Bernhardt Herbordt, Melanie Mohren Promise, Practice, Protocol— Performing Future Presences Are You Meaning Company Matthias Böttger Corinne May Botz Marcelo Cardoso Gama Jonathan Garfinkel Javier Hinojosa Eunjung Hwang Alicja Karska, Aleksandra Went Daniel Kötter, Begum Erciyas Pei-Wen Liu, Tobias Hoffmann Marcell Mars Matthias Aron Megyeri Kerstin Meyer Damir Očko Dubravka Sekulić Alexander Sigman Katarzyna Sowula |
Kerstin Meyer What Am I Doing Here? An Exchange Between Artists and Professionals of International Development
When you work as an international development practitioner, endowed with some operational power, your work is inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, you are bound to specific definitions of problems and solutions that are predefined by a system of thought, of a discourse and of institutions which have their main constituency elsewhere. But in practice, and using eyes, ears and one’s political or social sensibility, professionals “on mission” will continuously perceive that the actual conditions and circumstances in the country concerned and in which their work is set have their own acute presence, like a parallel world. This perception is irritating and destabilizing. What am I doing here? One can face the dilemma by calming oneself with the idea that contradictions are caused by “others.” Alternatively, instances of doubt and self-reflection and a choice of attitude can be part of the practitioner’s work, albeit little acknowledged in official language. Aesthetic practice, however, can successfully contain moments of instability and changing perspectives. Are artists therefore better off, politically, when treating social realities at a distance? The actual impact of aesthetic practice is within the imaginary, it is not in the social reality. It does not have to face consequences other than aesthetic judgement, yet there is hopefully some potential, emancipatory or other, that a spectator could appropriate. What happens, then, when members of the two professional fields, the artistic and the political, approach each other’s practice? Workshop on May 23, 2009 Guests: Wolf Dio, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ); Regine Dura, filmmaker; Jörg Freiberg-Strauss, GTZ; Martin Fröhlich, artist; Claudia Gottmann, GTZ; Christian Hanussek, artist; Laura Horelli, artist; Ulla Hoyer, architect; Daniel Kötter, filmmaker and director; Hans-Werner Kroesinger, theater director; Elisabeth Leiner, international development expert; Achim Lengerer, artist; Matthias Aron Megyeri, artist; Judith Raum, artist; Andrea Warner, international development expert
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