The MESSY GLOSSARY is part of the critical education program of the 12th Berlin Biennale. It is a growing, nonhierarchical assemblage of meanings and contexts related to the topics of the 12th Berlin Biennale.
With the voices of the art educators as well as invited guests, including students of the Masters Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts, it shares subjective, situated, and poetical knowledge without claiming completeness, in order to open a space for notions and new relations.
Amnesia
Proposed by Yanka Smetanina
Amnesia is a disease of memory destruction caused by psychological or organic trauma. Because of the inevitable fear of memory loss, as well as its beautiful name, amnesia is often romanticized in society, which sells it as an easy way out of an unpleasant situation or the ultimate freedom. But even in the case of a temporary disorder, on closer examination, things do not look so romantic: when a person loses their memory, they also lose their skills and ability to communicate, a part of their personality, their self. So, what to say, for example, about social/historical amnesia, which can be not only a consequence of severe traumatic periods of history but also a constant subject of manipulation by dominant groups in society to build their narratives? Absolute rejection of the past threatens the repetition of historical mistakes, of which any war would be a classic example.
On the other hand, coming into conflict with this discourse, thinkers and artists wage a fierce struggle against the loss of memory, which results in musealization and the Global Archive, and faces a new phenomenon: digital memory and consequently digital amnesia, where people today lead a largely active electronic life, leaving behind fewer artifacts in reality than people of the past.
Art mediation
Proposed by Samira Ghoualmia
Art mediation deals with injuries on a daily basis when we exchange, listen, debate, think, feel, and create, weaving a tapestry of unexpected collective storytelling. These are moments of an in-betweenness that navigates differences and conflicts, art and ourselves, assembling vivid textures of history, aesthetics, and politics and opening up to unending searches and (un)learnings. Such instances can provide opportunities for repair, acknowledging the injuries of the present and the past and entering into a collective dialogue.
Biennial
Proposed by Alex Ostojski
Are biennials the expression of an insatiable desire for expansion that has also taken hold of culture and is producing spectacles on an increasingly enormous scale? Can the machinery of the biennial be slowed down in favor of a sustainable mode of work and production? How can biennials—understood as platforms for international cultural collaboration—change their institutional structures in order to transform decolonial and capitalist-critical discourses into practices? Do biennials merely demonstrate the ability of capitalism to take over everything—even the critique of the system? Or does the decolonization of the format rather hold the potential for mobilizing resistance through transnational exchange?
Capitalism
Proposed by Alex Ostojski
What, how much, and whom do we desire? Capitalism marks the horizon—up to here and no further, and after me: destruction. Capitalism has long since penetrated all spheres of life; left behind are devastated lands wherever the eye settles and suicidal societies with Stockholm syndrome. Trapped in a toxic relationship, a fragile middle class wants more, more, more of the benefits whose fleeting pleasure makes them forget excesses of violence and creates a false sense of security. Addicted to their tormentor, the majority cling to a system “that, in the course of five hundred years of exploitation of the earth, has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to ensure the well-being of the world’s population, a … system … increasingly dependent on the violence of its bombs to maintain its rule.”(1)
1 Silvia Federici, AUFSTAND AUS DER KÜCHE: REPRODUKTIONSARBEIT IM GLOBALEN KAPITALISMUS UND DIE UNVOLLENDETE FEMINISTISCHE REVOLUTION, vol. 1 of KITCHEN POLITICS (Münster, 2020). Translated by the author.
Care
Excerpt from the text WHAT IF WE DIDN’T CARE von Esther Poppe und Arootin Mirzakhani
What does care look like when you are in a position of Power? What does care look like when you are not in a position of Power?
Proposed by Thị Minh Huyền Nguyễn
What does care in our complex society and current lives look like?
Do you care about me? Take care.
I care about you. Caring. Care work.
Who usually does care work? Why is it gendered?
How are you caring for yourself? For others?
I am taking care. I am taking care of this. I am taking care of them.
Can you please care? Do you actually care?
I don’t care.
Self-care. Community care.
What does a future of care—of caring look like?
Crisis
Proposed by Mahmoud Al-Shaer, translated by Joud Tamimi
Cultural Heritage
Proposed by Samira Ghoualmia
Some museums are spaces of European accumulation. They show off stolen goods, exhibited in white glass coffins or invisible and forgotten in dark cellars, but always constructed as SHARED European cultural heritage. Since the beginning of their violent birth, these museums have been political demonstrations of power intended to educate. They are usually overpriced, boring, and full of dirty secrets. In 1920, Paul Valéry asked whether the Louvre should not be burned. This question has aged gracefully – unlike museums.
De/humanization
Proposed by Sibongile Oageng Msimango
The fallacy that certain human life is of greater worth than others, which leads to the denial of agency, rights and privileges of those wrongfully deemed of lesser value. This festering sense of entitlement breeds contempt and cruelty in place of compassion, the basic unit of connection that forms humanity.
Touching my hair (or anything else on my body for that matter) without my consent.
Blatant disregard of boundaries.
Gruesome display of certain bodies, consumed like ice-cream.
Calloused civilization.
Us vs Them.
= Violence.
Decolonial
Proposed by Arootin Mirzakhani
Undoing completed acts of violence – prefix:de+actofviolence:colonialism – makes sense from a linguistic_historical perspective, though semantically it is too fast. What if prefix&stem are only capable of archiving meaning. How do our legal systems, funding- mechanisms and economical structures regulate and support progressivity. How is the institution:art and its administration an extension of these regulations through curatorial and mediating labour. How are art institutions able to talk about an undoing of acts of violence, when they are themselves drenched in power_violence they are blind to. Is decolonialism not a continuation of linear logic of hegemonic structures, when speaking about de_colonialism does not influence them structurally. What if an asking for and a finding of new vocabulary isn’t expedient. What if we don’t need intellectual discursive spaces anymore. Ways of doing that are able to re_act on violence. Ways of speaking that rely on im_material relations, responsibility and integrity. Ways of listening that already negotiate one’s ego and feelings. Ways of looking where our gaze penetrates public and private barriers. Ways of smelling, where scent and memory archive places. Ways of tasting, where soil_air_water are intrinsic to local societies. We need action-oriented practices that think differently through making.
Proposed by Léopold Lambert
Given how the verb “decolonizing” has been co-opted to mean liberal reform of colonial institutions (“decolonizing museums,” “decolonizing universities”… soon enough, we’ll get to “decolonize the police!”), it is crucial for us to remember Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s seminal essay: DECOLONIZATION IS NOT A METAPHOR […] When we use the term “decolonial,” we therefore refer to the project of reclaiming Indigenous sovereignty on the lands that colonizers stole, and on which it imposed various regimes of extractivism as well as individualized and speculative property. This decolonial project is almost never a project of reestablishing precolonial conditions of the land, just like an ecosystem never “goes back” to its “original” state after being subjected to toxicity. Instead, it adapts to its present conditions and builds on it, as long as the sources of toxins have been dismantled. However, this necessity to build on the ruins of colonialism should be read within the vast temporal scale of Indigenous caretaking and kinship practices with the land, as well as the millions of years of ecosystem existence. In light of this, the two to five centuries of European colonialism might start to appear as a small parenthesis that should not constitute the alpha and omega of the land and its living beings’ identity. Hopefully, such an affirmation can be read as a promise of decolonial futures rather than as a minimization of colonial violence.
Excerpt from: Léopold Lambert, "Decolonial Ecologies. Introduction", THE FUNAMBULIST, May 1, 2021
Desertification
Proposed by Samira Ghoualmia
Contrary to white imaginations of a vast no man’s lands, deserts are culturally vivid areas. Still, waves of (neo-) colonialism keep flooding these drylands, destroying local communities, the soil nurturing them, sucking it dry, and forcing them to migrate. Desertification is a devastating consequence of human caused climate change. As Frantz Fanon reminds us, the wretched earth could drown in Colonialism, Racism, and Violence. This is no metaphor. Neither is desertification.
Source: GLOSSARY OPEN SECRET
Digital Colonialism
Proposed by Vladen Joler (Glossary – Open Secret)
By digital colonialism, I understand the deployment of imperial power in the form of new rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems serving the interests of the dominant power. Traditional colonial practices of control over critical assets, trade routes, natural resources and exploitation of human labor are still deeply embedded in the contemporary supply chains, logistics and assembly lines of digital content, products and infrastructure.
Source: GLOSSARY OPEN SECRET
Digital Identity Labor
Proposed by Vladen Joler
Freelancers, self-employed, unemployed and all those grey areas in between that now constitute the world of labor need to spend more and more hours maintaining their profiles and offering in(directly) their expertise, experience, success stories, opinions and documentation of their works and activities, in a similar fashion to sex workers in the windows of red-light districts. Digital identity labor is the forced labor of the 21st century and opting out is essentially a fantasy.
Source: GLOSSARY OPEN SECRET
Dream
Proposed by Feben Amara
All my dreams
In your wildest dreams
I have a dream
To live my dream,
I dream my life away
Who dreams of better days?
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly,
because you tread on my dreams.
In your wildest dreams
I have a dream
To live my dream,
I dream my life away
Dreams of realities peace.
Dreams of infinite grief.
Cause Aaliyah had a dream,
Left Eye had a dream.
So I reached out to Kanye and
(I brought you all my dreams)
A co-seduction with Martin Luther King, William Yeats, Kendrick Lamar, Ozzy Osbourne, and The Game.
Proposed by Thị Minh Huyền Nguyễn
While asleep. While standing. While walking. In the evening and at night. In the morning. In between. Daydreaming. Night dreaming.
In dreaming, we process the unconscious. We process the past.
People we have seen before. Places we have been to before. Situations that have happened before.
Un_comfortable un_truths confront us. Often in nightmares. Encounters with ancestors and spirits.
They are more negative rather than positive experiences. At least, that’s what science says. Yet, can we control our dreams? More than just dreaming in our sleep? Can we dream our future? Desire it? Imagine it?
What would it mean to realize a collective dream? To connect on a daily basis? Beyond the capitalist American Dream, towards one based on solidarity, a “beloved community,” as Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh have called it.
What daily steps would we have to take in the here and now?
Edification
Proposed by Laura Hagemann
The act of building up, to inform or improve oneself or be informed or improved; to learn something new, to get a better image of something to understand the complexity of contexts—or not. Through whom or what do I build an image? Who forms the images inside me that become part of my edification? Who decides what is rendered visible? What is discussed? Who is told what? Who has which means of access, or not? Who are the players? Who and what is being talked about? And why? Who is ignored? Who will come to the Biennale? Who is not coming? Who will be persuaded to come? By whom? And why? Who will learn something at the Biennale? What is taught there? What is learned there? Is the Biennale a place where an educational process takes place? In what contexts do I want to learn? How can settings be created where all questions are welcome and perfectly ok? Where I don’t have to be afraid to reveal that I haven’t figured anything out yet? And when I do understand something, am I grateful for that little flash of inspiration? A building process, to inform or improve oneself or be informed or improved; to learn something new, to further understand the complexity of contexts—or not.
Else_where?
Proposed by Sibongile Oageng Msimango
An indication that what exists here. Now. In the current. In the present. Also exists in another time, context, space and place. Here, and in addition: There.
;
A longing to move away, a desire to detach from where one may be presently planted and/or actually based. Somewhere over the rainbow. Somewhere at the end of the yellow-brick road. On the other side of the fence, the common belief is that the grass is greener.
Eurocentrism
Proposed by Rami Shalati
Originating during the period of colonialism, the Eurocentric worldview understands ideas, values, and ways of life that originated in European countries. Eurocentrism is more ideological than geographical, which is why it includes other Western countries, such as the USA or Canada. It values technological achievements and political systems considered “civilized” and “progressive.” Eurocentric actions are characterized by dominant, proselytizing, “correct,” or other behavior trying to change people and countries that are (presumably) living according to different value systems or social systems. Moreover, Eurocentrism describes the predominance of Western, white perspectives in science, politics, and economics.
Exhibition
Proposed by Min Kyung Kim
A short checklist as a basis for an exhibition:
– Exhibition means a temporary presentation where artistic works are presented in a place for visibility.
– Exhibition provides a space for experience and creates a thinking space for you and those around us.
– The location of the presentation, its context, and the audience should be included in the planning and construction of the exhibition.
– The form and content of the artwork are not predefined.
– Where the work is presented defines an exhibition space.
– Where the work is presented defines your audience.
– Duration means the functional readiness of the artistic work for the triangle: work, audience, and dialogue.
– Who are you? Why are you doing this?
– What is not written yet?
Exotic
Proposed by Samira Ghoualmia
In European literature, the exotic is often equated with the beautiful, writes Cameroonian literary scholar David Simo. In WHITE imagination the exotic is sexy, unknown, and potentially transformative. The narcissistic illusion of wanting SOMETHING ELSE, wanting to transgress, this thing that must be possessed at all costs.
White imagination creates greedy consumers , craving the longing to feel themselves. The longing to get close and to finally experience self-pleasure. bell hooks names this interlocking of WHITE fantasies of the exotic and the commodification of the OTHER under the imperative of capitalist consumption. Bloated and insatiable, European capitalist gluttony celebrates its false mirror image, which quickly fizzles out again. This WHITE commodification is an act of violence, eager to devour what is categorized as alien OTHER.
Field of Emotion
Proposed by Feben Amara
Shame, joy, apathy, anger, being overwhelmed, fear, hopelessness, disgust, exhaustion, disillusion, depression, love, envy, contempt, hatred, restlessness, resignation, sadness, surprise, shock, hope, mania.
An emotion is
the transformation of an affect.
able to affect your politics.
a representation of a nonconscious, unnamable experience.
a materialization of a physical sensation.
preformed, rehearsed, repeated.
a controversial matter.
legible, a sign within a cultural collective.
a symbolic process.
more than an emoji and less than an attitude.
something other than a feeling.
Fragment
Proposed by Christopher Wierling
What if wor(l)ds were breaking in different places than the rules for hyphenation or the habitual ear dictate: g-ener-ati-o-ns, fr-ien-dshi-ps, s-to-ri-es, soli-d-a-rit-y. Di-splac-ed, dise-nfr-anchi-sed. Which units must be ruptured, and which need to be repaired? BODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY-ODY.
The Cartesian mind-body dichotomy is reverberating from a past that is built on its intimate knowledge of the violent divisibility of bodies. But notions of the whole are also conflicted, bound up with exclusions and fascist ideals of purity. Throughout violent histories and continuous modes of oppression, inventive and resistant grasps of the split of body and mind have offered ways and techniques to withdraw oneself from coerced traumatic enclosures. Some photographs, drawings, notes, memories, dreams, and particles have made it out of these spaces as witnesses by way of smuggling or hiding. Scattered, in shreds. Through the shattered glass of the museum display, wayward fibers from distorted colonial figurines are escaping the ethnological diorama. These splinters permeate skins, walls, and borders and travel across oceans. The movements they describe are passed on in clandestine messages. Refuges are being organized; people are gathering. Joining ongoing struggles: against all odds, togetherness is materializing.
Proposed by Muna AnNisa Aikins
Complete fragments.
Broken parts whole.
Elements.
Questions. Parts. Seeing. Understanding.
Feeling.
Carrying.
Segments.
Memories.
Whole grief,
fragmentary joy
experience
live.
Moments.
Fragments. Identifying.
Losing.
Creating.
Fragments.
Falling in love with me
Deepening.
Being whole.
Being fragmented.
Connecting, coming together, being more.
Connected in the in-between.
Fragments from wounds
recovering.
Unfinished beautiful answers,
in us from many places,
Elements.
Broken parts whole.
Complete fragments.
Hydro mystic
Proposed by Jeanne-Ange Megouem Wagne
The wide depths of water harbor divine eternities. Sirens, Mermaids and Mami-Wata, almost and yet not quite the same eternity in half human-feminine dress. Mami-Wata, the dreaded Vodun Spirit of the Continent and its diaspora, for on her too adheres the human fear of the nurturing, watering force that is the female truth. A fear soaked in bitter yearning.
Source: GLOSSARY OPEN SECRET
Imperialism
Proposed by Raoul Zoellner
Imperialism is a game played on extremely long tables, in backrooms packed with men and megalomania. It requires at least one player and ultimately ends with one player. Game boards come as foldable maps. Use pens in order to draw shapes on them. Be creative. If you find another player in a weak position, then team up with others, take his pen, and STAB IT IN HIS BACK. Momentum is everything. Paranoia and delusion are key and your prime advisors, reminding you that morals and rules are traps—set up by others at your table. Stick to them and end up with a pen in your back. Avoid them if you want to have the extremely long table all for yourself, which will earn you an equestrian statue: you on a horse, both in bronze, somewhere on a random public square, until you get spray-painted and torn down by iconoclastic kids. In the end, everything is shattered—until new men in new backrooms come up with new lines on their maps.
Information
Proposed by Heiko-Thandeka Ncube
If this wasn’t a messy glossary, then I would propose a definition carefully placing information between data and knowledge and two steps away from wisdom. Something along the lines of building blocks and stages of constructing abstract notions of knowledge aka WISSENSZUSAMMENHÄNGE. That said, it is far more interesting to look at how we deal with information rather than what it actually is. Information is in one way or another material, and we (the art workers) delight in forming, shaping, and twisting any kinds of material. Thereby, causality and association are tools with which we create intellectual artistic experiences. While truth in science is based on causality, association blooms within the field of creativity and forms the essential mechanism with which we question but also feel. You may think that the lecture performance you just saw made sense, or you may think it didn’t. Yet it certainly challenged your sense of orientation and set up a disposition for radical critique. Do not trust the artist-as-writer. Do not trust the writer-as-artist. Trust whatever you may or may not have thought, felt, or for lack of a better word: experienced.
Institution
Proposed by Samira Ghoualmia
Are art institutions barriers themselves?
Non-Aligned Movement
Proposed by Sinthujan Varatharajah
The Non-Aligned Movement emerged at the height of the period of so-called decolonization. A number of formerly colonized populations found themselves at that time in new state entities that were no longer FORMALLY tied to the colonial metropolises. At the same time, these new artificial state entities also found themselves on a new world map. In an attempt to claim their new place allotted to them on this imperial map, they began to create a means of navigating along imperial lines. They tried to imagine a political existence and order independent of the former colonial metropolises. At the Bandung Conference in 1955, they drew up utopian goals reflecting their wish for collective existence and growth, contrary to the many dictates imposed by the imperial powers. Although the movement was committed to conceiving and creating a different world, ultimately, it was not possible for them to break out of the world into which they were violently thrown, and they gradually began to align with it. Their promise remains unresolved to this day.
Resilience
Proposed by Muna AnNisa Aikins
Dreams flow in my blood,
assurance blossoms from my bones
in my breath there is so much
power.
Perspective,
depth.
Empowerment.
Robust,
flexible
and gentle.
Creating, living. Creating life, unfolding.
Growing in change.
Shaping, reshaping.
Actively determining.
How chaos, resistance, and freedom poetize us.
Sensed verse by verse.
We are a poem
instinctively experienced knowledge,
intuitively made, guided.
Reflections, embodied.
Manifested.
And yet we must speak for ourselves in so many moments,
when we want to breathe.
Certainly, to be able to breathe in freedom.
Resistance
Proposed by Mahmoud Al-Shaer, translated by Joud Tamimi
