To create new structures

Influence is what is continuously going on. This is the most interesting and at the same time the hardest thing for an artist – we are constantly under this influence and changing constantly. It should be like this. We must always think about what and how to do, but there are some things that can bring you to something new. For me it was the 2010 presidential elections in Belarus, after which I started publishing such papers as Convincing victory and Self-governing. These works referred to the direct actions outside of institutional spaces – direct work with people and activist organizations. This was a new and important experience. The papers were distributed and they led me to a new way of working.

I had no institutional support at that time. I was trying to organize the funds by myself, mostly for printing the newspaper. I was studying, so I can’t tell if I was absolutely free from the institutional context, but at that time I really started to think about why do I do all of this.

The second very influential moment in my younger life was participation in the Berlin Biennial in 2012, a pretty big experience. It was work under an institutional umbrella (Berlin Biennale is organized by Kunst Werke Berlin and sponsored by the German Ministry of Culture), but at the same time it was obvious for me that you can change things there. Before this moment I had no such feeling. I was taking part in many exhibitions – had around 20 shows per year, which was really at the verge of what a person can physically do. And all of them were very interesting and important. When you show your work, you are learning by working with other artists and curators, but after a while you can see the similarities in how the institutionalized art is framed. And it starts to look like there is some kind of a genre: the institutional art. And it definitely shouldn’t be so. The Berlin Biennial was a totally different issue. It just turned out that you can make a show differently.

After these two events I realized that I don’t want to go back to the standard art production anymore.

It started with a particular situation too. At that time, back in 2013, the refugees’ topic was totally absent in social discussions – there was nothing on it in the media. One of the first dormitories for refugees was opened on a nearby street. I got to know people who lived there and started visiting them. Obviously the situation was terrible; nobody cared about the people and I felt a very basic need to change this. This is how the initiative began. We started to self-organize.

This happened in a former school where people lived in several families per classroom. There were around 300 people, 100 of whom were children, and there was no infrastructure. Oh, and there were 4 employees of that company who were supposed to keep everything in order. The people were actually closed in that school. Despite the fact that it was the center of Berlin, there wasn’t any communication with neighbors. It was in the interest of that company, who was the organizer of this whole shelter and took money for it, to keep those people hidden away. My idea was that to influence the situation inside, you should to start doing it from the outside.

The first thing that needed to be done was to establish the contact with the neighbors who lived around them, and then to think about the structure. We had around 14 locals, and those who lived there in the school all participated in some way. On the second week the group got bigger and we needed a name for the mailing list. We called our growing organization: New Neighborhood – clear and simple. There are old neighbors, there are new neighbors, and what we create is exactly the “new neighborhood”. One group isn’t subjugated to the other. Obviously I didn’t plan for us to come up with some kind of institution. If you look at our program, at the number of people that come to us, it is actually one of the biggest institutions in Berlin (laughing). People come here not once in 6 weeks for the opening, but daily.

They are neighbors in the broader sense – neighbors from around the World. Berlin is a multinational city. You cannot divide Berliners into any categories. Many came here as refugees, with refugee status. Some have already got rid of it, became students or got employed. The refugee is a status on paper, and it is hard to get rid of this status unfortunately. There are people who live in Berlin for a long time or not, people of different ages, from different countries. Our goal as NN is to make people feel safe, to take part in setting up a place where they could feel at ease. We work on accessibility, because it is what cultural institutions are losing. If one is going to visit a white cube gallery, what counts is how the space looks, how you as a visitor present yourself and what the girl/guy at reception looks like… First you need to dare to pass her/him on your way in. Obviously this kind of entry ritual is not for everybody.

How did we get to the point where the cultural institutions became so inaccessible – especially talking about the visual arts, but art education as well?, I teach at the Academy of Arts and I see how elitist the education is. It is definitely not for everybody. It is fatal for the art that we create such spaces where only elites can enter. Why and for whom do we do this? So, because of this, for me the goal was clear – to make art and it’s institutions accessible. It is hard to manage this, because on some very basic pop level you can do it and people will keep coming, but we still need something “more than just entertainment”.

Art plays a crucial role for us. I always think about how, through art, to arrive at serious, important issues – which formats to employ? Yes, people come to us, we have our own place and they are interested. Certainly they wouldn’t meet in other circumstances. But what to do with them? What rules of intercommunication to create? One of our main rules, is that we are not a charity. It is the most common model – to help the refugees. Here we learn from each other; it is an educational process for everybody.

We are also doing other things such as language courses for instance. But we are rather a kind of a frequenters’ club, not like a school with a teacher-up-front style of instruction. People meet, get to know each other and learn the language together. We have a literature workshop, and a weekend art school for children and adults (we don’t segregate people by ages). There are music and dance classes. Also lawyers come here to give consultations.

It  solves the problem of a lack of social interactions, which is also one of the main problems in Eastern Europe, not only among refugees in Berlin. People are isolated there too. Communication is therefore very hard to establish. This is why such places like our neighborhood are necessary for addressing the issues of inner and outer isolation.

We would like to share the social structures, and to create our own that will work towards inclusion. I think that such a socially engaged art institution cannot be created by politicians or state organizations or social workers. It has to be through art. You can’t see it on the surface, at least not in all our formats, but it is there. It is clear when we sit and draw; if 200 people gather here and discuss something, it doesn’t necessarily look like art, but I definitely see a performative format in it.

Yes, it is about teaching people active participation with the usage of art as a tool. It isn’t only about people who live under particular political regimes, like in Belarus for instance. Here people also don’t feel strong enough to change something themselves, especially refugees, who in spite of learning the language over several years, still don’t participate in social life actively – not to even mention political life. Even If you can become a party member, you cannot vote or be elected without citizenship anyway. And there are all these rules of exclusion that need to be changed. We work with this as well; we try to organize political actions, which point out structures which are not up to date. However, although it is necessary to change the law, at the same I see an even bigger problem in inward isolation. It is necessary to teach people to stand up for themselves – because everybody talks for the refugees, but they do not encourage them to talk for themselves. We are trying to let people learn some things, become more confident, find their social field, and contacts. Certainly, if one comes to Berlin from France and has a certain education, they will find their social circles. For people of older age, who have an opportunity to study, it is also not such a problem. But they are only a small part, and others just stay in isolation.

Our aims are changing over time, with the rise of new problems and challenges. If during the first year we were preoccupied with organizing structures and teaching people how to get to know the city, recently the goals became more ambitious. One can easily see that some of the people already feel like Berliners but they don’t take an active part in the city’s life. And this inequality is very much visible: migrants with good social status can afford not to learn the language and still have access to all the social and cultural offers, and a person who came from Syria or Chechnya and knows German pretty well still isn’t welcome in many places. This is because the local society is very conservative and doesn’t let people through. This is why we work on changing this state of things – and art is a very important tool for achieving that.

Our goals are changing with time, with the rise of new problems and issues. If during the first year we were preoccupied with organizing of the structure and teaching people how to get to know the city, now the goals are getting more ambitious. You can see that some of the people already feel like Berliners but they don’t take active part in the city’s life. And you see this inequality: migrants with good social status can afford not to learn the language and have access to all social and cultural structures, and a person who came from Syria or Chechnya and knows German pretty well still isn’t welcome in some contexts. This is because local society is very conservative and doesn’t let people through. So, that’s why we think how to change this and art is a very crucial tool for that.

Right-wingers can self-organize themselves very quickly. The main problem now is the political crisis. In Germany the crisis of the traditional parties can be seen very clearly – how the social democrats lose their voters – the party is just falling apart. Their disintegration is an expected outcome, the process could be observed for a long time, and it develops rapidly nowadays. I am asking myself a question: will these parties be here in 10-15 years? It is obvious that they should be modernized and new models of direct politics should be applied. From the political side of the far right, they mobilize pretty fast now. It isn’t hard, as there is always a percentage of rightists in the society. There have also been many people mobilized to support refugees. And what is absurd is that in those regions where the right have the strongest position, there is the lowest level of foreigners. This is a fact. The old clichés are becoming handy and very simple tools work well enough. The problem of the leftists and the centrists is that they need to create their own agenda, but what they do is just reacting. If only some opposition would be proposed, a clear course, other topics – but no. What is happening is only a reaction to the right-wingers, and this is a real political crisis. Only reacting is the traditional parties’ major mistake.

For example in 2015 a lot of people were engaged in helping the refugees, because the state wasn’t able to do this. But another part of the population – the conservative one – went to politics. They had time for this. And for sure, politicians got a certain opinion on how people feel in general. It was like that, really. We have no time for politics now – there is a lot to do. The rightists, they have this time to go to appointments, to write letters. Politicians, they see this and build their one-sided opinion. This is wrong, because they must come to us, to different people, and see that the bigger part of the population thinks the other way.

Actually, I see this in a positive way. The peak of right-wing ideology has already been passed, and I don’t think that there will be any further rise. We see all the bad things that are shown in the media, but it isn’t really representing the majority of people. Yes, I’m concerned, but there is no reason to die of fear on the spot or cry over a terrible situation. There are a lot of really good tendencies. One needs just to go on and work further.

Yes, but I guess this was some time ago; today the situation has changed. I think that we actually could attract attention – if not of institutions, then of artists and curators. There are people who support us a lot. We have succeeded in convincing people that the experience we make here is really embedded in art.

Institutions have no possibility to do what we do here. They just lack the formats, and frankly speaking I don’t see that anybody bothers. It’s a pity because it could influence some well-established institutional formats,especially since there is also the crisis and a need for changes. But it isn’t my goal. We create a lot of content, many forms of work, and it is interesting for me here. The institutional field disposes of enough people – clever, educated, engaged, interested – who could do something with this. But unfortunately they know no methods of cooperation.

For instance let’s take the event we just saw at the Volksbühne (theater). Christian Filips led the literature workshop there two years ago, and people without experience, today, in 1-1.5 years, write their texts and perform on one of the main stages in Berlin. In the theater, this is possible, in the visual arts it is not. Another example. I was invited to the biennial. I told the curators that I would like to involve people from the initiative. They answered – yes, sure, but we can’t cover the travel costs. Yeah, it is a financial problem, but also it is a problem of access. It is the most pragmatic example, but,  first of all, there should be an interest and understanding how the people from NN could be included. Sure, I as an artist can make a presentation about NN, but it’s not the same.

The same as before. There are any new forms of interaction, so I don’t have much enthusiasm anymore. There are some biennials and non-commercial exhibitions. I make works that mostly cost nothing, because the budgets are usually near to zero. I try to develop the issues I am working on anyway, or, if there is some money for production, to do new things. But in general I never created anything for the given topic. I was always lucky to do works that were included in exhibitions afterwards. It is really important not to work for an institutional commission. It isn’t a goal as well to hang art pieces all over such institutions. The goal is different. I have a lot of work with the initiative. I am lacking some free weekends for a long time.

I have to prioritize. The initiative always comes first. I don’t divide my “art work” and my work here. It is one process. I see that the initiative is more important, because it allows me to grow. Right now I have a new commitment – I am teaching at the Art School in Berlin. At the same time I am involved in a program which aims to change the educational and academic realm. I’m interested in creating new spaces and formats, not in conserving the already existing ones. In general, the goal for an artist is not to fit into the existing formats, but to create the new ones.