The Classroom, Forced Migration and the Arts

The initiative owes its origin to the transdisciplinary educational environment at Bard College Berlin, a Liberal Arts College with a BA Program “Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought”, that allows all kinds of combinations of artistic practice, social sciences, humanities, and civic interventions. The Research-Creation approach, developed by Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk*, helped us in 2016, while the so-called “Refugee Crisis” unfolded in Germany, to include students who just recently had arrived in Berlin, from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and to use their knowledge and experience for a class about Germany’s history as a country of immigration. Films, poems, paintings, sound compositions, installations communicated the students’ insights and ideas on contemporary movements and migrations, based on academic readings and research as well as on individual and collective memory. In that first year, the historian Marion Detjen collaborated with artists - Sabine Hornig, Penny Yassour, Rula Ali, Nasan Tur, and others - to support the students in finding their medium and realising their art works. The class partnered with an architecture class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, taught by Michelle Howard, to build two exhibitions: one in May 2017, as part of the International Migration History Conference “The Impossible Order” at the Berlin Wall Memorial, and another in October 2017, in the arts space BOX Freiraum.

In 2018, we anchored the approach in BCB’s curriculum by involving BCB’s art department and cross-listing the class as a history class and a practicing arts class. The artist John von Bergen taught a class together with Marion Detjen that resulted in an exhibition on the memory of exile and displacement in literature and the arts. Since 2019, the art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann has been taking the artistic und curatorial aspects of Research-Creation to new levels, and the class has been interlocking and integrating artistic and migration research and practice ever more. The students learn and discuss movement/migration/diaspora concepts and history, while at the same time encountering examples of research-based art. The development of their individual projects is accompanied by lectures, continuous reading, critical assessment of historical sources, and class discussions about how the arts and the knowledge about movement and migration relate. Due to Covid19 we had to cancel an international conference and exhibition on the emergence of the figure of the “modern refugee” during the 20th Century in Berlin in Spring 2020. But we recovered from this disappointment quickly, by experimenting with our first online exhibition, which eventually led to the decision to build this website as an archive and continuous documentation platform. 

In 2021, the class entered its first cycle as an OSUN cross-campus network class. The migration researcher and anthropologist Juan Ricardo Aparicio Cuervo at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá collaborated with the artist and photographer Juan Orrantia for the artistic development of the student projects in his class. The classes in Berlin and in Bogotá met frequently online, for discussions and presentations, sharing a common theoretical basis (Hannah Arendt and Achille Mbembe) and an interest in questions of the nation state and the international order, of institutions and regulations and migrants’ agencies. While the Bogotá class had a focus on Internally Displaced Persons in Colombia, the Berlin class focussed on the post Second World War European Asylum regime and the history of forced migration to Europe. Our third OSUN partner, Sarah Nuttal and Pamila Gupka at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, organised lectures, and a workshop in August 2021 for the faculty to share their research experience and think together about how to best leverage the practicing arts to enrich teaching in the social sciences and humanities.

In 2022 we entered the second cycle, with a network class involving classes at BCB, Universidad de los Andes, and University of Witwatersrand (Wits), plus the post-graduate student Maria Carri from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College Annandale in the US. The class at Wits School of Arts was taught collaboratively in tandems by artists and social scientists, coordinated by the curator Nontobeko Ntombela. The classes at BCB, Wits, and Uniandes, while coming from very different disciplinary and geographic backgrounds, had a common focus on failing refugee protection institutions as part of a landscape of the “ruins” of imperialism and modernity, on the internalised "ruinations” (Ann Stoler) in bodies and minds of the people, on movement, identity, and “coming home” (Sara Ahmed), and on diaspora and nation (Stuart Hall). They shared lectures by the artists Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Juan Orrantia, and students exchanged their individual projects on Padlet and on Zoom in break-out rooms. In May/June 2022 the three classes culminated in public exhibitions, showing the students’ works and following up on ideas from the class discussions with public events, as transformative interventions into local and transnational debates.

* Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Interventions, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances’”, Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 37 (2012), 5-26.

Leadership

Marion Detjen, Bard College Berlin
m.detjen@berlin.bard.edu

Dorothea von Hantelmann, Bard College Berlin
d.vonhantelmann@berlin.bard.edu