş veya uzuvla tek bir bedende birleşiyor. Bu şekilde tertiplenmiş bir kamera tarafından üretilen parçalı ve birleşik kolektif beden benim için büyüleyici. Diğer yandan, bu işte aynı zamanda bu tür görüntülerin devrimden sonra üstlenebileceği politik işlevi de sorguluyorum. Kaybolmuş ya da tarihsel anlatıdan silinmiş, fakat bu türden belgeler aracılığıyla hâlâ geri kazanılabilecek tarihsel bir gerçekliğe tanıklık eden görüntüler bunlar.

 

Elske Rosenfeld, Interrupting (A bit of a Complex Situation) [Kesinti (Vaziyet Biraz Karışık)], 2014, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; 12. Berlin Bienali enstalasyon görünümü, sanatçının izniyle

Burak – Kendini nerede konumlandırdığının geçmişi hatırlama biçimini nasıl değiştirdiğini görmek gerçekten çok ilginç. Kendi deneyimimize dair belleğimizi diri tutacak aktif bir çabanın içinde olmadığımız sürece, o masanın diğer tarafında oturan egemenlerin dili, senin de az önce dediğin gibi, kendimizi naif ütopyacılar olarak görmemizi sağlayacak hikâyeler bizim dilimize de yerleşebiliyor. Gezi’de ya da farklı bir coğrafyada, başka bir dünyanın kapısını kendi elleriyle aralayıp, toplumsal özgürlüğü kendi bedenlerinde tecrübe edenler, egemen söylemi yeniden üretir hale gelebiliyor. Düşünce izleğimiz örgütsüzlük, lider ya da politik programın olmayışı, iktidarı devirememek gibi kriterlere göre başarı-yenilgi spekturumuna indirgendiğinde ise, mücadelelerimizin o an farkına varamadığımız katmanlarını keşfedemiyoruz. Akabinde gelen karamsarlık ve teslimiyet duygusunun, kendi gücünü önemsizleştirmenin bununla da bir ilgisi olmalı.

Bir yazında sanat bağlamında şöyle diyorsun: “Batılı sanat anlayışları sadece Doğu Alman sanat pratiklerini görüş alanından çıkarmakla kalmadı, aynı zamanda ve belki de daha önemlisi, onun estetiğinin ve politikalarının okunabileceği maddi ve söylemsel bağlamları da sildi.”[4] Sanırım Gezi gibi olaylarda şaşkınlık hissi veren, şeyleri bambaşka türden alımlamamıza neden olan şey, yeni “bağlamlar” kurmamızdan, Georges Didi-Huberman’ın sözcükleriyle kendi sahnemizi, politik ifadelerimizin görünür olduğu sahneyi kurmamızdan kaynaklanıyor.[5] Bu nedenle, olay sonrasında, yani sahne dağıldığında, zihinlerimizin sömürgeleştirilmesine direnebilecek, ayaklanmalar gibi istisnai kolektif deneyimleri okunur kılacak ve rasyonelleştirmeye yardımcı olacak araçlara daha fazla ihtiyaç duyuyoruz. Sanat, devrimci bir momentin yokluğunda bize bu deneyleri yapacak bir bağlam, seninki gibi sanatsal pratikler ise bu deneylerin alet çantasını sunuyor.

Elske – Çok önemli bir noktaya değiniyorsun: isyan ve devrimlerin başarı ya da yenilgilerinin tartışılabileceği söz dağarcıklarının -anlamlandırma bağlamlarının veya “sahnelerin”- başkaları tarafından değil, yine bu isyan ve devrimler tarafından üretilmesi gerektiği gerçeğine. 1989’dan bu yana gerçekleşen devrimlerin ortak noktalarından biri, liderlere yönelik bir ilgilerinin olmayışı gibi, devrim sonrası geleceğe dair önceden belirlenmiş bir vizyon veya planlarının da olmamasıdır. Bu devrimlerin ya da protestoların gerçek, yapısal bir değişime ulaşamamasının genellikle böyle açık bir hedefin eksikliğinden kaynaklandığı düşünülür. Ancak, ben -Bini Adamczak’ın Rus devrimi hakkındaki çalışmasında yaptığı ayrımdan ilham alarak- bu devrimlerin hayal kırıklığı yaratan sonuçlarının kendi iç başarısızlıklarından -tutarlı bir vizyona sahip olmamalarından yahut kendi iç çelişkilerinden- ziyade, dışarıdan aldıkları yenilginin bir ürünü olduğunu düşünüyorum.

İster elit kesimden olsun, ister Doğu Almanya örneğindeki gibi Batı Almanyalı muhafazakâr yöneticiler arasından olsun, genellikle çok daha geniş imkân ve kaynakları elinde tutan aktörler, devrimci süreç yeni politik ve toplumsal biçimlerini kurumsallaştırma fırsatı bulamadan kendi gündemlerini dayatıyorlar. Bu tarz bir el koyma ile birlikte devrimin kendi dilini yaratmaya başladığı süreç de sona erer – senin yukarıda tarif ettiğin şekilde: devrimciler kendi tarihlerini anlamlandırmak için statükonun (ya da Benjamin’in deyişiyle tarihin galiplerinin) bilindik söz dağarcıklarını ödünç almak zorunda kalırlar. Bu durumda sanat, devrimci deneyimin bu egemen tarihyazımında anlaşılmaz hale gelen kısımlarının yeniden aktarılabileceği bir alan haline gelebilir.

Burak – Kristin Ross, Mayıs ’68 ile ilgili kitabında tarihçiler ile birlikte sosyologların yaklaşımlarını da dahil ediyor “yenilgi” söylemine su taşıyan bu dış faktörler arasına. Ona göre sosyoloji her daim bir toplumsal olayın “ölçülmek, kategorize edilmek ve hapsedilmek için yargılandığı bir mahkeme görevi görmüştür.”[6]

Elske – Üzücü bir şey bu, çünkü daha militan bir sosyoloji, bu devrimlerin canlılığı içinde açığa çıkan yeni siyasete yaklaşmak için harika bir araç olabilir. Şüphesiz bu canlılığı Gezi Parkı’ndaki yaşantıdan biliyorsun: geleneksel anlamda bir liderlik olmaksızın gıda, barınma ve korunma gibi temel ihtiyaçların nasıl organize edildiğini. Mısır örneğinde Asef Bayat, ayaklanma ve işgaller sırasında patlak veren ama aynı zamanda varlığı belli bir düzeyde devrimci dönemin öncesine dayanan ve sonrasında da varlığını sürdüren bu tarz öz-örgütlenme biçimleri üzerine nefis bir araştırma yaptı.[7] Devrimlerin, çoğu zaman aktörlerinin kendi niyetlerinin ya da kavrayışlarının ötesinde, politikalarını pratik olarak nasıl ortaya koyduklarını anlamak için hem ampirik hem de kavramsal düzeyde yapılması gereken işler olduğunu düşünüyorum. Devrimi sistem değişikliği olarak düşünen eski Marksist devrim anlayışının ötesine geçen politik kavram ve metodolojilere ihtiyacımız var, aynı zamanda bu, örneğin Jacques Rancière’inki gibi, “politik olanı” salt bir kesintiye uğratmasalt bir olumsuzlama olarak ele alan daha yakın zamanlı kavrayışların da ötesine geçmeyi içermeli. Judith Butler,[8] Veronica Gago[9] ya da Ewa Majewska[10] gibi, devrimin gündelik yaşamına bakan feminist yaklaşımlar bu açıdan daha elverişli görünüyor; hepsi de son dönemdeki isyan ve devrimlere ilişkin analizlerini eylemcilerin bedenlerine yönelerek geliştiren yaklaşımlar bunlar. Devrimin politikasını, minör ve majör düzeyler arasında cereyan eden bir şey olarak anlıyorlar, yani daha önceki feministlerin politik niteliğini görmemizi sağladığı “küçük” bakım ve destek edimleri ile devrimlerin sıradışı “kahramanlık” momentleri arasındaki bir ilişki olarak kavrıyorlar. Bu yaklaşımları çok faydalı buluyorum, çünkü sıradışı olanın içinde sıradan olanı ararken, aynı zamanda günlük yaşamın en olağan halinde radikal değişim olanaklarını bulmamızı sağlıyorlar. Devrimin bedenlerde nasıl tezahür ettiği benim de peşine düştüğüm soru – ama aynı zamanda devrimin sona erdiği ilan edildikten sonra özgürleştirici bir bilgi veya itki olarak bedenlerde nasıl yaşamını sürdürdüğü sorusuyla da ilgileniyorum. Sanırım 1989/90 devrimi üzerine -sanat projelerim ve aynı zamanda yakında çıkacak olan kitabım aracılığıyla- yaptığım çalışmalar bu tartışmaya bir şeyler katabilir, çünkü bu örnekte resmi tarih ile bedenlerdeki karşı-bilgi arasında uzun zamandır süregelen bir gerilim var.

Burak – Bir de somut bir gerilimden, ayaklanmalar sırasında bedenlerde oluşan fiziksel gerilimden söz edelim; “Jestler Arşivi”nden bir diğer örnekle. 17 Haziran 2013’de, polisin Gezi Parkı’nı zorla boşaltılmasından iki gün sonra Duran Adam’ın (Erdem Gündüz) sekiz saatlik sessiz duruşu vuku buldu. Onunla birlikte de, polisin ne yapacağını bilemeyişi, devlet aklında yarattığı afallatıcı etki, Türkiye’nin her bölgesinde meydanlarda beliren ve günlerce duran insanlar… Geçtiğimiz aylarda da senin aracılığınla Duran Adam’ı, Berlin’in merkezinde, Pariser Meydanındaki Akademie der Künste binasının içinde ve onun camlı ön cephesinin eşiğinde dururken gördük. Birbirine metal bir strüktür ile bağlı, paralel duran iki ayrı monitör yerleştirmişsin. Birinde Gündüz’ün yüzü bienal alanına dönük ve binanın girişine doğru bakan bir konumda. Diğer monitörde görülen sırtını ise Brandenburg Kapısına veya hatta biraz daha ilerideki parlamento binasına dönük olacak şekilde yerleştirmişsin. Bu haliyle, bir yandan da turistler için meydanın kenarında sergilenen bir dijital direniş heykelini andırıyor. Hatta Brandenburg Kapısının üzerindeki emperyal sembol quadriganın o görkemli şahlanışıyla, duran adamın sükutunun yarattığı etkileyici bir kontrast var. Kulaklığı taktığımızda ise Taksim meydanındaki sesler ile Vito Acconci’nin 1971’de kaydettiği, işaret parmağını kameraya doğrultarak 23 dakika boyunca sabit durduğu video işinin seslerini duyuyoruz. Duran Adam’ı ve Acconci’nin işini niteleyen jest, durağanlık. Her ikisinin de performanslarında ısrar ve hatta inat var. Akışla, o ilerlemeci beklentiyle, yeni bir duruma geçiş yapılması beklentisiyle oynuyorlar. Nihayetinde “yeni” ortaya çıkmıyor. O beklentinin yarattığı toplumsal gerilime, sanatçının bedeninin içinde yoğunlaşan, kaslarda, eklemlerde oluşan gerilim dahil oluyor. Dolayısıyla bizim durağanlık olarak tarif ettiğimiz şey aslında bedenin içindeki psiko-fiziksel dinamik ve dışındaki toplumsal dinamik arasındaki bir eşik deneyimi. Sen de sanatçı olarak bu inadı devralıyorsun ve ısrarla kameranı bu jestlere yöneltiyor ya da mikrofonunu seslerine tutuyor, onları hem çoğaltıyorsun, hem de onlara ve alımlanma biçimlerine müdahale ediyorsun.

Elske– Erdem Gündüz’ünjestine dair yaptığım bu iş, başka bir sanatçıyla (ya da sanatçılarla demeliyim, çünkü senin de vurguladığın gibi, Vito Acconci’nin işine de bir karşılık veriyorum) bir diyaloğa girmek bakımından buluntu görüntülerle yaptığım diğer işlerden farklı. Gündüz’ün jesti hem bir sanat, hem de bir protesto biçimi ve inanılmaz güçlü bir etkisi var. Gündüz’ün jestini belirli bir mekâna ve bir sanat sergisi bağlamına taşıyan bu işin jeste verdiği tepkiyi ya da ona dahil ettiği bazı katmanları vurgulamana sevindim. Ben de bazı fikirler eklemek isterim. İlgimi çeken şeylerden biri, Gündüz’ün geçici bir heykel üretmesiydi ve bence bu, kendi canlı bedeninden oluşması ve böylelikle kendini süreksiz ve savunmasız kılması anlamında bir gayri-kahramanlık (non-heroic) heykelidir. Kulaklıklardan duyulan ses için internette bulduğum, Gündüz’ün polis tarafından arandığı ve vücudunun her yerine dokunulduğu -ki bu basbayağı şiddet- video görüntülerinden örnekler kullandım. Benim yorumumda, Gündüz’ün jesti bir metal strüktüre entegre edilerek daha da heykelsi bir hal alıyor ve bir tür anıta dönüşüyor. Ama yine de durağan diyemeyiz, aslında kıpırdanıyor. Gündüz’ün eylem fotoğraflarının bir el kamerasıyla filme alınması neticesinde, Gündüz’ün jestinin tüm dünyayı dolaştığı o imaj yeniden canlanmış oluyor. Bu şekilde, hareketsiz durmanın, fizyolojik olarak, mikro hareketlerin çokluğunu ve yoğun bir titreşimi içerdiği de görünür hale geliyor. Fakat bu kez titreşen ve salınan, süreksiz, sabitlenemeyen bir imaj üreten Gündüz’ün değil, benim bedenim. Benim müdahalemin (ya da gayri-müdahalemin) minimalizmi, onun jestinin minimalizmini tekrarlıyor. Çalışmalarımda bu minimalizm, izleyiciyi durağanlığa, izlerken yavaşlamaya davet ediyor. İzleyicinin kendini suskunlaştırmasıyla, hem işin içinde ve dışında olanlara, hem de kendi deneyimine dair daha fazlasını duyumsayabileceği şekilde algısını uyarlayabilmesi ihtimaliyle ilgileniyorum.

 

Elske Rosenfeld, Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers) [Durma (Duran Adam/Merkezler)], 2022, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; 12. Berlin Bienali enstalasyon görünümü, sanatçının izniyle

 

Üçüncü olarak, senin de doğru bir şekilde gözlemlediğin gibi, monitörlerin konumlandırılmasının önemine değinelim. Taksim Meydanı’nda Gündüz’ün yüzü Atatürk portresine dönüktü. Türkiyeli bazı arkadaşlarım bu kemalist, milliyetçi yönelim nedeniyle onun bu jestinden rahatsız oldular. Benim bu jesti yorumlayışımda Gündüz ulusal bir sembol ya da milliyetçiliğin sembolü olan Brandenburg Kapısına sırtını dönüyor ve bir Doğu Alman olarak benim için özel bir anlamı var bunun. Almanya’nın birleşmesinin sembolüne dönmüş olan elbette benim sırtım, zira bu birleşmenin gerçekleşme şekli, benim devrime dair deneyim ve umutlarımla tezat oluşturuyor. Bununla birlikte, enstalasyonun Akademie der Künste’de yer alması benim için ek bir katman oldu. Çünkü bu işin fikri Bienal davetinden önce oluşmuştu ve benim için bu anlamda mekândan bağımsız bir duruşu var.

Burak – Semboller üzerindeki mücadele de sanki gittikçe kızışıyor. Sömürgeciliği simgeleyen, “kahramanlık” heykellerinin ya da anıtlarının devrildiği, dekolonizasyon üzerine çalışmaların yoğunlaştığı bir dönemdeyiz. Diğer yandan, Berlin’in göbeğinde, imparatorluk sarayının bir kopyası, DDR parlamentosunun enkazının üzerine, yeniden inşa edildi. Humboldt Forum[11] ismiyle, bir müze olarak, 2021 Temmuz ayında ziyaretçilere açıldı. Almanya’da DDR geçmişi hâlâ bir tabu, kalan ne iz varsa silinmeye çalışılıyor gibi. Birkaç yıl önce Berlin’e geldiğim zaman, Almanca kursunda Berlin tarihi işlenirken DDR geçmişinin ele alınma biçimi beni oldukça şaşırtmıştı. Düşünsene, dil kursundasın, zaten yeni gelmişsin, kimseyi tanımıyorsun ve kendini anti-komünist propagandanın içinde buluyorsun. Sanki Almanya tarihinin en berbat, baskıcı, utanç duyulması gereken dönemi buydu. Yabancılar da hemen bu konuda bilgilenmeliydi. Ara sıra festivallerde DDR üzerine izlediğim filmlerde dahi yaygın olarak bir travma anlatısıyla karşılaştım. Hiç mi olumlu bir deneyim yoktu, günümüze çekip alabileceğimiz bir dinamizm, mücadeleleri besleyebilecek devrimci hayaller ya da dilekler? Hasılı, genel olarak DDR konusunda garip bir sessizlik var gibi geliyordu bana hep.

Elske – Elbette DDR’deki yaşam deneyimi tamamen olumsuz değildi. İnsanlar, bu ülkenin dogmatik ve paranoyak rejimi tarafından uygulanan sosyalizm modeli altında, ona rağmen ve ona tepki olarak karmaşık, çelişkili ve zengin hayatlar yaşadılar. DDR’nin hafızası farklı travmalarla örülüdür; bunların bir kısmı DDR’deki şiddet ve baskı deneyimleriyle, diğer kısmı birleşmeden sonra yaşanan biyografik, sosyal ve ekonomik kopuşun yarattığı travmayla ve son olarak da devrimin kendisiyle, yarattığı umutlarla ve sonra da bu umutların sönmesiyle ilgilidir. Doğu Alman devletinin baskıcı doğasının -ki başlı başına Leninist ve Stalinist harmanlı devlet sosyalizminin özgürlük projesinin başarısızlığının bir sonucudur – neden olduğu travma çetrefil bir konu. Ayrıca birleşmeyle birlikte anma ve tarihselleştirme pratikleri anti-komünist biçimler altında yürürlüğe girmiş, basitleştirici, indirgeyici ve ideolojik yaklaşımlarla da epey sulandırılmıştır. Bu anlatıyı geçersiz kılarak gerçekte sahip olduğu karmaşıklığı ortaya çıkarmak, henüz yeni yeni ele alınmaya başlanan zorlu bir görev.

1990’lardaki ekonomik şok dönüşümünün ve kültürel tasfiyenin yarattığı travmayla ilgili olarak, birleşmeyi ve sonrasındaki süreci alkışlayıp duran bir tutum son yıllarda yerini büyük oranda daha gerçekçi bir yaklaşıma bırakmaya başladı. O yıllarda büyüyen genç bir Doğu Alman kuşağı, daha önceki kuşakların yapamadığı bir şekilde medyaya ve diğer kurumlara girmeye başladı ve o yılları kuşatan sessizliği bozabildi. Birleşmenin başarısızlığı ya da en azından kısmî başarısızlığı hakkında konuşmak mümkün hale geldi.

Bununla birlikte, özellikle dikkatimi çeken ve bu konuşmalarda hâlâ tamamen ve manidar bir şekilde eksik olduğuna inandığım bir şey var, o da devrimin sona ermesinin yarattığı travma. Bu, sohbetimizin başında bahsettiğim devrimin söze dökülemeyişidir; insanların, başarısız olduğu düşünülen diğer devrimler ve politik hareketler -Gezi, Arap Baharı, 1980’lerin başında Polonya’daki Solidarność hareketi- hakkında da benzer şeyler konuştuklarını duyduğum bir fenomen bu. Gücünü kendi eline almaya yürekten inanmışların uğradığı yenilginin ve yenilgiden sonra statükonun yeni ya da eski bekçileri tarafından ütopik, yolunu şaşırmış ya da naif bulunarak yok sayılmanın travmasından bahsediyorum. Bu durum insanları eski umutlarından, hayatı eşitlik temelinde kolektif bir şekilde yeniden düzenlemenin mümkün olduğuna dair inançlarından -ki bu aslında sadece bir inanç değil, kısa bir süre de olsa somut, yaşanmış bir deneyimdi- utanır hale getirdi.

Neoliberal şok dönüşümün travması hakkında artık konuşulabiliyor, çünkü dönüşüm tamamlandı, fakat devrim sonrası travmayı yaratan koşullar hâlâ bizimle. Muazzam bir özgürleşme deneyiminin ardından gelen mahrumiyet hissi sürüyor – bu anlamda hâlâ devrim sonrasındayız. Bu da bu travmayı görmeyi ve onun hakkında konuşmayı çok daha zor hale getiriyor. Almanya’da devrimci pek çok kişinin birleşmeden sonra hissettiği hayal kırıklığı depolitize edilip patolojikleştirildi. Doğu Almanlar, nankör ve politikasız olduklarını imleyen “Jammerossi” etiketiyle damgalanmıştı. Hâl böyleyken, Doğu Almanların yaklaşık yirmi yıllık huzursuzluğu ve 90’ların başındaki kitlesel özelleştirmelere ve 2000’lerin başındaki sosyal kesintilere karşı protestosu dikkate alınmıyordu bile. Protestolar ancak 2014’ten sonra -dil ve amaçları bakımından- sağa kaymaya başladıktan sonra ciddiye alınmaya başlandı. Tabii bu da derin bir konu, ama bence isyanın ve devrimin tarihselleştirilmesi sorununu -onun kalıcı olabilecek bir özgürlük vaadiyle örtüşen uygun bir sözcük dağarcığı sorununu- günümüzün krizlerine yanıt verme kapasitemize doğrudan eklemleyen mühim bir mesele. İnsanların kendi geleceklerini şekillendirme becerilerine olan güvenlerini ya da tam tersine otoriter ayartmalara yönelik duyarlılıklarını büyük ölçüde etkiliyor. Bu anlamda, hem 1989’da DDR’de, hem de 2013’te Türkiye’de yaşadığımız özgürleştirici deneylerin (karşı)anlatısının kurulması üzerine ikimizin de yaptığı çalışmaları tarihyazımı olarak değil, şimdiki zamanda harekete geçme becerilerimizin güçlendiği ve arttığı ya da kısıtlandığı bir mücadele alanı olarak görüyorum.

 

*Elske Rosenfeld 1974 Halle (Doğu Almanya) doğumlu. Farklı medya ve formatlarda çalışan Rosenfeld’in başlıca çalışma alanları, devlet-sosyalizminin ve muhaliflerinin tarihleri ile 1989/90 devrimidir. Belgeler ve arşivler ise bu hikâyelerin/tarihlerin yeniden ortaya çıkabileceği alanlar oluşturmakta çıkış noktası işlevi görüyor. Halen devam etmekte olan “Jestler Arşivi” projesi, politik olayların aktörlerinin bedenlerinde nasıl tezahür ettiğini ve arşivlendiğini araştırıyor.

**Burak Üzümkesici halihazırda Berlin Freie Üniversitesi felsefe bölümünde doktora tezini yazıyor. Çalışmaları ağırlıklı olarak politik eylem biçimleri, estetik, mimesis teorisi, medya gibi başlıklar etrafında şekilleniyor.

 

Ana görsel: Elske Rosenfeld, Standing Still (Standing Man/Centers) [Durma (Duran Adam/Merkezler)], 2022, Jestler Arşivi serisinden, 2012–22; 12. Berlin Bienali enstalasyon görünümü, sanatçının izniyle

 

[1] L, “Bir Kadın Devriminin Figürleri: İmajlarıyla Etkileşen Bedenler” https://www.5harfliler.com/bir-kadin-devriminin-figurleri-imajlariyla-etkilesen-bedenler/

[2] Rosenfeld’in 2012’de Kahire’de yaptığı konuşmanın metni için bkz. “Pictures that refuse to go back inside. An artist talk on revolutionary images”, https://www.eipcp.net/projects/creatingworlds/rosenfeld/en.html

[3] İran bağlamında protestoların metalaştırılması üzerine bir tartışma için bkz. “‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’nin Batı’daki Sanat Kurumları Eliyle Metalaştırılması” https://www.5harfliler.com/jin-jiyan-azadinin-batida-sanat-kurumlari-eliyle-metalastirilmasi/

[4] “Sinyaller, Jestler, Kolektif Bedenler,” https://www.5harfliler.com/sinyaller-jestler-kolektif-bedenler/; “Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies,” http://dissidencies.net/signals-gestures-collective-bodies/

[5] Georges Didi-Huberman, “Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 27, no. 55–56 (2018): 8–22.

[6] Kristin Ross, Mayıs 68 ve Geriye Kalanlar, çev. Yağız Ay & Fahrettin Ege (Bilim ve Sosyalizm Yayınları, 2017): 16.

[7] Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021).

[8] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, yeniden basım (Harvard University Press, 2018).

[9] Veronica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything, çev. Liz Mason-Deese (Verso, 2020).

[10] Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common (Verso, 2021).

[11] Cihan Küçük’ün Humboldt Forum hakkında hazırladığı dosya için bkz.https://e-skop.com/skopdergi/sunus-tear-it-down-and-turn-it-upside-down/6492

Sinyaller, Jestler, Kolektif Bedenler

Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies has now been published on [https://www.5harfliler.com/sinyaller-jestler-kolektif-bedenler/] in a translation by Burak Üzümkesici*.

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Demokratik Alman Cumhuriyeti’nde (Doğu Almanya) kadınların özgürleşmesi işçi sınıfının özgürleşmesine bağlı olarak düşünülüyordu. Cinsiyet eşitliği Doğu Almanya anayasasında yer alıyordu, dolayısıyla bu mevzuya sosyalist devlette artık bir sorun olmaktan çıkmış gözüyle bakılıyordu. Oysa gerçekte kadınlar devlet kurumlarının ya da şirketlerin üst kademelerinde nadiren yer bulurken, bir yandan da tam zamanlı çalışma ve ev içi yeniden üretim emeğinin çifte yüküyle cebelleşiyorlardı. Bu eşitsizlik ve çelişkiler Doğu Almanya’nın muhalif çevrelerinde dahi nadiren politik bir sorun olarak görülüyordu. Söz konusu çelişki ve eşitsizliklerde bir sorun görmek ya da kendini “feminist” olarak nitelemek, doğrusu, pek tasvip edilen bir şey değildi.[1] Bu çevrelerde aktif olan kadın sanatçılar devlet karşısında kendilerini erkeklere kıyasla daha muhalif bir konumda hissediyor[2] ve kendi özgürlüklerini yeraltı kültürünün erkek-merkezli ideallerini yıkmak ya da bunlara direnmek yerine, çoğu zaman bunlara öykünmekte arıyorlardı.[3] Annemirl Bauer ya da Angela Hampel’inkiler gibi toplumsal cinsiyete ya da “kadınlığa” doğrudan referans veren çalışmaların sayısı ise azdı.

Erfurt’lu sanatçı Gabriele Stötzer’in (d. 1953, Emleben, Thüringen) işbirliğine dayalı performansları ise, sosyalist devletin kolektiflik, toplumsal cinsiyet ve sanat kavramlarına yüklediği anlama meydan okurken, aynı zamanda kendisinin de bir parçası olduğu ülkenin muhalif ve yeraltı sanat çevresinin yaklaşımından da kopuyordu. Bu çevre, (erkek) sanatçının otonom bedenini sosyalist sistemin taleplerine karşı eşsiz bir sığınak olarak görürken, Stötzer’in sanatı ise en çok da azami ölçüde merkezsiz, parçalı ve dünyaya açık olduğunda özgürleşen muhalif, dişi ve kolektif olarak şekil verilen beden üzerinde kafa yoruyordu.

Bu metin, sanatçının kırılganlıkların vücut bulduğu biraradalık biçimleri oluşturmaya dayalı pratiğinin kendine has feminizmine adanmıştır.

 

Derin bir Fiziksel Altüst Oluş Deneyimi Kolektif bir Sanat Pratiğine Yol Açıyor

Gabriele Stötzer (o zamanlar evlilik soyadı olan Kachold ile tanınıyordu) başlangıçta memleketi Erfurt’un muhalif edebiyat ortamında aktif biriydi. İşbirliğine dayalı ve beden odaklı kendine has performatif pratiğini ise, benlik algısını ve dünyasını fiziksel ve zihinsel düzeyde allak bullak eden bir deneyimden sonra geliştirdi. Stötzer, 1977 yılında muhalif şarkıcı ve söz yazarı Wolf Biermann’ın sınırdışı edilmesine karşı yazılan ünlü ortak bildiriyi imzalayıp dağıttığı için tutuklanarak hapse atıldı. Şiddet veya siyasi suçlardan hüküm giyen kadın mahkûmların kaldığı, “katiller kalesi” olarak anılan meşum Hoheneck hapishanesinde yedi ay geçirdi.[4] Hapishanenin fiziksel ve psikolojik açıdan son derece zorlayıcı koşulları altında mahkûm arkadaşlarıyla yaşadığı karşılaşmalar, Stötzer’in kendisine, cinsiyet fenomenine ve Doğu Almanya’nın sosyalist modeline dair algısını derinden sarsacak ve değiştirecekti. Gabriele Stötzer sonraları hapishane günleri hakkında konuşurken, “Doğu Almanya’ya ve kadınlara bakışı[nın] bir anda yerle bir olduğunu” söylemişti.[5]

Mahkûm kadın arkadaşlarının, kadın katillerin, hırsızların ve fahişelerin bedenleri, Doğu Almanya’da, tezat oluşturmak şöyle dursun birbiriyle gayet iyi örtüşen iki kadın bedeni konfigürasyonuna meydan okuyordu: bir yanda geleneksel “iyi aile kızı”[6] (küçük) burjuva kadının bedeni, diğer yanda eski burjuva idealinin yerini almaktansa tam da bu idealin üzerine oturtulmuş disiplinli ve üretken kadın sosyalist işçinin bedeni. Bunların ikisinin de hapishanedeki kadınlarla bağdaşan bir yanı yoktu: “Birbirlerine duydukları fiziksel aşk, bedenlerine yaptıkları dövmeler, kaşık yutarak intihara teşebbüs etmeleri: Ne dışarıdaki reel sosyalizm ne de ebeveynleri Stötzer’i böyle bir şeye hazırlamıştı. Kendi annesinde de bir örneğini gördüğü, Doğu Almanya rejimi tarafından ‘özgürleştirilmiş’ kadının prototipi olarak propagandası yapılan tertipli ve çalışkan anne-işçi şeklindeki kadın imgesi paramparça olmuştu.”[7] Stötzer’in kendi sözleriyle, [mahkûm kadınların] “bendeki kadın imgesiyle zerre uyuşmayan hayat hikâyeleri ve karakterleri”[8] vardı.

Gabriele Stötzer tahliyesinin ardından, yaşadıkları hakkında konuşamadığını ve başından geçenlerin zihninde imgeler halinde canlandığını idrak etti. Esasen siyasi faaliyete yönelen diğer eski siyasi mahkûmların aksine Stötzer kendini şiir ve sanata yönelmiş buldu. Hapishanede yaşadığı şiddetli kırılmanın ardından (cinsiyetlendirilmiş) benliğinin kolektif olarak yeniden kurulması gerektiğini, bunun da tek başına başarılamayacağını farketti. Stötzer, yaratıcı süreci için ihtiyaç duyduğu katılımcıları bulmak adına, devlet kurumlarıyla kendisi gibi olumsuz deneyimler yaşamış kişilerle, genellikle de kadınlarla bir araya gelmeye başladı. Doğu Almanya Devlet Güvenlik Bakanlığı (Stasi) tarafından sürekli maruz bırakıldıkları gözetim ve engellemelere rağmen, kadınlar haftada bir kez Stötzer’in özel galerisinde veya fotoğraf laboratuvarı ve stüdyoya dönüştürülmüş yıkık dökük işgâl evlerinde buluşuyorlardı.[9] Bu buluşmalarda rüyalardan konuşuyor, vokal ve ses deneyleri yapıyor[10] ve kendi yaptıkları kıyafet ve aksesuarlarla, bazen de onlar olmadan birbirlerini fotoğraflayıp filme alıyorlardı. Kadınların kendi sınırlarını zorlamalarını mümkün kılan bu güven ilişkisinin temelinde yatan şey ise kurdukları dostluklardı. Stötzer bir keresinde bu kadınlarla yaptığı çalışmaları bir tür takas olarak tanımlamıştı: “Kadınlara bedenlerini bir deneyim, bir his, bir duyumsama, kadın cinsiyetine dair yanıtlanmamış sorularının oluşturduğu eşiği aşma tecrübesi olarak geri vermek dışında bir şey sunmayan” bir takastı bu.[11]

 

Gabriele Stötzer, The Hole [Delik], und, frauen miteinander, [ve, kadınlar birlikte] fotokitaptan, 1982/3, sanatçının izniyle

Stötzer’in çağrısı zamanla giderek artan sayıda kadını (hatta bazı erkekleri de) sanatının ayrılmaz parçası haline gelen “kolektivist bir çalışma ve yaşam anlayışına”[12] doğru çekti ve bunu yaparken de sanat-toplum ilişkisine dair eski Sosyalist Gerçekçi yaklaşımları olduğu gibi, emsallerinin bu yaklaşımlara yanıt olarak geliştirdiği “underground” veya “aykırı” sanat formlarını da bozguna uğrattı.

 

Çifte Kaçış: Doğu Almanya’da ve Onun Underground Dünyasında Patriyarkal Tahakküme Direnmek

Stötzer’in kuşağından pek çok sanatçı için devletin boğucu ideolojik tasallutundan kaçış “yeraltı”nın içe kapanık, homojen çevrelerine ve alenen apolitik bir sanata ricat etmek anlamına geliyordu. Erkek olarak tasavvur edilen bireysel sanatçı bedeni, sadece (bireysel) sanatsal yaratımın kaynağı değil, aynı zamanda rejimin taleplerine karşı isyanın ve özgürlüğün mevzisiydi de. Başına buyruk, “özgür” erkek bohem sanatçı figürü baştacı ediliyordu [13].

Bundan dolayı, Gabriele Stötzer’in kadınlarla, kadınlık hakkında çalışma kararı gerek Doğu Alman devleti, gerekse birlikte hareket ettiği muhalif çevreler açısından provoke edicidir. Stötzer, 1984 yılında, Doğu Almanya’da bulunan yegâne kadın sanatçı topluluğu olan Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt’u (sonradan Exterra XX adını alan Erfurt Kadın Sanatçılar Grubu) kurdu. Yıllar boyunca Monika Andres, Tely Büchner, Elke Carl, Monique Förster, Gabriele Göbel, Ina Heyner, Verena Kyselka, Bettina Neumann, Ingrid Plöttner ve Harriet Wollert’in yanı sıra Ines Lesch, Karina Popp, Birgit Quehl, Jutta Rauchfuß ve Marlies Schmidt grubun faaliyetlerinde yer aldı ve katılımcı sayısı zamanla daha da arttı. [14] Grup, çalışmalarında yeraltı ile devlet arasında ikili bir karşıtlık kurmak yerine, her ikisinde de mevcut olan patriyarkal tahakküm biçimlerini ele alan deneylere girişti. Grup içinde teşvik edilen sosyalleşme ve elbirliğinin yarattığı güvenle kadınlar, toplumsal cinsiyet ve normların dışında ve bunlara karşı kendilerinin ve birbirlerinin bedenlerini keşfettiler.

Kendilerini eşit ölçüde patriyarkal olan rejimin ve yeraltının çift yönlü saldırısından kurtarmak için, artık kendisi de bir tahakküm biçimi olarak deneyimlenen sözümona özgürleşmiş, erkek, bireysel sanatçı bedenine sığınamazlardı. Stötzer’in grubunun fotoğraf ve film deneylerindeki bedenler artık birer kahraman gibi değil, yaralı, kırılgan, hassas ve dünyayla iç içedir. Bu fotoğrafların bazılarında bandajlar bir bedeni gizler, sınırlar ya da iki bedeni birbirine bağlarken, diğerlerinde bedensel açıklıklar işaretlenir ya da ellerle gerilerek açılır, deri esnetilir, çekilir ya da boyanır. Kendini özgürleştirmek, bu işlerde radikal biçimde kolektif, başkalarına açık ve merkezsiz olmak anlamına geliyor. Verili toplumsal cinsiyet konfigürasyonlarının ve yeraltı/devlet siyasi ikiliklerinin ötesine geçerek, o zamanın mevcut dillerinde (henüz) ifade bulamayan varoluş biçimlerini duyumsayan ve onlarla deneyler yapan bedenlerdir bu işlerde karşımıza çıkan. Bu bedenler “yeni bir gerçeklik” için öngörüler ve deneysel konfigürasyonlar olarak işlev görüyor, diyordu Gabriele Stötzer kendi bedensel sezgilerinden yola çıkarak ve şunu eklemeyi de unutmuyordu: “bu diğer gerçekliğin adı Batı değildi.”[15]

 

Gabriele Stötzer, Wrapping [Sargı], und, frauen miteinander, [ve, kadınlar birlikte] adlı fotokitaptan, 1982/3, sanatçının izniyle

 

Yeni Bir Gerçeklik: Stötzer’in Feminist Sanatı ve Aktivizmi Birleşiyor

Signale (Sinyaller) filmi ise, grubun 1989 baharında başladığı bir projeydi ve sonunda öngörücü, hatta “kehanetvari” bir film ortaya çıkacaktı. “Sinyaller saklı kalmış bir şey hakkındaydı, henüz söze dökülüp de konuşulamayan bir şeylere sesleniyordu.”[16]

Birkaç ay sonra, grubun çalışmalarının sinyalini verdiği “yeni gerçeklik” her yerde görkemli bir varoluşa doğru taşmaya başladı. Sonbaharda devrim başladığında, yaşamın her alanı kolektif düzeyde yeniden tasavvur edilerek hızla politikleşirken, kadınların deneyleri zahmetsizce dünyaya açıldı. Feminist sanatsal işbirliklerinin örtük (ya da mikro) politikası, somut (makro) politik eylemlere dönüştü. Frauen für Veränderung (Değişim için Kadınlar) grubu Stötzer çevresinden doğdu ve bu çevrenin var ettiği maddi ve manevi dayanaklar üzerinde yükseldi: networkler, kaynaklar, beceriler, karşılıklı edinilen bilgi ve duyulan güven.[17] Grup, Erfurt’ta her hafta yapılan eylemlerde önemli bir rol oynadı ve şehrin belediye binasında ilk kez sadece kadınlar için toplantılar örgütledi.

Stötzer, 8 Kasım 1989’da bu yeni grubun 300 üyesi önünde bir konuşma yaptı:

erkeklerin liderliğine karşı
liderlere karşı
rollere karşı
imajlara karşı
son 40 yıla damga vuran kadın imajlarına karşı [18] bir konuşmaydı bu.

Bu devrimci uğrakta, Doğu Almanya sosyalizminin ideolojik, siyasi yapılanmasının, rollerin ve siyasi hiyerarşilerin parçalanması ile toplumsal cinsiyetin, patriyarkanın kendine özgü yapılanmasının çözülmesi bir ve aynı şey olarak ele alınabilir hale gelmişti. Stötzer’in işbirliklerinde birkaç yıldır irdelediği kolektif “ben”-lik ve “kadın”-lık hallerinin estetik olarak dolayımlanmış biçimleri nihayet artık sanatının dışında da kendine bir isim ve farklı bir yaşam çevresi bulabiliyordu. 8 Kasım’da, Stötzer’in sanatındaki bedensel sinyaller, kısa bir süreliğine de olsa dar bir çevrenin dışına çıkarak farklı temaslar kurabilmişti. Stötzer’in pratiğinin devlet-sosyalizmi kavramsallaştırmalarının derinleşen çatlak ve çelişkilerinden yola çıkarak örmeye başladığı, politika, sanat ve toplumsal cinsiyetten müteşekkil takımyıldız artık görünürlük kazanmaya ve mümkünün alanına girmeye başlamıştı.

 

1990 Sonrası: Stötzer’in Sanatı ve Politikası Batı Lügatinde Okunaksız Hale Geliyor

Devrimin yönünün 1990 kışında Alman ulusunun birleşmesine doğru sapması, bu deney ve hayallerin yok sayılarak dışlanmasıyla sonuçlandı. 3 Ekim 1990’dan sonra, Doğu Alman devleti ve onun kendine has kültürleri, genişleyen Federal Almanya Cumhuriyeti içinde eriyip yok olurken, Gabriele Stötzer ve grubunun geliştirdiği muhalif feminenlikler de unutulup gitti. Stötzer’in muhalif feminizmi de, kolektifliğin yeni biçimlerine dair giriştiği politik-estetik araştırmalar da Batı’nın artık egemen olan sözdağarlarında bir kez daha konuşulamaz hale geldi.

Feminist diller de Batı’nın kendi mücadeleleri içinde yoğrulduğundan, devlet sosyalizminin ilerici görünen sosyal ve cinsiyet politikalarının farklı cinsiyetli varoluş tarzlarını geçerli kılma ve geçersizleştirme biçimlerinin yanı sıra, bunlara karşı geliştirilen stratejileri de gözden kaçırdı. Batılı sanat anlayışları da benzer şekilde, sadece Doğu Alman sanat pratiklerini görüş alanından çıkarmakla kalmadı, aynı zamanda ve belki de daha önemlisi, bu pratiklerin estetiğini ve politikalarını okunaklı kılan maddi ve söylemsel bağlamları da sildi. Soğuk Savaş’tan miras komünist-antikomünist ikiliğine saplanıp kalan sanat tarihi analizleri ise, Doğu Almanya’nın yeraltı sanat dünyasını konu ettiklerinde genellikle, Stötzer’in pratiğinin defterini dürdüğü özgürleşmiş, otonom, deha sanatçı türünden fazlasıyla cinsiyetlendirilmiş, eril çağrışımlı yaklaşımları yineleme eğiliminde oldu. Hülâsa, Stötzer’in pratiği uzun yıllar boyunca yeterince ilgi göremedi.

Gabriele Stötzer ve grubunun çalışmalarına yönelik ilginin artıyor olması iyi haber. Onların film ve fotoğraflarda muhafaza edilen bedenlerinin günümüze ilettiği sinyalleri; farklı ve uzlaşmacı olmayan cinsiyetlerden aktarılan bilgi ve olanakları deşifre edip açığa çıkarmak, özverili ve titiz bir feminist çalışmayı gerektiriyor. Önümüzde, bu feminist mirasın cevherlerini gün yüzüne çıkarmak gibi harika bir görev duruyor.

 

Notlar

[1] Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene: Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR (Bielefeld, 2019), s. 136.

[2] A.g.y., s. 144.

[3] Doğu Almanya’da (sanat çevreleri de dahil olmak üzere) kendilerini devletin ve kurumlarının karşısında konumlandıran ya da devlet tarafından eleştirel veya muhalif olarak görülen birey ve grupları tanımlamak için çeşitli terimler kullanılmıştır: karşıt, muhalif, aykırı, underground, vs. Ancak, bu terimlerin hiçbiri, özellikle de öznelerin kendilik algıları söz konusu olduğunda, resmin tamamını yansıtmamaktadır.

[4] Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR (Berlin, 2011), s. 290.

[5] “Gabriele Stötzer: Anklagepunkte,” n.d., zeitzeugen-portal, Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwGwd6dS-uE (linklere son erişim: Haziran 2022).

[6] Rebecca Hillauer, ‘Zeit hinter Mauern,’ der Freitag, 18 Ekim 2002, sec. Kultur, http://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/zeit-hinter-mauern.

[7] A.g.y.

[8] Stötzer’den aktaran Karin Fritzsche ve Claus Löser, Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR 1976–1989; Texte, Bilder, Daten (Berlin, 1996), s. 75.

[9] Yazarın Stötzer’le yaptığı söyleşiden.

[10] Löser, a.g.y., s. 294.

[11] Fritzsche ve Löser, a.g.y., s. 76.

[12] Löser, a.g.y., s. 296.

[13] Richter, a.g.y., s. 108.

[14] A.g.y., s. 131.

[15] Fritzsche ve Löser, a.g.y., s. 76.

[16] Yazarın Stötzer’le yaptığı e-posta yazışmasından, Mayıs 2013.

[17] Örneğin Stötzer ve çevresinden dört kadın, ülkedeki ilk başarılı Stasi bölge karargâhı işgâlini başlatacak ve bunu kısa süre sonra başka yerlerdeki işgaller izleyecekti. Bkz. Peter Große, Barbara Sengewald ve Matthias Sengewald, “Die Besetzung der Bezirksverwaltung des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit der DDR am 4. Dezember 1989 in Erfurt,” Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte, n.d., www.gesellschaft-zeitgeschichte.de.

[18] “geredet im rathaussitzungssaal vor frauen eingeladen von der bürgerinneninitiative frauen für veränderung am 8.11.89 gegen 22 uhr,” adlı belge, Gabriele Stötzer’in kişisel arşivinden.

*Burak Üzümkesici holds an MA in Art History from İstanbul Technical University and is currently a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His areas of research mainly focus on forms of political action, artistic practices, mimesis theory, media and mediation.

Signale, Gesten, kollektive Körper.

Signale, Gesten, kollektive Körper. Der dissidentische Feminismus in Gabriele Stötzers künstlerischer Praxis war mein Beitrag zu Andreas Beitin, Uta Ruhkamp, Katharina Koch (Hg.): Empowerment Kunst und Feminismen, Berlin, 2022.

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Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Barbara Hess.

Der Kampf für die Emanzipation der Frau galt in der DDR im Vergleich zur Emanzipation der Arbeiterklasse als zweitrangig. Die Gleichberechtigung der Geschlechter war in der Verfassung der DDR von 1949 festgeschrieben; die Frage galt damit als in dem sozialistischen Staat abgehakt. Tatsächlich aber waren als Frauen sozialisierte Menschen in den höheren Etagen staatlicher Institutionen oder Unternehmen kaum präsent und sahen sich zudem mit der Doppelbelastung von Vollzeitbeschäftigung und häuslicher Reproduktionsarbeit konfrontiert. Diese Ungleichheiten und Widersprüche wurden jedoch, selbst in den dissidentischen Szenen der DDR, politisch kaum thematisiert. Wer dies doch tat oder sich gar als „feministisch“ bezeichnete, stieß auf Ablehnung.[1] Künstlerinnen, die in oppositionellen Kreisen aktiv waren, sahen sich weniger im Konflikt mit den Männern als mit dem Staat.[2] Sie suchten ihre eigene Ermächtigung eher darin, die männlich dominierten Ideale des Untergrunds[3] zu übernehmen, statt sich gegen diese aufzulehnen oder sie durch eigene zu ergänzen oder zu ersetzen. Nur wenige künstlerische Praktiken – wie die von Annemirl Baur oder Angela Hampel – bezogen sich ausdrücklich auf Geschlechterfragen oder das eigene „Frausein“.

Die kollaborativen Performances der Erfurter Künstlerin Gabriele Stötzer (geb. 1953 in Emleben, Thüringen) waren daher insofern sehr ungewöhnlich, als sie einerseits die Vorstellungen des sozialistischen Staates von Kollektivität, Geschlecht und Kunst hinterfragten, zugleich jedoch auch mit dem Selbstverständnis der dissidentischen Szenen beziehungsweise des künstlerischen Untergrunds brachen, dem Stötzer selbst angehörte. Während Letztere den vermeintlich autonomen Körper des (männlichen) Künstlers als einen raren Rückzugsort vor den Zurichtungen des sozialistischen Systems zelebrierten, entwickelte Stötzer in ihrer Kunst wiederum einen dissidenten, weiblichen, kollektiv konfigurierten Körper, der sich gerade dann aus den staatlichen Zwängen und Zuschreibungen zu lösen vermag, wenn er sich als maximal offen, dezentriert oder fragmentiert erlebt.

Der vorliegende Text spürt Stötzers spezifischem dissidenten Feminismus in diesen von ihrer Praxis ermöglichten Formen einer geteilten Verletzlichkeit nach.

 

Eine kollaborative Kunstpraxis entsteht aus der Erfahrung einer fundamentalen persönlichen Erschütterung

Gabriele Stötzer war in den späten 1970er Jahren, damals unter ihrem Ehenamen Kachold bekannt, zunächst in der dissidentischen Literaturszene ihrer Heimatstadt Erfurt aktiv. Ihre besonderen, kollaborativen und körperzentrierten performativen Praktiken begann sie aber erst nach dem Erleben einer radikalen Erschütterung ihrer Körper- und Selbstwahrnehmung zu entwickeln. Stötzer wurde 1977 verhaftet und zu einer Gefängnisstrafe wegen „Staatsverleumdung“ verurteilt, nachdem sie den berühmten offenen Brief an die DDR-Führung gegen die Ausbürgerung des regimekritischen Liedermachers Wolf Biermann mitunterzeichnet und verbreitet hatte. Sie verbrachte sieben Monate in der „Mörderburg“ Hoheneck, dem berüchtigten Frauengefängnis, dessen Insassinnen wegen Gewaltverbrechen oder politischer Straftaten verurteilt worden waren.[4] Die Begegnungen mit ihren weiblichen Mitgefangenen unter den körperlich wie psychisch extrem harten Haftbedingungen sollten ihre Wahrnehmung ihrer selbst, aber auch ihres Geschlechts und des sozialistischen Projekts in der DDR grundlegend erschüttern und verändern. Zu ihrem Gefängnisaufenthalt sagte Gabriele Stötzer später selbst: „Mein ganzes Bild von der Welt, von der DDR und von Frauen brach in einem Mal zusammen.“[5]

Die Körper ihrer Mitgefangenen, der Mörderinnen, Diebinnen und Prostituierten, widersetzten sich den beiden Konfigurationen des weiblichen Körpers, die in der DDR nicht so sehr miteinander konkurrierten, als sich vielmehr überschnitten: der traditionelle, (klein-)bürgerliche Körper des Mädchens „aus einem ordentlichen Haushalt“[6] und der sozialistische Körper der disziplinierten, produktiven Arbeiterin, der das ältere, bürgerliche Ideal eher überlagert als ersetzt hatte. Keine dieser Konfigurationen ließ sich für Stötzer mit den Verhaltensweisen der Frauen im Gefängnis in Einklang bringen: „Dass Frauen sich auch körperlich lieben, sich tätowieren, Löffel schlucken, um sich umzubringen – darauf hatten sie weder der real existierende Sozialismus noch ihre Eltern vorbereitet. Das Frauenbild der ordentlichen und fleißigen Mutter und Arbeiterin – von der eigenen Mutter vorgelebt und vom DDR-Regime als Prototyp der ,emanzipiertenʻ Frau propagiert – zerbricht.“[7] Es waren, in Stötzers eigenen Worten, „schicksale und eigenschaften, die ich frauen vorher nicht zuordnen konnte“.[8]

Mit der Zeit brachten Stötzers Einladungen immer mehr Frauen (und einige Männer) in einem „kollektivistischen Lebens- und Arbeitsentwurf“ [12] zusammen, der sich von ihrer Kunst nicht mehr trennen ließ. Eine solche Praxis forderte einerseits die vom Sozialistischen Realismus postulierte funktionalistische Verquickung von Kunst und Gesellschaft heraus – aber eben auch die diesem Postulat entgegengestellten Ausdrucksformen ihrer Kolleg*innen im künstlerischen Untergrund.

 

Eine doppelte Befreiung: gegen das Patriarchale im DDR-Staat und seinen Untergrundszenen

Viele Künstler*innen der Generation Stötzers versuchten, sich dem ideologischen Zugriff des Staats durch einen Rückzug in den hermetischen, homogenen Zirkel des Untergrunds und in eine explizit „unpolitische“ Kunst zu entziehen. Der Körper des – als männlich imaginierten – autonomen Künstlers galt nicht nur als Quelle der (individuellen) künstlerischen Autorschaft, sondern auch als Ort der Rebellion gegen beziehungsweise der Freiheit von den Zumutungen des Regimes. Als „frei“ galt der wilde, heroische, männliche Bohemien.[13]

Gabriele Stötzers Entscheidung, mit Frauen und über das Thema „Frausein“ zu arbeiten, war daher nicht nur eine Provokation für den ostdeutschen Staat, sondern überdies auch für die oppositionellen Kreise, in denen sie sich bewegte. 1984 gründete sie die einzige Künstlerinnengruppe der DDR, die unter dem Namen „Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt“ (später Exterra XX) bekannt wurde. Im Laufe der Jahre nahmen Monika Andres, Tely Büchner, Elke Carl, Monique Förster, Gabriele Göbel, Ina Heyner, Verena Kyselka, Bettina Neumann, Ingrid Plöttner und Harriet Wollert sowie Ines Lesch, Karina Popp, Birgit Quehl, Jutta Rauchfuß und Marlies Schmidt – und gelegentlich weitere Personen – an den Aktivitäten der Gruppe teil.[14] Statt das eigene oppositionelle Selbstbild an einer möglichst radikalen Unterscheidung zwischen Untergrund und Staat festzumachen, beschäftigte sich die Gruppe in ihren Experimenten mit patriarchalischen Formen der Unterdrückung, die beiden Kontexten gemeinsam waren. Im Schutz von Formen der Soziabilität und Kooperation, die in der Gruppe geschaffen und gepflegt wurden, erforschten die Frauen sowohl ihre eigenen Körper wie auch die der anderen, jenseits von und entgegen den propagierten Geschlechter- und gesellschaftlichen Normen.

 

Eine neue Realität: Stötzers feministische Kunst und ihre aktivistische Praxis werden eins

Der Film „signale“ war ein Projekt, das Stötzers Gruppe im Frühjahr 1989 begann und das sich als vorausahnend, ja sogar als „prophetisch“ erweisen sollte. „signale war etwas für mich verborgenes, es rief mich das andere, unausgesprochene.“[16]

Wenige Monate später sollte die „neue realität“, die ihre Arbeit erfühlt hatte, überall explosionsartig zur wunderbaren Wirklichkeit werden. Als im Herbst 1989 die Revolution begann, öffneten sich die Experimente der Frauen mühelos einer rasanten und allumfassenden Politisierung – einem kollektiven Neudenken – aller Lebensbereiche. Die implizite (oder Mikro-)Politik ihrer feministischen, künstlerischen Kooperationen und das konkrete (makro-)politische Handeln wurden ununterscheidbar eins. Die Gruppe Frauen für Veränderung gründete sich im Oktober 1989 aus Stötzers Gruppe und anderen engagierten Thüringer Frauengruppen in Erfurt und baute auf deren materiellen und immateriellen Grundlagen auf: Netzwerken, Ressourcen, Fähigkeiten, dem Einander-Kennen und Vertrauen.[17] Die Gruppe beteiligte sich maßgeblich an den allwöchentlichen Erfurter Demonstrationen und organisierte im Rathaus der Stadt erstmalig Versammlungen nur für Frauen.

Am 8. November 1989 ergriff Stötzer vor 300 Frauen das Wort:

„gegen die führungsrolle des mannes
gegen die führer
gegen die rollen
gegen die bilder
gegen die frauenbilder der letzten 40 jahre“[18]

Im Moment der Revolution wurden die Dekonstruktion der ideologischen und politischen Struktur des DDR-Sozialismus, seiner Rollen und politischen Hierarchien und die Dekonstruktion seiner patriarchal geprägten Geschlechterrollen als gegenseitig bedingt erkennbar und somit als solche verhandelbar. Die ästhetisch vermittelten Formen des kollektiven „Selbst-“ und „Frau“-Seins, die Stötzers künstlerische Kollaborationen jahrelang herausgearbeitet hatten, konnten nun endlich benannt und auch außerhalb ihrer Kunst gelebt werden. Am 8. November 1989 entfalteten die körperlichen Signale in Stötzers Kunst – wenigstens für einen kurzen Moment – ihre kommunikative Wirkung auch jenseits der kleinen Zirkel ihrer künstlerischen Aktivitäten. Die besondere Konstellation von Politik, Kunst und Geschlecht, die Stötzers Praxis aus den Widersprüchen und der zunehmenden Durchlässigkeit ihres staatssozialistischen Verständnisses formuliert hatte, begann nun sichtbar zu werden und betrat den Bereich des Möglichen.

 

Nach 1990: Stötzers politisch-ästhetische Arbeitsweise wird in den Vokabularen des Westens unlesbar

Die politische Neuorientierung der Revolution in Richtung der deutschen Wiedervereinigung bereitete diesen Experimenten und Träumen ein rasches Ende. Nach dem 3. Oktober 1990 gingen der ostdeutsche Staat und seine spezifischen Kulturen ebenso in einer vergrößerten BRD auf wie die dissidenten Formen von Weiblichkeit, die Stötzer und ihre Gruppe herausgearbeitet hatten. Stötzers dissidenter Feminismus und ihre politisch-ästhetischen Erforschungen neuer Formen von Kollektivität wurden – in den nun dominierenden Vokabularen des Westens –abermals unlesbar.

Auch die in den politischen Kämpfen des Westens geformten feministischen Sprechweisen waren wenig geeignet, die Geschlechterverhältnisse in der einstigen DDR zu fassen: Die spezifischen Arten, das eigene (weibliche) Geschlecht zu leben und zu erleben, welche die nur vordergründig progressive Sozial- und Geschlechterpolitik des Staatssozialismus ermöglicht und verunmöglicht hatten, waren in deren Vokabularen eben so wenig beschreibbar, wie die dissidenten Gegenvorschläge von Stötzers Gruppe.

Gleiches passierte im Feld der Kunst, wo ein westlicher Kunstbegriff nicht nur ostdeutsche künstlerische Praktiken aus dem Blick geraten ließ, sondern auch – was vielleicht noch gravierender ist – die materiellen und diskursiven Kontexte, in denen deren Ästhetik und Politik überhaupt nur lesbar waren. Kunsthistorische Untersuchungen zum künstlerischen Untergrund der DDR blieben denn auch oft in dem aus dem Kalten Krieg übernommenen Gegensatz von Kommunismus und Antikommunismus verhaftet und reproduzierten so eben jene geschlechtlich kodierten (männlich konnotierten) Vorstellungen eines befreiten, autonomen Künstlergenies, die Gabriele Stötzers künstlerische Praxis durchkreuzt hatte. Auch das führte dazu, dass ihre Kunst viele Jahre nur wenig Beachtung fand.

Seit einigen Jahren zieht die Öffnung des Diskurses zu DDR und „Nachwende“ nun auch ein wachsendes Interesse am Werk von Gabriele Stötzer und ihrer Gruppe nach sich. Das Wissen um die Möglichkeiten, die eigene Geschlechtlichkeit anders zu leben, das in den filmischen und fotografischen Dokumenten von Stötzers künstlerischer Praxis aufbewahrt ist, wartet auf eine Entschlüsselung. Die großartige Aufgabe, den Schatz dieses feministischen Erbes zu heben, steht nun an.

 

Anmerkungen

[1] Siehe Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene: Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR, Bielefeld 2019, S. 136.

[2] Siehe ebd., S. 144.

[3] Für die Beschreibung von Personen und Gruppen in der DDR (inklusive ihrer Kunstszenen), die sich selbst als kritisch gegenüber dem Staat und seinen Institutionen verstanden oder staatlicherseits als Kritiker*innen oder Gegner*innen wahrgenommen wurden, werden diverse Begriffe verwendet: oppositionell, dissidentisch, nonkonform, Untergrund u. v. a. Sie bilden jedoch immer nur Teilaspekte des Selbstverständnisses von Akteur*innen ab, bleiben also immer ein Stück weit unzulänglich. Ich verwende hier auch den Begriff „dissident“, der dem Englischen entlehnt ist, und der das Konzept der Dissidenz in Richtung eines erweiterten Politikbegriffs öffnet.

[4] Siehe Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR, Berlin 2011, S. 290.

[5] Gabriele Stötzer: Anklagepunkte, n.d., Zeitzeugenportal, Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Online abrufbar unter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwGwd6dS-uE (Zugriff: 09.11.2021).

[6] Rebecca Hillauer, Zeit hinter Mauern, in: der Freitag vom 18. Oktober 2002, o. S. Online verfügbar unter: http://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/zeit-hinter-mauern (Zugriff: 09.11.2021).

[7] Hillauer ebd.

[8] Zit. in: Karin Fritzsche/Claus Löser (Hrsg.), Gegenbilder. Filmische Subversion in der DDR 1976 – 1989. Texte, Bilder, Daten, Berlin 1996, S. 75.

[9] Stötzer im Gespräch mit der Autorin.

[10] Siehe C. Löser (Anm. 4), S. 294.

[11] Zit. in: K. Fritzsche /C. Löser (Anm. 8), S. 76.

[12] Ebd., S. 296.

[13] Siehe A. Richter (Anm. 1), S. 108.

[14] Siehe ebd., S. 131.

[15] Zit. in: K. Fritzsche/C. Löser (Anm. 8), S. 76.

[16] Gabriele Stötzer in einer E-Mail an die Verfasserin, Mai 2013.

[17] So initiierten Stötzer und vier Frauen aus ihrem Umkreis die landesweit erste erfolgreiche Besetzung eines lokalen Stasi-Hauptquartiers, auf die bald weitere an anderen Orten folgten. Siehe Peter Große/Barbara und Matthias Sengewald, Die Besetzung der Bezirksverwaltung des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit der DDR am 4. Dezember 1989 in Erfurt , hrsg. v. der Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte, Erfurt, n. d.. Online verfügbar unter: www.gesellschaft-zeitgeschichte.de (Zugriff: 09.11.2021).

[18] Aus dem Dokument „geredet im rathaussitzungssaal vor frauen eingeladen von der bürgerinneninitiative frauen für veränderung am 8.11.89 gegen 22 uhr“, Gabriele Stötzer, Privatarchiv.

Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies

Very happy to contribute my text Signals, Gestures, Collective Bodies: Uncovering the Dissident Feminism of Gabriele Stötzer’s Art to Andreas Beitin, Uta Ruhkamp, Katharina Koch (Eds.): Empowerment Kunst und Feminismen, Berlin, 2022.

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In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the emancipation of women was considered as subsidiary to that of the working class. The equality of the genders was inscribed in the GDR constitution, and so the question was accordingly considered to be resolved in this socialist state. In reality, people socialized as women were, however, rarely present in the higher echelons of state institutions or companies and found themselves confronted with the double burden of full-time employment and reproductive labor at home. But these disparities and contradictions were rarely taken on politically, even in the GDR’s dissident scenes. To do so or to call oneself “feminist” was, in fact, frowned upon.[1] Women artists active in these circles felt themselves to be in opposition to the state, more so than men,[2] and often sought their emancipation in emulating, rather than subverting or resisting, these male-centric ideals of the underground.[3] Few practices—like the ones of Annemirl Bauer or Angela Hampel—made explicit reference to gender or “womanhood.”

The collaborative performances of the Erfurt artist Gabriele Stötzer (b. 1953 in Emleben, Thuringia) stood out, as they challenged the socialist state’s concepts of being collective, of gender, and of art, but they also broke with the self-understanding of the country’s dissident and underground artistic scenes that she was a part of. Where the latter espoused the (male) artist’s autonomous body as a rare site of refuge from the socialist system’s demands, Stötzer’s art elaborates a dissident, female, collectively configured body that is at its most liberated when it is maximally decentered, fragmented, and open to the world.

The text at hand is dedicated to the specific feminism of her practice that rests in the forms of being together in embodied vulnerability made possible in her work.

 

A Profound Physical Experience of Disruption Gives Rise to a Collective Art Practice

Gabriele Stötzer (known by her married name of Kachold at the time) had initially been active in the dissident literary scenes of her hometown of Erfurt. She would develop her unique collaborative and body-centered performative practice after an experience that shattered her perception of her physical and mental self and her place in the world. In 1977, Stötzer had been arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for signing and distributing the infamous open letter against the expatriation of Wolf Biermann, the dissident singer-songwriter. She spent seven months in Hoheneck, the “murderer’s fortress,” the infamous prison for female felons with convictions for violent or political crimes.[4] The encounters with her fellow prisoners under the prison’s conditions of extreme physical and psychological hardship would profoundly disrupt and alter her perception of herself, of her gender, and of the socialist project in the GDR. Of her imprisonment, Gabriele Stötzer later said: “my whole image of the GDR and of women collapsed at once.”[5]

The bodies of her fellow inmates, the women murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, defied two configurations of the female body that not so much competed as overlapped in the GDR: the traditional (petit-)bourgeois female body of the girl “from a decent family”[6] and the socialist body of the disciplined and productive woman worker which had superimposed itself onto, rather than replaced, the older, bourgeois ideal. Neither of these squared with the behaviors of the women in jail: “women who love each other physically, who tattoo themselves, who swallow spoons to kill themselves, and for whom neither real existing socialism nor her parents had prepared her. The image of the tidy and hard-working mother and worker—embodied by her mother and propagated by the GDR regime as the image of the ‘emancipated’ woman—fell apart.”[7] In Stötzer’s own words, there were “biographies and qualities that i could not reconcile with my image of women.”[8]

Upon her release, Gabriele Stötzer found that she could not talk about her experience, but that it returned to her in mental images. Unlike other former political prisoners who turned their main focus of activity to politics, Stötzer found herself pushed toward poetry and art. She found that the reworking of her (gendered) self after its violent disruption during her imprisonment had to be collective, that it could not be achieved alone. To find the collaborators she needed for her creative process, Stötzer began joining together with others, usually women, who had likewise had negative experiences with state-run organizations. Under constant surveillance by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Stasi), and despite its attempts to disrupt their activities, the women met once a week in Stötzer’s private gallery and in squatted condemned buildings that had been converted into photo labs and studios.[9] They talked about dreams, experimented with singing and sound,[10] and made clothes and props in which—or without which altogether—they filmed and photographed each other. Friendships laid the foundation for a relationship of trust that made it possible for the women to push their limits. Stötzer once described her work with these women as a barter transaction: “offering them nothing but their own bodies back as a experience, as feeling, as sensing, as the crossing of a threshold of their own unanswered questions about their female sex.”[11]

Over time, Stötzer’s invitation drew increasing numbers of women (and even some men) into a “collectivist work and life concept”[12] that became indistinguishable from her art—and that, in doing so, confounded both older Socialist Realist concepts of the relationship of art and society and the “underground” or “non-conforming” art forms developed in response to the former by her peers.

 

A Double Escape: Resisting Patriarchal Oppression in the East German State and Its Underground Scenes

For many artists of her generation, escape from the stifling ideological encroachment of the state had meant withdrawing into the hermetic, homogeneous circles of the “underground” and into an explicitly apolitical art. The individual artist body, conceived of as male, was not only the source of (individual) artistic authorship, but also a place of rebellion against and freedom from the demands of the regime. The figure of the wild, “free” male bohemian artist loomed large.[13]

Gabriele Stötzer’s decision to work with women and on the subject of womanhood, was, accordingly, a provocation for both the East German state and the oppositional circles in which she moved. In 1984, she founded the GDR’s only existing artist women’s group, known as the Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt (Erfurt Women Artists’ Group), later Exterra XX. Over the years, Monika Andres, Tely Büchner, Elke Carl, Monique Förster, Gabriele Göbel, Ina Heyner, Verena Kyselka, Bettina Neumann, Ingrid Plöttner, and Harriet Wollert, as well as Ines Lesch, Karina Popp, Birgit Quehl, Jutta Rauchfuß, and Marlies Schmidt, took part in the group’s activities with more persons participating occasionally.[14] Instead of working along a binary opposition between underground and state, the group’s experimentations took on patriarchal forms of repression shared by both. In the safety of the forms of sociability and collaboration fostered within the group, the women explored their own and each others’ bodies outside and against gender and societal norms.

To emancipate themselves from the double assault of the equally patriarchal regime and underground they could no longer seek shelter in a supposedly liberated male-connotated individual artist body, experienced as a mode of oppression itself. The bodies in the photographic and filmic experimentations of Stötzer’s group are no longer heroic; they are wounded, fragile, vulnerable, and interpenetrating with the world. In some their photographed interactions, bandages conceal and constrain a body or connect two bodies into one; in others, bodily openings are marked or pulled open with hands, skin is stretched and pulled or painted upon. To liberate oneself means to be radically collective, open to others, and decentered in these works. By moving beyond given configurations of gender and of political binaries of underground versus state, these bodies sense and try out ways of being that the available languages of that time could not (yet) express. They came to function as anticipations, experimental configurations, of what Gabriele Stötzer calls, in regard to her own bodily sensing, “a new reality,” and of which she says: “this other reality was not the west.”[15]

 

A New Reality: Stötzer’s Feminist Art and Activist Practice Merge into One

The film signale (signals) was a project that her group started in the spring of 1989, and that would turn out to be anticipatory, even “divinatory” in this way. “signals was about something obscured, it called on something other, not yet speakable.”[16]

A few month later, the “new reality” that their work had signaled toward, began to explode into glorious being all around. When the revolution began in the autumn, the women’s experimentations opened out effortlessly into the rapid politicization—the collective rethinking—of all arenas of life. The implicit (or micro)politics of their feminist artistic collaborations was filtered into concrete (macro)political acts. The group Frauen für Veränderung (Women for Change) formalized out of Stötzer’s circles and built on the material and immaterial supports the former had put into place: networks, resources, skills, along with mutual knowledge and trust.[17] The group played a significant role in Erfurt’s weekly demonstrations and, for the first time, organized gatherings for women only at the city’s town hall.

On November 8, 1989, Stötzer spoke out in front of the 300 members of the new group:

against men as leaders

against leaders

against roles

against images

against the images of women of the last 40 years[18]

In the revolutionary moment, the taking apart of the ideological, political configuration of GDR socialism, of roles and political hierarchies, and the taking apart of its specific configuration of gender, of patriarchy, became addressable as one and the same. The aesthetically mediated forms of collective “self-” and “woman”-hood, which Stötzer’s collaborations had been elaborating for some years, could now also and finally begin to be named—and inhabited outside of her art. On November 8, the bodily signals in Stötzer’s art found their communicability beyond the small circles of her collaborations—at least for a short moment in time. The particular constellation of the political, of art and gender, that Stötzer’s practice had begun to weave out of the contradictions and the increasing porosity of their state-socialist conceptualizations began to gain visibility and entered the realm of the possible.

 

After 1990: Stötzer’s Art and Its Politic Become Illegible in the Vocabularies of the West

The revolution’s political rerouting toward German national unification in the winter of 1990 made short shrift of these experimentations and dreams. After October 3, 1990, as the East German state and its specific cultures disappeared into an enlarged Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), so did the dissident femininities like those elaborated by Gabriele Stötzer and her group. Both Stötzer’s dissident feminism and her political-aesthetic explorations of new forms of being collective became once more unspeakable—in the now dominant vocabularies of the West.

Feminist languages, too, honed in the particular struggles of the West, have missed the ways in which state socialism’s ostensibly progressive social and gender politics enabled and disabled differently gendered ways of being—and the strategies developed in response. Western understandings of art, likewise, made not only East German art practices disappear from view, but also, and maybe more crucially, the material and discursive contexts in which their aesthetics and politics could be read. Art-historical analyses of the GDR’s artistic underground, often deeply steeped in communist and anti-communist binaries inherited from the Cold War, have tended to reiterate precisely those strongly gendered—male connotated—notions of the liberated, autonomous artist genius that Stötzer’s practice crossed. In consequence, her practice received little attention for many years.

It is good news that interest in the work of Gabriele Stötzer and her group is now on the rise. Decoding and uncovering the knowledge and the possibilities of being differently, dissidently gendered—which their bodies, preserved in film and photos, signal into our present—is a generous and careful feminist work calling to be done. The wonderful task of unearthing the treasure of this feminist heritage is now at hand.

 

[1] Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene: Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR (Bielefeld, 2019), p. 136.

[2] Ibid., p. 144.

[3] Various terms have been used to describe individuals and groups in the GDR (including its art scenes) who saw themselves as critical of the state and its institutions or who were perceived by the state as critics or opponents: oppositional, dissident, nonconformist, underground, and many others. However, none of these terms convey the whole picture, especially when it comes to the protagonists’ self-perception.

[4] Claus Löser, Strategien der Verweigerung: Untersuchungen zum politisch-ästhetischen Gestus unangepasster filmischer Artikulationen in der Spätphase der DDR (Berlin, 2011), p. 290.

[5] “Gabriele Stötzer: Anklagepunkte,” n.d., zeitzeugen-portal, Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwGwd6dS-uE (all URLs accessed in June 2022).

[6] Rebecca Hillauer, ‘Zeit hinter Mauern’, der Freitag, October 18, 2002, sec. Kultur, http://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/zeit-hinter-mauern.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Stötzer quoted in Karin Fritzsche and Claus Löser, Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversion in der DDR 1976–1989; Texte, Bilder, Daten (Berlin, 1996), p. 75.

[9] Stötzer in conversation with the author.

[10] Löser 2011 (see note 4), p. 294.

[11] Fritzsche and Löser 1996 (see note 8), p. 76.

[12]  Löser 2011 (see note 4), p. 296.

[13] Richter 2019 (see note 1), p. 108.

[14] Ibid., p. 131.

[15] Fritzsche and Löser 1996 (see note 8), p. 76.

[16] Stötzer in an email exchange with the author, May 2013.

[17] Stötzer and four women from her circles would, for example, launch the first successful occupation of a local Stasi headquarters in the country, soon to be followed by others elsewhere. See Peter Große, Barbara Sengewald, and Matthias Sengewald, “Die Besetzung der Bezirksverwaltung des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit der DDR am 4. Dezember 1989 in Erfurt,” Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte, n.d., www.gesellschaft-zeitgeschichte.de.

[18] From the document “geredet im rathaussitzungssaal vor frauen eingeladen von der bürgerinneninitiative frauen für veränderung am 8.11.89 gegen 22 uhr,” private archive of Gabriele Stötzer.

kuratieren ist sorge

kuratieren ist sorge – formen der sorge in praktiken des kritischen kuratierens
war mein Textbeitrag (hier in deutscher Übersetzung) zu Anna Schäffler, Friederike Schäfer, Nanne Buurman, AG Networks of Care, nGbK, (Eds.): Networks of Care. Politiken des (Er)haltens und (Ent)sorgens, Berlin, 2022

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curate (v.) von lateinisch curatus, Partizip Perfekt von curare „sich sorgen“; siehe auch: cure (v.); spätes 14. Jh., „gesund machen oder ein gesunder Zustand“, von altfranzösisch curer und direkt von lateinisch curare „sich sorgen“, daher in der medizinischen Sprache „medizinisch behandeln, heilen“. Auch: für ein Museum, eine Galerie, eine Kunstausstellung etc. „verantwortlich sein, verwalten“. Ein früheres Verb, curatize (1801), bezieht sich auf das Substantiv „(Kirchen-)Kurator“; spätes 14. Jh., „geistlicher Führer, Kleriker, der für das geistige Wohlergehen der ihm Anvertrauten verantwortlich ist; Gemeindepfarrer“, von mittelalterlich lateinisch curatus „jemand, der für die Sorge (der Seelen) verantwortlich ist.[1]

 

wenn kuratieren sorge ist, dann sorge durch wen, für wen, wofür?

wenn kuratieren sorge ist, dann wie?

 

wer sorgt sich und um wen?

die institution um die kurator_innen?

die kurator_innen um die künstler_innen?

die künstler_innen um die institution?

alles dreis aber umgekehrt?

 

wer sorgt für die zeit, die es braucht, damit kreative arbeit stattfinden kann?

wer sorgt für die integrität der werke?

 

wer sorgt sich um das publikum?

ist sorge zustimmung oder kann es auch heißen mehr zu fordern?

bedeutet sorge fürs publikum überfluss herzustellen?

oder ist weniger zu zeigen auch eine art sorge?

was ist die arbeit der betrachter_innen?

 

wenn sich die sorge um das publikum und die sorge um die kurator_innen, die sorge um die künstler_innen und die sorge um die institution nicht nahtlos ineinander fügen – sollte dann eine form der sorge vorrang vor der anderen haben? wessen sorge ist privilegiert, wenn sorge eine begrenzte ressource ist?

wer entscheidet darüber?

 

was ist die arbeit des kuratierens? ist denken arbeit, ist lesen arbeit, ist es arbeit, umherlaufen und zuzuhören wie ein gedanke im kopf gestalt annimmt? wie misst sich der wert dieser arbeit?

 

an der anzahl der formate,

der kunstwerke,

der besucher_innen,

der twitter-erwähnungen,

der rezensionen?

oder an der qualität der beziehungen, die der prozess des kuratierens ermöglicht?

wie misst man diese?

 

wer misst?

die produzent_innen? das publikum? die institution? die geldgeber_innen?

 

ist eine kuratorische arbeit erfolgreich, wenn sie ihre macher_innen erschöpft zurücklässt?

 

kann kritik sorgend sein?

kann sorge in der suche nach perfektion liegen?

 

wie kann sorgearbeit sichtbar werden?

welche sorgearbeit und wessen?

 

die arbeit, toiletten zu putzen, oder nächtelang zu diskutieren, bis ein bestimmtes problem gelöst ist? die arbeit, die es braucht, um tief durchzuatmen, wenn man aus der haut fahren will, oder die arbeit, die es braucht, um wieder zu atem zu kommen, wenn dies jemand anderem passiert ist?

 

für welche dieser arten von arbeit werden wir bezahlt?

wie werden wir bezahlt?

ist bezahlung eine form der sorge?

 

wie kalkuliert man eine gerechte bezahlung?

auf der grundlage der bedürfnisse,

fähigkeiten,

qualifikationen,

dem jeweiligen wert, den der so genannte freie markt den verschiedenen arten von arbeit zuweist?

sollte die arbeit des kuratierens gleich bezahlt werden wie die der künstler_innen, der flyer-designer_innen, der person am kassenschalter? ist es sorge, alle unterschiedlich oder alle genau gleich zu bezahlen?

sollte jemand besser bezahlt werden, dessen arbeit unglaublich langweilig ist?

sollten wir für die zeit bezahlt werden, die es braucht, um unsere eigenen körper zu regenerieren?

wer zahlt für die babysitter_in?

sollten wir darauf beharren, dass alle arbeitsstunden, die für die gestaltung einer ausstellung nötig sind, auch bezahlt werden? oder darauf, nur genau die stunden in diese arbeit zu stecken, für die wir tatsächlich bezahlt werden? schaffen wir es, eine wand leer zu lassen?

was ist mit bezahlung

in form von anerkennung?

in form von kulturellem kapital?

in form von freundschaft?

in form von unterstützung?

mit dem versprechen auf all diese dinge irgendwann einmal, später?

mit dem spass an der arbeit?

ist das genug?

wie werden wir großzügiger mit uns selbst und einander?

ist das einverständnis, kostenlos oder für wenig geld zu arbeiten, ein akt der sorge? ist es ein privileg? kann es eine pflicht sein?

ist eine arbeit noch kritisch, wenn sie bezahlt wird? ist eine arbeit noch kritisch, wenn sie gut bezahlt wird?

wenn ich euch sage, dass ich für das schreiben dieses textes 150 euro brutto bekommen und 8 stunden daran gesessen habe, erscheint euch das angemessen, zu viel oder zu wenig?

hätte mein text für diese bezahlung länger, kürzer, umfangreicher oder weniger umfangreich sein sollen? würde es einen unterschied machen, wenn ich sage, dass die arbeit an diesem text ein kampf war, aber auch ein vergnügen?

sollte das eine rolle spielen?

wie begegnen wir den widersprüchen in den ökonomischen politiken unserer praxis?

wie können wir unsere arbeit und unsere begegnungen als eine praxis der sorge um uns selbst und andere gestalten? (und wenn die sorge um einen selbst auf kosten von anderen geht – ist das noch sorge? und vice versa?)

wissen wir bereits oder müssen wir noch besser lernen, wie eine sorgende arbeit und ein sorgender arbeitskontext aussehen könnten?

können wir es gemeinsam lernen?

 

Elske Rosenfeld, geboren 1974 in Halle/S. (DDR), arbeitet in verschiedenen Medien und Formaten. Ihr hauptsächlicher Schwerpunkt und Material sind die Geschichte des Staatssozialismus, seiner Dissidenzen und der Revolution von 1989/90. Die Fragestellungen dieses Texts basieren auf Erfahrungen aus der Arbeit als Künstlerin und Ausstellungsmacherin in der politischen Kunstszene Berlins, wie zum Beispiel zuletzt als Mitglied der nGbK Arbeitsgruppe „oder kann das weg? Fallstudien zur Nachwende“. Der Text baut auf der Text-Bild-Collage„Symposium“ auf, die 2014 mit Freja Bäckman entstanden ist.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/curate und https://www.etymonline.com/word/cure?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_42912

curating is care

curating is care—on the conditions of care in practices of critical curating

was my contribution to Anna Schäffler, Friederike Schäfer, Nanne Buurman, AG Networks of Care, nGbK, (Eds.): Networks of Care. Politiken des (Er)haltens und (Ent)sorgens, Berlin, 2022

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curate (v.)

from Latin curatus, past participle of curare “to take care of”; see also: cure (v.); late 14c., “to restore to health or a sound state,” from Old French curer and directly from Latin curare “take care of,” hence, in medical language, “treat medically, cure”). Also: to “be in charge of, manage” a museum, gallery, art exhibit, etc. An earlier verb, curatize (1801) refers to the noun “(church) curate;” late 14c., “spiritual guide, ecclesiastic responsible for the spiritual welfare of those in his charge; parish priest,” from Medieval Latin curatus “one responsible for the care (of souls).1

if curating is care then care by whom, for whom, of what? if curating is care then how?

who takes care and of whom? the institution of the curators? the curators of the artists?
the artists of the institution?
all of the above but vice versa?

who takes care of protecting the time-space in which creation can happen? who takes care of the integrity of the works?

who takes care of the audience?
is to care to comfort or is to care also to challenge? does care show up as abundance?
or is showing less care?
what is the work of the viewer?

if care of the audience and care of the curators, care of the artists and care of the institution do not collapse neatly into each other—should one form of care take precedence over the other? whose care is privileged if care is a limited resource?
who decides?

what is the work of curating? is thinking work, is reading work, is going around listening to your thoughts settle work? how can its value be measured?

in the quantity of formats, of art works,
of visitors,
of twitter mentions,
of reviews?
or by the quality of the relationships a process of curating enabled? how to measure those?

who measures?
the producers? the audience? the institution? the funders?

is a work of curating successful if it leaves its makers depleted?

can criticism be caring?
and is it caring to aim for perfection?

can the work of taking care be made visible? which work and whose?

the work of cleaning the toilets or that of talking through the night until a particular problem has found its solution? the work it takes to take a deep breath when you want to fly off the handle, or the work it takes to get your breath back when another has done so?

which of these kinds of work are we paid for? how are we paid?
is pay care?

how is a fair rate of pay calculated? based on needs,
abilities,
qualifications,

the respective value assigned to different types of work by the so-called “free market”?

should the work of curating be paid the same as that of the artist, the flyer designer, the person at the ticket counter? is it care to pay everyone differently or to pay them exactly the same?
should someone be paid more if their work is incredibly boring?
should we be paid for the time it takes to replenish our own bodies?
who pays for the babysitter?

should we fight to increase the pay to fit the amount of work invested in an exhibition’s creation? or limit the amount of work we invest to the amount of pay available for it? do we have the courage to leave one wall empty?

what about payment in recognition?
in cultural capital?
in friendship? support?

with the promise of any of the above at some point in the future? with the joy of creation?

is it enough?
how can we be generous with ourselves and each other?

is agreeing to work for free or for little an act of care? is it a privilege? is it a duty? is a work still critical if it is paid for? is a work still critical if it is well paid for?

if i told you i was paid 150 euro before taxes for writing this text, and that it took me 8 hours, would you consider this adequate, too much, too little?
for this amount of pay should my text have been longer, shorter, more comprehensive or less so? would it make a difference if i said that to work on it has been a struggle, but also a pleasure?

should it matter?
how do we sit with the contradictions of the economies and the politics or our practice?

how can we conduct our work and our encounters as a practice of taking care of ourselves and each other? (and if my self-care comes at the expense of that of another—is it still caring? and vice versa?)

do we already know, or do we still have to learn what a work and a work context that cares looks like?

how do we learn together?

 

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S. (GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state socialism, its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. The questions of this text are based on experiences of working as an artist and exhibition maker in the political art scenes of Berlin, such as her most recent work as a member of the project “…oder kann das weg? Fallstudien zur Nachwende” at the nGbK/ such as most recently as a member of the nGbK working group “oder kann das weg? Fallstudien zur Nachwende”. The text also builds on the text- image-collage work “Symposium”, created in 2014 with Freja Bäckman.

 

1 https://www.etymonline.com/word/curate and https://www.etymonline.com/word/cure?ref=etymolI- ne_crossreference#etymonline_v_42912

Review: Covergirl

Covergirl: Wasp Files. History and stories of an image, a narrative (Spector Books, 2016) is about a series of encounters and entanglements between a number of biographies, images, and works of art.

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It documents and completes the eponymous project Leipzig-based artist Alba D’Urbano and photographer Tina Bara developed between 2007 and 2016 in response to a set of artworks and publications by conceptual artist Dora García. Their project raises questions about how processes of appropriation, abstraction, and (de)contextualisation can come into play when historical materials are valorised into works of “critical art” – and that are relevant beyond the concreteness of their case.

During a residency in Leipzig in 2007, García, conducted research into images held by the East German state security service Stasi. In the resulting exhibition at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK), a video showing a fictionalised meeting between a Stasi informant and their case officer was accompanied by several series of ready-mades: photographs found in the files of, among others, a group of women, captured sunbathing and chatting together in the nude. Unbeknownst to García, one of the women was Tina Bara, a photographer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, a stone’s throw from the GfZK. Covergirl’s story begins in 2007 just after the closing of the show, when Bara finds herself, superficially “anonymised” with a black bar across her eyes, on the cover of García’s exhibition catalogue, which her colleague D’Urbano had brought back from the gallery to their shared offices.

Covergirl documents the series of appropriations and re-appropriations that transported the nude photo of Bara and others from the particular, historical context of the 1980s GDR’s dissident cultures via its regime of mass-surveillance and its historicisation into the space of contemporary international critical and commercial art. With the support of D’Urbano, Bara traces the images back to a weekend excursion of members of a women’s anti-militarisation group, Frauen für den Frieden [FfF, engl. Women for Peace] in the mid-80ies, where they had been taken by her friend and fellow activist Katja Havemann. They ended up in the hands of the Stasi during a raid at another of the women’s homes. In 1990 the “wasp files” (“wasps” was the Stasi’s codename for the group) passed into the custodianship of the Stasi Records Agency (BstU), an institution set up to preserve and provide access to files for victims and researchers. The images were discovered there by the Spanish artist during her research; who would then them on display in her Leipzig show, sell them as art prints, and use one of them – Bara’s naked image – on the cover of her catalogue. García decided not to seek or include further information on the images’ context of origin or their passage into the hands of the Stasi, nor to try and ascertain the identity and whereabouts of those portrayed. She mislabels the series: “Women, naturist meeting, end of the seventies”. Her e-flux announcement describes the work’s artistic merit like this: “The material here presented out of its historical context reveals itself surprisingly, as a peculiar form of narrative: conceptually highly interesting examinations of human behaviour and gestures that at times call to mind the Theatre of the Absurd.”

D’Urbano and Bara’s book is based around a reversal of García’s decontextualising and abstracting move: it reconnects the catchy catalogue cover back to the historical constellations of intimacy, resistance, and repression from which it was lifted in order to be valorised as art. A trail of correspondence of Bara with the Stasi Records Agency as well as with the Spanish artist maps the ethical and legal grounds and the professional and institutional motivations that guided the image’s transit across contexts and times. But the two artist’s project does not aim at or exhaust itself in this reconstruction, nor in passing moral judgment on the ethics of the Spanish artist’s work. The book and the art works it documents elaborate their own, different approaches to the nexus of history, biography, image politics, and aesthetics engaged by the images’ transposition into art. Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik among others have used the term ethico-aesthetic to show the two, ethics and aesthetics, to be intrinsically linked. In García’s and the Covergirl project such constellations are made, often around quite similar formal aspects, in vastly different ways. It is through their juxtaposition that the book broaches valuable questions about the ethical and aesthetical economies that elevate documents of past violence into objects of value in the circuits of contemporary “critical art”. I will go over a few of them here:

De/Re-contextualisation: In García’s work artistic value is produced through the decontextualisation of the images, freeing them up for the artist’s formal and conceptual play and skilful inter-textual referencing (“conceptual examinations”, “theatre of the absurd”). But to understand the ethico-aesthetics of such a move in the image’s concrete case, this de-contextualisation must itself be contextualised:

An international art audience may or may not be aware that East German perspectives were at the time of the work’s presentation largely absent, not just in the international field of art, but also in German mainstream discourse itself. A German Gedenkpolitik [commemoration politics] that passed its historical judgment in binary vocabularies inherited from the Cold War, had invisibiled lives lived in degrees of acquiescence and resistance to a repressive regime. Blanket condemnations of all things Stasi had foreclosed a discussion in which some form of accountability or reconciliation might have been achieved. It was in this space of absences and open wounds that García lifted her as yet historically unprocessed materials, as decontextualized footage into the international field of contemporary art.

D’Urbano and Bara’s works, take precisely the opposite path, of re-contextualising or, in fact, creating a context for the readability of the images in their historical, political significance. In the absence of public discourse, contemporary art can and often has become a proxy space: people come to art to assure themselves of their otherwise invisible past. The video Re-Action and the photo tableaus of Story Tales (both from 2008-2009) can provide such a space for its protagonists and audiences: In both, D’Urbano and Bara revisit the women portrayed in the series of nudes, returning the images to the women, and the women into the images.

Figurations of Other/ Self are part of this re-appropriation and are engaged, once again, differently here and in García’s work. The latter skilfully fine-tunes the exact degree of otherness/exoticism and abstraction (“naturist meeting”) that make the women’s bodies maximally available for the free play of the desires (conceptual, formal, sexual) of the both, her the creator, and the consumers of her work.

By contrast, D’Urbano and Bara’s works reinvests these bodies with personhood in ways that can be expected to challenge, rather than service the expectations of international art audiences (possibly even in welcome ways). The project’s strength also lies in how the two women bring their different and constantly shifting degrees of proximity and distance to the images and their story to bear: It is clear that D’Urbano needs Bara, and Bara needs D’Urbano to make this work. Where García construes the material and its personnel as “other” to an unmarked, “neutral” artists’ or art viewers’ self, D’Urbano and Bara address their respective otherness to or entanglement in that materials throughout – as that which enables and conditions their dialogical approach.

The question why García’s othering failed to raise any alarms in an art world that has thankfully become more sensitized to the violence of such acts is interesting in itself. It is clear however, that the point of D’Urbano and Bara’s intervention is not to say that histories should only be owned and worked on by those directly affected by them. In Covergirl it is precisely the collaboration between the two artists – the absorption in and processing of her past of the one, the witnessing and sorting through of the other – that makes their interventions work.

Anonymisation/ the black bar/XX contributes to the othering performed by García’s work. Her picture series does not addresses the black line she dutifully applied to all faces: it remains an unwelcome, but necessary blip in the picture – a response, as minimal as possible to legal requirement, spilling its (presumably) unintentional associations of criminality, illegality, or obscenity onto its depersonalized subjects. In a later, bizarre and unpleasant twist of the story the letters XX will take on a similar function in García’s book Steal this Book. Here it will anonymise Bara’s beautiful and heartfelt letters to the Spanish artist, which DG reprints here, again, without Bara’s knowledge or consent. To the naked body of subject that does not speak, García adds speech that has no author-body. When Bara confronts her with this renewed transgression, the Spanish artist explains that she did not seek permission, because she had worried that Bara would not grant it. Well, yes…

D’Urbano and Bara, by contrast, make the black bar into another site of formal and contextual analysis in the Covergirl works. Their video and print series Re-Flection (2010-2011) play with the aesthetics and mechanics of the black line, including its use by the Stasi Records Agency (who permitted the use of the pictures on the condition that they be anonymised this way) and in García’s work. When the black bar slips from Bara’s face to her crotch (or rather, to the crotch of a life-size photo of a naked female body on one of D’Urbanos “skin dresses” which Bara wears), the work adds an interrogation of the naked female body in art history, porn, its shaming and disciplining.

These and the other works of the Covergirl project show, that attention to a work’s ethics and to the context in which it unfolds, does not have to come at the expense of its aesthetic effectiveness. That, on the contrary, artistic value can be made there: where historical, relational sensitivity deepens and expands a work’s formal, aesthetic richness and complexity.

When García’s deploys Bara’s nakedness on her book’s cover, all we learn is what we may have already feared: that what works for the most opportunistic realms of advertising still works to sell a book as critical art. D’Urbano and Bara decided to put Bara’s picture on their cover, too. But when we squint at it, to make out a figure among the bitmap of black dots on a reflective ground, what we catch sight of is mostly ourselves.

***

This text was written for the Blog https://nachwendefallstudien.de/ in 2021.

In/visible – Karl-Marx-Allee’s Return to Legibility in Art

This text was produced for the project Treffpunkt: Karl-Marx-Allee (Meet-up at Karl-Marx-Allee)

The word “visible” remains visible within the word “invisible”. Cover up the “in”, and it appears. The prefix negates as much as it preserves.

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In 1968 the Czechoslovakian artist Július Koller retraced the white lines of a tennis court with white chalk in one of his artistic actions.[1] Once completed, his act of overwriting became invisible, but not without first doubling the space traced. By artistically (and invisibly) overwriting the tennis court, the artist made this everyday place legible in a new way: as a work of art.
The subject of invisibility pervades the history as well as the aftermath of Eastern Europe’s artistic underground, including that of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In many art scenes, for example in Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring, the literal imperceptibility of actions in public space was both a political strategy and an artistic concept. Various forms of over-affirmation and working between the lines also played with INvisibility.
Meanwhile in the GDR, performance art and experimental film art practices were not recognised or categorised as art by the establishment and were hardly shown at all in official art exhibitions. Artists themselves often didn’t view ephemeral practices and artistically mediated forms of togetherness as art either, because they did not fit into the traditional artistic categories that persisted even in those circles considered non-conformist at the time. The unification of Germany in 1990 saw the GDR’s artistic practices fall into a renewed state of invisibility, this time even less strategic or intentional, in an overwriting of culture that made things disappear rather than duplicating their legibility.
GDR architecture also disappeared from many cityscapes after 1990. Post-unification artists and activists have documented this disappearance, marking or capturing threatened or already demolished buildings in their work. Itself an overwriting of previous architectures that were no longer considered contemporary, Karl-Marx-Allee has survived the course of GDR history and its erasure in Berlin’s urban space after 1990.
The GDR remains visible, indeed, hypervisible – and yet still invisible – on Karl-Marx-Allee. Here it is hidden in plain sight, or rather in hyper-visibility.

The street and its architectures are there to be seen, but who can still read and understand them? A West German viewer might see a type of architecture in which all floor plans are the same and assume that all residents were treated as equals here. An East German neighbour might know that the upper classes of the GDR once lived here, not necessarily richer than the rest of the country, but privileged in terms of the location of their homes. Who takes this representative project of the GDR at face value, and who knows of the conflicts and ideological battles it obscures? Who still recognises the names of those who lived here, many of them members of the GDR’s cultural elite? The street must be coaxed into telling its story. Without a mediating voice, it will remain silent.
The project Treffpunkt: Karl-Marx-Allee (Meet-up at Karl-Marx-Allee) sees three artists take on this mediating care-work. Thus Karl-Marx-Allee becomes a sort of inversion of Koller’s overwritten tennis court: a place that needs an artist’s touch in order for its original meanings to become legible.
All three parts of the project play with different formats of INvisibility: the walk, the projection, the performance, and the temporary installation are only visible for a short time and only live on as memories connected to their locations for those who witnessed them.
In her work Hier, Berolinastraße! (Here, Berolinastraße!), Ingeborg Lockemann examines the particular form of invisibility lived by lesbian women in the GDR. These women placed personal advertisements in which they gave terms from everyday life double meanings that could only be deciphered by those in the know. Ingeborg Lockemann’s plexiglass works engraved with these terms are also transparent, discreet, and hidden – visible, but perhaps easy to miss for anyone not in the know. Michaela Schweiger brings to the fore that which usually remains unseen in Wir, 2021 (We, 2021). For this work, residents have clothing tailor-made based on patterns from Sibylle, a magazine for fashion and culture founded in the GDR in 1956 and discontinued in 1995. Their hourly wages will be calculated in correlation to how much rent they pay, illuminating material conditions not usually on display: the cost of living and the value of an hour’s work.

The eponymous protagonist of Babette im Rosengarten (Babette in the Rose Garden) wanders the cityscape in a performance by Inken Reinert, revealing pieces of history before disappearing once more. Only the rosebushes arranged around Babette as props that briefly turn into art will remain. After the performance they will be given to residents. Stripped once more of their secondary meaning as art, they will return to their existence as rose bushes, nothing more.

[1] Július Koller, Time/Space Definition of the Psychophysical Activity of Matter 1 (Anti-Happening), 1968

Translation by Moira Barrett