Author(s)
Isshaq Al-Barbary (Campus in Camps), Diego Segatto (Campus in Camps)
In April 2016, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, brought to life the Here We Are Academy: a spirited temporary recomposition of a refugee-initiated platform for learning called We Are Here Academy.
Established in Amsterdam in 2012, We Are Here is the first large-scale organization of refugees living in limbo in the Netherlands. Through projects organized with artists and activists, the group explores the space of art as one wherein members can practice visibility, solidarity, self-representation, and action—structurally unavailable to them due to society’s denial of the right of refugees to have rights. If We Are Here Academy is where refugees can learn, Here We Are Academy is where they can teach (each other and those with citizen rights) the knowledge of survival.
Campus in Camps joined the Academy’s temporary “faculty” to co-develop its curriculum and gather with refugees, artists, students, researchers, and activists to continue our commitment to writing-by-embodying an ongoing Collective Dictionary. We have taken to heart curator Maria Hlavajova’s question of how to conceive of “future vocabularies” in times like ours; of how to think and practice a lexicon of “being together otherwise.” Such a lexicon could enable us to move about the current impasse, negotiating refugee participants’ knowledge against the reality of a contemporary western society that hides its own failings behind the label “refugee crisis.” It has been a complex, humbling, and at times conflict filled process of figuring out how to speak a language of neither victim nor victor, but that of confident political subject who recognizes and acts upon the urgencies of the contemporary. It has led us, if tentatively, to shape the contours of an entry for Political into the Collective Dictionary. Download the complete Collective Dictionary here.
Campus in Camps “Collective Dictionary: Political” was originally published in FORMER WEST: Art and the Contemporary After 1989, Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds. (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 567-568.
Related
In April 2016, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, brought to life the Here We Are Academy: a spirited temporary recomposition of a refugee-initiated platform for learning called We Are Here Academy.
We at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst stand in full allyship and solidarity with ruangrupa, all artists and activists of documenta fifteen, and the broader lumbung ecosistem. The collective learnings of decolonial praxis that this edition of documenta have brought to Kassel have been an important and invaluable achievement. This labor reveals the urgency of addressing racist and imperial political agendas perpetuated in Germany today. To echo the words of writer and researcher Sami Khatib:
“To Read the War” is an assemblage of texts, visual essays, interviews, conversations, and even entire publications from BAK, basis voor actuele kunst’s archive[1] and beyond, republished here on BAK’s digital forum, Prospections. Hurtled into being in these devastating days of escalating violence in Palestine, it coincides with BAK’s long-term series To Watch the War, In Solidarity and the moving image forum To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023).
“Scarecrows” is a visual essay by artist Jumana Manna. Here, Manna images daily acts of defiance by Palestinians foraging wild plants for food and medicine; something their survival had depended on for centuries. These humble resistances take place in the face of the legal prohibitions imposed by the State of Israel. The thinly veiled imperialist and racist laws, disguised as preservation decrees protecting plants and other species, are aimed, de facto, against the very possibility of people sustaining their lives on their own lands. “Lands that, in many cases,” Manna stresses, “have been expropriated by the Israeli state and are administered as Israeli settlements, nature reserves, military training areas, and other forms of ‘state land.’” The state here, indeed, continues usurping the power to decide “what is made extinct and what gets to live on; about who gets to decide the fate of these foraging traditions and the options that remain for those who don‘t.”
To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023) Guidebook English , is the guidebook to the moving image forum To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023), exhibited at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht 9 September–29 October 2023.
