Njangi House: SAVVY CONTEMPORARY and the Postmigrant Condition

In recent years, the notion of the “postmigrant condition” has contributed to the understanding of migration as a phenomenon that concerns all parts of society and therefore cannot be limited to minority cultures.^[1] As an analytical perspective, the concept of the postmigrant society provides an opportunity to bring in nuance and complicate the perception of community formations in today’s culturally pluralised societies. Exponents of a postmigrant perspective seek to challenge categorisations, marginalisations and increasing societal polarisations. Rather than maintaining widespread assumptions about the foundations of society based on old binary oppositions—between settled inhabitants on the one hand and newcomers on the other, either in the form of “immigrants” or “descendants with migrant backgrounds”—they seek to rethink these categorisations altogether.^[2] Rejecting the idea of a fixed and predefined division between “us” and “them”, and arguing for the urgent need to reconceptualise conventional notions of belonging, they emphasise that members of today’s migratory societies are characterised by a plurality of backgrounds, affiliations and identity formations.

Adherents to postmigrant thinking problematise the use of conventional categories that reduce the complexity of socio-cultural relations to a simple binary opposition between a majoritised, allegedly homogeneous “we” group and minoritised groups of “others”. As a result, they also contest the idea that newcomers to society should engage in a process of learning and citizenship through which they are expected to gradually adopt the language, religion, culture, etc. of the country they moved to. In a postmigrant perspective, such static and monoculturalist perceptions can be substituted by more pluralist and dynamic outlooks. It is therefore worth underlining that the notion of postmigration does not seek to uphold a hegemonic distinction between “outsiders” who have to “integrate” into the pre-existing system of a national “we” group. In addition, it does not refer to a frictionless position. On the contrary, it introduces a process-based and conflict-sensitive perspective on community formation that focuses on the negotiations that inevitably take place across cultural and political differences. Following this train of thought, academics have sought to employ the concept of postmigration as a means to move beyond the widespread binary approach towards migration and migrants and instead focus attention on the various kinds of struggles, societal transformations, identity processes and power-infiltrated community formations that take place in today’s migration-oriented societies.^[3]

Social scientist Naika Foroutan points out that contemporary postmigrant societies should be conceived of as culturally diverse “societies of negotiation”, in which conflictual pluralisation processes are played out, struggles over inclusion and exclusion take place, notions of belonging are reconceptualised and new alliances of solidarity are formed.^[4] Here it should be emphasised that, according to Foroutan, postmigrant “societies of negotiation” challenge former dogmas of integration. They do so by replacing such dogmas with the continuous renegotiations of existing hierarchies that involve all citizens in a given society, not only newcomers, either in the form of “immigrants” or as “descendants with migrant backgrounds”.^[5] Herein lies a political vision of a potential society-to-come where pre-existing hierarchies, asymmetrical power relations and historically inherited privileges can be renegotiated, enabling the creation of more open, equal and diversified communities.^[6] This may enable new alliances and relationships to be forged that move beyond traditional binary distinctions of migrants and nationals, foreigners and natives, ethnic and white communities, Western and non-Western cultures. In what follows I look at the institutional practices of SAVVY Contemporary, through the lens of the “postmigrant condition”. I cover different aspects of their institutional approach through interviews with staff members, participation in online events and information derived from articles written by SAVVY Contemporary and/or written by its founder and artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. This appraisal of SAVVY’S practice in relation to the postmigrant condition includes the organisation of the physical space and the team, and broader reflections on their approach in relation to theories of “the curatorial” and anti-racist curating.

SAVVY Contemporary: New Publics and Diversity Work

SAVVY Contemporary describes itself as “an art space, discursive platform, eating and drinking spot, njangi house, space for conviviality”.^[7] The current building on Reinickendorfer Strasse comprises exhibition spaces, a bar and a library that are architecturally and conceptually interconnected. Artistic Co-Director Arlette-Louise Ndakoze states, “there is no division between them in terms of supremacy”, meaning that conviviality and social interaction is approached in tandem with exhibition-making, research, archival studies and publishing.^[8] The SAVVY team are often found working within the exhibition spaces rather than behind closed doors. As Head of Communications and curator Anna Jäger comments, “[w]e are super accessible. Everyone knows who is running SAVVY.”^[9] This modest gesture is symptomatic of the way SAVVY seems to develop institutional practices to connect with local communities. By offering coffee, tea, home-cooked food or wine to visitors, SAVVY inscribes hospitality into the art space.

As a collectively run art space, the programming of SAVVY Contemporary is co-developed by a team consisting of members from twelve countries and five continents trained as art historians, cultural theorists, anthropologists, biotechnologists, designers and artists.^[10] Jäger describes SAVVY Contemporary as an “institution in perpetual becoming” where new staff are continually recruited, often based on their long-term engagements with the various activities carried out on site.^[11] Those recruited mainly work voluntarily due to the financial constraints of the institution, resulting in a frequent turnover of staff. Sabrina Vitting-Seerup and Frauke Wiegan point out that SAVVY Contemporary meets the challenges of precarious working conditions by practising a culture of care and collaboration. Professional contacts are shared, concepts and programmes are co-developed and co-created across paid and unpaid members of the team.^[12] While the financial precarity of SAVVY Contemporary and the enforced flexibility of the staff may complicate the building of sustainable institutional structures capable of countering discrimination in the long run, the continuous recruitment of staff members with diverse backgrounds, skills and means of addressing audiences is a key factor in the ongoing diversification of the institution.

SAVVY Contemporary has shifted locations several times since its inauguration in 2009.^[13] A common characteristic of the organisation’s locales is the presence of multiple migrant communities. The former working-class area of Wedding, where SAVVY Contemporary has been based since 2015, is one of the most ethnically and culturally mixed areas of Berlin, encompassing large groups of recently arrived citizens from Ghana, Cameroun and Nigeria, many of whom have settled in the Africanisches Viertel, or African Quarter, as well as inhabitants from Turkey, Poland, China, the Middle East and the countries of former Yugoslavia, among others.

Attending to different publics has meant adapting the ways in which exhibitions are mediated. In “Guided Tours in SAVVY Tongues”, organized in connection with the exhibition project “Geographies of the Imagination” (2018), SAVVY provided guided tours of the exhibition in either Portuguese, English, Pidgin, French, Italian, Spanish, German or Rumanian in an attempt to create new and inclusive entry points for non-English or non-German speaking gallerygoers and pluralise existing mediation strategies.^[14] These tours were also announced as an opportunity to join SAVVY Contemporary’s team “for insights, jokes and rumours” in an attempt to lure not only traditional art audiences but also new publics in pursuit of more informal, anecdotal and humorous approaches to the art on display.^[15]

A Multiplicity of Platforms

The programmed discussions, performances and archival presentations are conceived as interventions into current theoretical and political debates, with a scope and ambition that exceeds SAVVY’s status as a small-scale art institution.^[16] These activities are distributed across physical and digital platforms, and publics are addressed both within institutional spaces and extra-institutional contexts. “Colonial Neighbours” is a participatory archive and research project based on collaborations with the neighbourhood, artists, researchers, cultural practitioners and activists, which investigates Germany’s colonial history and its legacies in the present.^[17] Through open calls, members of various publics are invited to provide objects or memorabilia—such as photo albums, diaries, magazines, tin containers, sweets, small sculptures, stamps and jewellery—which they associate with Germany’s colonial past and to share personal stories associated with them.^[18] The project’s main aim is to create a collective archive that serves as an active platform for discussion, exchange and collaboration with actors from various fields, offering an alternative to sedimented historical narratives.

The archive has been activated at different sites, for example through the workshops entitled “(Post)colonialism and Textiles”. The workshops were conducted with students from the Berlin-based fashion school OSZ Bekleidung und Mode in collaboration with “Colonial Neighbours”, Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and the Kulturagentenprogramm (cultural agents programme) Berlin, artist Marlon Denzel van Rooyen and a local tailor in Wedding, and were hosted at the DHM and at the “Colonial Neighbours” archive.^[19] “Colonial Neighbours” has likewise resulted in the enactment of a series of interventions at multiple sites. A recent example is Lucid Dreaming (2020) staged at the Gorki Teater, a site that has been perceived as one of the main cultural institutions in Berlin engaging with postmigrant discourses and practices since the appointment of Shermin Langhoff as theatre director in 2013. In connection with Lucid Dreaming, the artist Lizza May David, who was born in Quezon City in the Philippines and currently resides in Berlin, engaged with the “Colonial Neighbours” archive by creating an installation focusing on the representation of domestic workers. David juxtaposed a video displaying an intimate portrait of the working and living space of a domestic helper (the artist’s aunt) in Hong Kong with various objects from the archive. Among others, she displayed the journal Kolonie und Heimat (1907-1920), published by the Women’s Association of German Colonial Society, which campaigned for an expansive colonialist policy. By creating such asynchronous constellations at the Gorki Theatre, David explored colonial entanglements across time. She reflected critically, and personally, on the production of race and gender constructions within oppressive white narratives. The project put forward the potential of the “Colonial Neighbours” archive as a participatory, locally embedded, transnationally interconnected and cross-institutionally enacted platform.

Another example of a project that takes place across several sites is “The Rushes” (2020-ongoing). These are virtual conversations that explore the possibilities for reorganising cinema distribution across the Global South and how it may be possible to conceptualize technology and digitality from a pluriversal perspective, deconstructing geographical imaginaries subject to hierarchical structures. Thematically, they deal with issues pertaining to access, democratisation and the forging of alliances between transculturally interconnected agents and the creation of new cinematic infrastructures for the circulation of independent film and video art powered by technology. Due to the pandemic, The Rushes is currently realized in digital space and hosted by the UNITED SCREENS network and its affiliates, based in various parts of the world.^[20] The virtual conversations are programmed, live-streamed and made available for viewing online and are the prelude to the on-site programme over the course of 2021-22.

Like other small- and medium-sized art spaces that are working to critically develop their curatorial and institutional practices, SAVVY Contemporary is experimenting with transdisciplinary collaborations, where diverse fields of knowledge can come together in research and exhibition projects.^[21] “The Rushes” and “Colonial Neighbours” bring participants from different parts of the world into constellation, proposing a transdisciplinary production of knowledge and the articulation of critical discourses within a curatorial programme. Artists, writers, film-makers, political scientists, activists, researchers and other cultural practitioners contribute to exhibitions, film screenings, poetry readings, radio broadcasts, communal dinners, panel discussions and events of different kinds, including dance, theatre, music, performances and performance art, etc. Here, SAVVY Contemporary proposes ways of producing situated social and political knowledge on the history and current situation of Berlin-Wedding in the context of global migratory movements.

The Curatorial as an Event of Diversified Knowledge Production

Founder and artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has defined the overarching premise of SAVVY Contemporary as experimenting with alternative forms of critical exhibition-making through decolonising practices. This approach is used as a means for sharing knowledge and creating new forms and modalities of solidarity.^[22] SAVVY Contemporary’s curatorial approach chimes with ideas of curating as a form of knowledge production. Curatorial theorist Simon Sheikh sees curatorial practice as not being limited to exhibition-making but as one that employs “the thinking involved in exhibition-making and researching”.^[23] Curatorial practice is not reduced to “putting up exhibitions” and “displaying works of art”, as cultural theorist Irit Rogoff has put it, rather, there has been a shift to a more expanded notion of “the curatorial”.^[24] In the anthology The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (2013), Jean-Paul Martinon and Rogoff argue for a distinction between curating and “the curatorial”, suggesting that “[i]f ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge.”^[25]

SAVVY Contemporary stages “events of knowledge” within the framework of exhibitions, events and educational activities. It is envisioned as “a space for epistemological diversity”, as an environment where knowledge is created across otherwise presumed stable markers of difference and prescribed identity positions. In the words of Ndikung, SAVVY Contemporary seeks to develop an “extra-disciplinary approach” to curatorial practices, based on the assumption that “another knowledge is possible”.^[26] In the conceptual outlines for SAVVY Contemporary, Ndikung specifies that the institution’s efforts are

to produce antidotes to the epistemic activities that have been practiced all over the globe, by accommodating and celebrating knowledges and epistemic systems from Africa and the African diaspora, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, but also Europe and North America. In so doing, we have chosen to explore other mediums that embody and disseminate knowledges. The body, music, storytelling, food/eating and performativity of different kinds, as for instance dance, theatre, performing and performance art etc.^[27]

The programming at SAVVY Contemporary therefore blurs disciplinary boundaries across transculturally networked and cross-disciplinary forms of knowledge production related to colonialism, migration, integration, discrimination, racism and cultural pluralisation. Crucially, the curatorial programming is also based on long-term engagements. In her article “Taking Time Together” (2014), educator and curatorial theorist Nora Sternfeld reflects on forms of curating that are of a durational character and that are not about the mere representation of social relations, but which “lay the ground for intervening in them—an intellectual practice that understands itself as involved, dissensual and situated in solidarity with existing social movements”.^[28] This characterisation, I suggest, resonates with SAVVY Contemporary’s approach.^[29]

A main focus of SAVVY Contemporary as an institutional space is on so-called post-Other conviviality, a concept that Ndikung co-developed with anthropologist Regina Römhild.^[30] Ndikung and Römhild point out how this concept is closely linked to contemporary reflections on the postmigrant condition. They situate, for example, “the moment of the post-Other” in the artistic practices explored by the small independent theatre Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Kreuzberg. This theatre became widely known for bringing the term postmigration to public attention after the appointment of Shermin Langhoff as director in 2008, whose work continuously “transgresses the restricted space of ‘ethnic minorities’ towards ‘native’ mobile subjects, thus speaking of and for an inclusive postmigrant Germany/ Europe/ world” according to Ndikung and Römhild.^[31] Acknowledging that forms of historical colonial Othering as well as migration-related mechanisms of exclusion continue to be at work, the post-Other is perceived as a figure that “negates the existence of self and other, as categories of differentiation.”^[32]

Creating Culturally Pluralised Contact and Conflict Zones

Drawing on theories formulated by Mary Louise Pratt and Sternfeld, Ndikung refers to exhibition spaces as contact zones, as social spaces where people with different backgrounds “meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in sites characterized by highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in the world today.”^[33] SAVVY Contemporary is not envisioned as a site of harmonious coexistence, rather Ndikung emphasises that it should seek to reframe and question well-known exhibition formats in ways that actively contribute to the creation of contact and conflict zones where friction-filled pluralisation processes play themselves out, struggles over inclusion and exclusion take place, notions of belonging are reconceptualised and new alliances of solidarity are formed. This happens for example by staging debates on contested notions such as “Heimat” and “das Volk”, for example, by creating platforms for the discussion of Othering currently taking place in the context of ethnographic museums,^[34] or by contributing to various forums that seek to forge political alliances of solidarity across the migrant-native divide.^[35]

SAVVY Contemporary’s approach resonates with what Natalie Bayer and Mark Terkissidis have termed anti-racist curating. According to Bayer and Terkissidis, this type of curating seeks to avoid objectification and racialisation, include subjugated knowledges and experiment with collective practices that allow for many points of access, engagement and collaboration.^[36] While acknowledging obvious similarities, considering SAVVY Contemporary as a njangi house, as a coalition-building contact and conflict zone from a postmigrant perspective appears more apt. It characterises a conflict-oriented approach to exhibition formats that is sensitive towards issues of race without foregrounding them terminologically on behalf of other migration-related types of Othering. It also puts more emphasis on the potential alliances that can be built between minority and majority groups within society.

Adopting a postmigrant perspective allows for a sharper focus on how exhibition practices seek to renegotiate power relations, resist minority ascriptions in the fixed form of essentialised identities, struggle for equality, and take a political stance by seeking to create alliances of solidarity across existing divides. SAVVY Contemporary’s proactive espousal of postmigrant approaches to curating allows space for friction and disagreement when seeking to address the societal conflicts created by the need to learn how to coexist in conditions of socio-cultural diversity. Importantly, they also enable the formation of alliances of solidarity that seek to reconceptualise conventional notions of belonging. By creating culturally pluralised contact and conflict zones, postmigrant approaches to curating offer a possibility for the radicalisation and politicisation of exhibition practices, enabling dissent and differences to be renegotiated, counter-hegemonic struggles to be staged, and new post-binary forms of solidarity to evolve within small-scale art institutions and beyond.

The author would like to thank Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Committee on Research in Art and Art History for supporting the research on which this article is based (grant NNF 19OC0053992).