Thank You!

Bard College Berlin: Since our first Research-Creation class in 2017 we have been cooperating with many institutional partners and individuals, receiving invaluable support for the development and refinement of the Research-Creation approach and often also for our students and their projects individually. The first exhibition, “Tread Softly”, was a wonderful collaboration with the Architecture Master Class of Michelle Howards at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The Spring 2019 class on the “(Il-)Legal” and the exhibition “The Skin of the Law” drew on the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made available through the Consortium on Forced Migration, Education and Displacement. We thank Carolina Mojto at BOX Freiraum Berlin for hosting some of our workshops and one exhibition; the Berlin Wall Memorial for hosting an exhibition and a conference; Callie’s for hosting an exhibition and an evening event; the Federal Agency for Political Education for financial support; FLAX-Foreign-Local Artistic Xchange for contacts and help when we started; the artists Penny Yassour, Nasan Tur, Rula Ali, Alina Amer, Sabine Hornig, Khaled Kurbeh, Tanja Knaus, Ulrike Kuschel, Mohamedali Ltaief Abdul, Razzak Shaballout, and others, for working with our students; John von Bergen for co-teaching the class in 2018; Penny Yassour especially, for her love and dedication to the students and to the arts during two workshops in 2017 and in 2020; Victoria Martínez, Lena Kocutar, Dachil Sado, and Tamar Maare for being the artistic instructors for the classes 2023 and 2024; Janina Schabig and Charity Ellis for building this website; Joon Park and again Janina for working with students and for technical support with the exhibitions; Adèle Martin, Lara Habboub, Gali Har-Gil, and Lily Adams as student assistents; Omar Haidari and his friends and family for preparing delicious Afghan Burgers at almost all of the openings; the “Wir machen das” team and Annika Reich, for always being there; and for ideas and inspiration, for lectures, academic exchange and cooperation at different stages of the project Frank Wolff, Sandeep Bhagwati, Bashshar Haydar, Christine Bartlitz, Orwa Nyrabia, Jakob Vogel, Markus Messling, Leyla Dhakli, Peter Gatrell, Loren Landau, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, mêLe yamomo, Omri Boehm, Teresa Koloma Beck, Priya Basil, Phi Su, David Macou, Angelika Nguyen, Katharina Warda, and others.

Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá: The collective process that led to our first exhibition in 2021 was set in a context of widespread political mobilization, police violence, students and a middle class national strikes, COVID pandemia, indigenous and afrodescendant struggles. All these events made our class and individual projects much more contingent, relevant and also emotionally difficult to confront. But in the middle of these uncertainties and even within the virtual world, our class created a space of caring for each other, even though we never met during the semester. We had fellow-travellers that came to our class and enriched our debates that we want to also acknowledge here. Sebastián Cobarrubias, a critical geographer and cartographer, gave us a fascinating talk which helped us to ponder on the externalization of borders outside the UE. Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon made us think about writing as a radical and subtle process for following subjectification processes, abandonment and perdurance and the affective in the migrant experience in Southafrica. To be sure, none of us had experience with exhibitions and artistic projects. We want to specially thank Juan Carlos Orrantia for guiding us through this dimension with immense creativity, courage and patience. He was certainly the person that helped us to connect the research dimension with the artistic practices. The work of Eduardo Arias with the setting up of the exhibition was magnificent. Support given by Tatjana Louis, head of the departement of Languages and Culture was crucial and special thanks to the diligence and passion of Maria José Sierra for taking care of the institutional arrangements of the exhibition. Sergio Andrés Serrano was in charge of setting up contracts, payments, etc. The communication team of the Faculty of Social Science filmed the inauguration of the exhibition. Finally, many thanks to the staff of the beautiful Centro de Japón, which lend us their space for the exhibition. Our exhibition was the first one that the Centro de Japón held after the decreed pandemia quarantine.