Nora El Qadim: We started this conversation when we met in Gothenburg for the PARSE event on Art and Migration. I have been working on migration as a researcher for more than ten years now, and have grown increasingly frustrated with some of the art exhibitions on migration that I have seen, especially when wondering about the conditions in which they were produced. This frustration echoed in a way questions I had about the ethics of research on migration, which are often neglected, or not much discussed, compared to the large amount of research on migration. One problem for me was the ethics of studying “migrants” as if they were something separate from the rest of society or from research. I also encountered a fear of voyeurism or of being exploitative of peoples’ narratives. Reflecting on how art engages with the topic was a way to formulate the pitfalls and dilemmas that I saw in doing research on migration for myself. This is also the reason why I’m particularly interested in having this conversation with you and to learn more about CAMP / Center for Art on Migration Politics. Could you tell us more about CAMP?
Frederikke Hansen: Let us start by giving a bit of background first. Before starting to sketch out what became CAMP in 2013, Tone and I had been working together as the curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion (Curatorial Action) since 2005, and had for eight years engaged with the history of Nordic colonialism and its ramifications for Scandinavia and the Nordic region today in a broad body of projects.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: We wanted to curatorially examine why the colonial legacies of the Scandinavian countries have been repressed and made structurally invisible, and to what degree colonial relations of rule continue to haunt the Nordic region, where we were both born and are still based. Parallel to my work with Frederikke, I was part of co-founding an independent refugee justice community center in 2009-2010, called Trampoline House, where I am currently program director. Trampoline House offers internships and job training, legal counseling and language classes, workshops and campaigns for change to refugees with a residence permit, asylum seekers, rejected asylum seekers, and migrants with the aim of breaking their social isolation and easing their inclusion into Danish society.
Kuratorisk Aktion’s long-term engagement with the history of Nordic colonialism ended in 2013. We then embarked on a new chapter in our curatorial work, and decided to turn our curatorial focus to contemporary Western immigration policies, since it is in the West’s reactions to the large refugee and migrant influx that we, in our opinion, see coloniality operate most clearly today. You could argue that there was a direct trajectory from engaging with historical colonialism and colonial practices of racism and sexism to how the West is currently dealing, or not dealing, with the so-called challenges of human migration and forced displacement.
So in 2013, we decided to open up an art space inside Trampoline House that would solely show art that engages with migration politics and issues of asylum, immigration, integration, assimilation, displacement, forced deportation and so forth. We were able to obtain funding for this space and opened it in April 2015.
Frederikke Hansen: We have produced ten exhibitions in CAMP since the opening. Seen as an overarching thematic, the first six exhibitions were engaging with what we labeled Migration Politics. This series looked at refugee detention, forms of displacement, border control, the deportation regime, imaging war and grievability, and (undocumented) migrant labor. After Migration Politics, we turned our gaze to what happens when people do obtain a residency permit in an exhibition series called State of Integration: Artistic analyses of the challenges of coexistence that comprises both guest-curated international group shows and smaller solo exhibitions curated by us with more local artists, including artists we have met and got to know in Trampoline House.
Nora El Qadim: You’ve explained how you decided to start CAMP, but who is CAMP for? Is it for the users of Trampoline House or do you hope to reach out to a wider audience and bring them in?
Frederikke Hansen: You could look at it as concentric circles. Our primary audience are the users of Trampoline House, which in itself is a very diverse group. Then, it’s the public of Copenhagen—residents and visitors interested in art and/or migration politics. Around this is a wider international community of artists, curators, and academics alike. Even just the concept of a permanent space for exhibiting first-class art by artists with migrant and refugee experience has had quite a big impact around the world. And the catalogs, along with our website and social media platforms, also reach audiences far away from Copenhagen.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: CAMP has always had a dual perspective and tried to reach out to two different audience groups. The first group consists of people who are directly affected by current immigration and asylum policies—people whose bodies are administered by the border spectacle—and these are primarily people who are users of Trampoline House. The other group is made up of socially engaged art audiences, locally, nationally and internationally. The intention with locating CAMP inside Trampoline House was to orchestrate a meeting between audiences from the latter group with audiences from the first group through art. You physically have to move through Trampoline House to enter CAMP, which is located in the heart of the house. We wanted to create an art space where those of us who are privileged and haven’t been forced to flee, who are not displaced and are here voluntarily, would be able to see shows that provide insights into refugee life situations and the structural causes for migration and forced displacement. After viewing the shows, you would be able to go back out into Trampoline House and have a more informed conversation with its users. If CAMP had been located in the art district of Copenhagen, isolated from communities of displaced peoples, it would not have worked at all, in our opinion. We would have contributed to an aestheticization of migration politics, whereas now we’re really trying to encourage people to have a real engagement with migration politics—not just on a symbolic or aesthetic level, but on a human level. In this way, there is a real possibility for solidarity and community to be created across boundaries of privilege and separation. If you go to see a show on migration or exile in a gallery or a museum, there is a big step to getting involved in solidarity work. CAMP’s location in Trampoline House makes that step smaller. Here you can talk to the people the art is about. You can become a volunteer. You can become a monthly donor or visitor. And luckily, that’s how many people react when they step out of CAMP and into Trampoline House.
Nora El Qadim: I read that Refugees, Survivors and Ex-detainees (RISE), the first refugee and asylum seeker organization in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, which does advocacy, provides welfare and services, organizes educational programs and workshops, attached a lot of importance to its location in the central business district in Melbourne. This made me think it would be interesting to have CAMP with the whole of Trampoline in the art district in Copenhagen.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: Absolutely. But the reason why Trampoline House is located in the multicultural neighborhood of Nørrebro in Copenhagen is because this is the only place where we can afford the rent. It is also easier to reach with public transport for users living in the remote Danish asylum centers. On average, they have long commutes of one to two hours each way to get to and from the house.
Nora El Qadim: Affordability and convenience for your visitors. I know thinking about the people involved is also something you do when curating exhibitions. How do you select the artists that you show in CAMP? Are they artists who use Trampoline House and then you see their work and show it? I know that there are also other artists, so how do the shows come about?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: A common misconception of CAMP among people who haven’t been to the space or researched what we do, is that CAMP is Trampoline House’s art gallery for asylum seekers doing aesthetic production on a hobby level to “kill time.” There are many artists who go to refugee camps and asylum centers around the world to organize art workshops for refugees with a therapeutic aim. This is not what CAMP does or exhibits. CAMP shows internationally recognized artists and upcoming artists, activists and researchers who have experience, themselves or through their families, with migration or forced displacement. This selection criterion stems from a desire for CAMP to become a space where forcibly displaced people have representatives from their community speak to their causes. Such a space did not, as far as we knew, exist in Denmark or Scandinavia. We definitely did not want to tokenize artists with refugee and migrant experience, but wanted to ensure that the users of Trampoline House would have a space where they felt represented in a truthful way, in an accurate way, to allow a situation of mirroring and self-identification.
Frederikke Hansen: Practically speaking, we start with the issue. We try to figure out how to unpack this issue and what it is that we more specifically need to address. Then we look at who has been doing work on this. We look for artworks that do not involve too much language and that are not too conceptual, because we’re not just talking to a professional art audience, we also address people in the house who have no training or maybe a different training in understanding contemporary art. While English is the most commonly used language in the international art world, this might be only the fourth or fifth language to some of our audiences. Tone and I haven’t been part of this well-off professional circuit, where you see tons of artists and artworks around the globe, so we’ve been depending a great deal on our network of socially engaged curators, artists, and educators.
Nora El Qadim: Tone, when you say: “People from their community,” I guess you refer to a community of forcibly displaced people around the globe rather than people’s geographic origins? Does it matter to you where the artists are from?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: Yes, that is exactly what I’m referring to. And yes, it matters where the artists are from. We always work with curatorial principles of equal representation of gender, class, race, sexual orientation/identity, language, and geographical region. We’ve been quite careful to not only focus on non-Western migration and displacement, but to also look at migration and displacement within the Global North. In our 2017 group exhibition We shout and shout but no one listens: Art from conflict zones, for instance, we did not just show works on wars in the Global South, but also included works on the conflicts in Northern Ireland and in the Balkans. We wanted to underline that killing and forced displacement due to war occur in the privileged Global North as well, but that conflicts and lives lost in the Global South are mourned less and get less attention from the international community than wars and lives lost on Western soil.
A large global community of forcibly displaced people exists. The first time we really experienced that in CAMP was when we did a solo show with Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung. She came to Copenhagen to install her work and do an artist talk, and a group of asylum seeking users of Trampoline House helped her install some of the work and also did guided tours of her exhibition. There was an informed understanding between her and the users, and Tiffany has later explained that for her, it was a very special experience to exhibit in CAMP and be able to address an audience group that knew what her work communicated, because they had experienced it themselves.
There was another instance, a performance done by the Barcelona-based Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz during our group show Deportation Regime: Artistic responses to state practices and lived experience of forced removal. She did a live performance in which she had a symbolic blood transfusion from her ethnic Spanish friend with a European Schengen passport into her migrant, Peruvian body, to secure that her then unborn child would be granted citizenship in Spain. This resonated with so many people in the audience, people in the asylum system who have been separated from their kids and are waiting for their asylum claim to be processed and to embark on a family reunification process, knowing that this can take years and that they might not succeed. This separation of parents and children is something we experience in Trampoline House every day, which this performance became a heartbreaking testimony to.
Nora El Qadim: I was wondering if it has happened that users of Trampoline House have shown their art in CAMP or that they participated in the curatorial process?
Frederikke Hansen: In our inaugural exhibition, Camp Life: Artistic reflections on the politics of refugee and migrant detention we were working with artist and a fashion designer Dady de Maximo. Tone first got to know him when he started coming to Trampoline House as an asylum seeker from Rwanda. He wrote a piece called If the sea could talk, about people gone missing and drowning in the Mediterranean fleeing to Europe, for a magazine on asylum and migration that came into being in parallel to the formation of Trampoline House. Subsequently, he turned this piece into a fashion collection under the same name. We invited him to our first exhibition and helped him produce a really exceptional fashion show for the inauguration and opening night. Four hundred people came out for the show, and the year after, we were able to do it again for Roskilde Festival in Denmark and the Sonsbeek sculpture festival in Holland. Another example of an artist that we only got to know in the house, and then invited to have a solo exhibition on conditions for LGBTQ people from the Global South seeking asylum in Denmark, was the Chilean artist and dissident Pablo Andres.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: We always make sure to include a perspective on the Danish context. You probably know that Scandinavia has this idea that we are at the forefront of democracy, gender equality, that we didn’t participate, allegedly, in colonialism and so forth. Colonialism in this narrative was done by somebody else somewhere far away, and we can research it and look at it from a distance, but we were never implicated in the structures ourselves. It has therefore become crucial to Frederikke and I to show what is really happening here in our own backyard. So, in Deportation Regime, for instance, we included a project about the Danish deportation centers by a group of rejected asylum seeker activists, who had earlier that year mobilized within the Danish deportation center Sjælsmark.
Frederikke Hansen: I’d also like to mention an eight-week education program that we’ve created, called Talking about art. For TAA, we recruit people from the community of Trampoline House who are interested in learning how to become a gallery guide. They self-organize a workshop where they have guest lecturers and where they study and discuss how the established art museums in and around Copenhagen go about dissemination and education. They then study the exhibition that we are about to mount in CAMP and co-write a guide manuscript for the exhibition that they then perform in duos. We offer free guided tours once a week and sell tours to groups. We’ve had a lot of students of art history, refugee studies, literature, and also vocational training coming through this way.
Nora El Qadim: I remember when I visited CAMP and Trampoline House, you mentioned that there are legal limitations to how people can be paid for their work. How does this kind of economy work?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: Refugees with a residence permit in Denmark automatically get a work permit. So when we work with refugees with a work permit, we can pay them a cash fee. However, asylum seekers waiting for their application to be processed and rejected asylum seekers are not allowed to work and receive any income. So when we work with them, we find different ways to compensate them for their labor, but not in cash fees, as that is illegal.
When we’ve invited artists in the asylum phase or rejected asylum seekers to contribute to our exhibitions or events, we have always offered them the same production fee as the other artists in the show and compensated them with, for instance, gifts amounting to what the other artists receive in artist fees. As for the people who complete the Talking about art program, they are invited to become hosts of CAMP—opening and closing the space, turning on video installations etc., taking attendance and answering questions by visiting audiences. They get their transport expenses from the asylum center to CAMP covered, and they get an hourly pay, but not in cash.
Nora El Qadim: This issue of payment is important because it highlights your attention to power dynamics and to people’s time. I remember from our previous discussions that you were also considerate of people’s time when dealing with requests of journalists or artists who want to access the Trampoline House and talk to an asylum seeker or a migrant. Maybe you can tell me more?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: That’s something that Frederikke and I really appreciated in your paper, pinpointing and discussing the phenomena of “migrant eaters” and “research fatigue.” There are a lot of researchers, artists, film directors, theater producers, PhD students, Post-Doc researchers and so forth who approach spaces like Trampoline House and, I guess, refugee camps all over the world, looking for refugees to tell their story that can then become part of an art production, theater play, PhD thesis, etc. And even though the majority of these projects are created with the best intentions, I think that, as you point out, there’s a lack of understanding of how often people from migrant and refugee communities are approached. If you have lived in a Danish asylum center for eight years, hundreds of people have passed through asking you to tell your story, to go back over the most traumatic experience you’ve had and share that with a complete stranger.
Trampoline House recognizes that this research and aesthetic production is important to create structural and political change. So, we ask researchers and others who want to do cultural projects in the house to volunteer for a minimum of six months and not ask research questions the first month until they have become a familiar face in the house. This is to prevent a complete stranger from pointing a microphone at a user’s face and asking them to recount the traumatic flight journey. Once users of the house know the researcher or artist a little better, they actually feel more comfortable saying: “No, I would not like to participate in this,” or they feel that a sort of safe space has been created. We also ask artists and researchers to keep in mind that they are not the first researcher in the house. They are part of a long row of people having come through the house and the asylum and deportation centers. Our volunteer requirement also has to do with principles of solidarity and reciprocity: if you learn/get/take something from the house, you also have to give something back to the community of the house. So, in your paper, Nora, when you describe that refugees and migrants feel that they talk to so many people and tell their story, but that nothing really changes, this is exactly what we’re trying to curb with this call for direct involvement and solidarity when doing research/projects in the house. The great thing is of course that most researchers and artists then become friends with many of the house users and their engagement continues beyond the specific project.
Nora El Qadim: Another of your rules is “No police questions.” Am I right?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: Yes. We have 40 educational interns in the house every year, without whose amazing effort and labor we would not be able to offer the programming that we do. They come from various university programs, and they put in 20-25 hours of work a week for a six-month period. To prepare them for interning in the house, we offer them a guided tour in one of the asylum centers, a presentation of the history and mission of the house, and a talk on the structure and rules of the Danish asylum system. We then ask them to be careful asking police questions when socializing with house users, such as “Where are you from? What’s your name? Why did you flee?” Instead, we advise people to start a conversation based on their shared experience of being in the house. Slowly, mutual understanding and friendships form. We advise people to keep it kind of formal, because the less you know about someone’s specific asylum case, the less of a chance there is that you give them wrong advise. The number one rule in Trampoline House is that no one gives legal advice except our legal counselor.
Nora El Qadim: I think this approach of “no police questions” is reflected in your choices for CAMP, because the art you show is not about migrant stories. Instead it is about migrants’ art and views on the topic at hand. And not only through their own experience, but a view that is informed by their experience. To me, these rules of Trampoline House are really part of trying to avoid the migratory orientalism that Emma Chubb talks about.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: I’m glad that comes through, because that’s definitely a curatorial intention, but not necessarily one that we always succeed in.
A dilemma that non-refugee users and interns of Trampoline House and CAMP have been voicing for quite some time is I think pertinent to our conversation, which is how one is affected emotionally and commitment-wise by one’s engagement in care work and solidarity work as a privileged subject. The original core group of people who formed Trampoline House was big and many are no longer active in the house. The idea of forming friendships in the house took its toll on lots of people. It was difficult for non-refugee users of Trampoline House to deal with a guilt complex, and also to say “no” in certain situations. So, people burned out, which I believe is common to many activist-centered projects. Enough is never enough, and Trampoline House definitely suffers from this, and it’s an issue that we’re trying to structurally deal with by making internship contracts that sets a limit to how many hours you have to spend in the space, and to offer supervision to educational interns.
I’m raising this because I believe it is a big issue for a lot of migration research, migration activism, and migration aesthetic production. Participation is crucial, but it’s also crucial to be able to set limits. You can’t be committed 24/7, and it’s okay not to give away your Facebook name or your telephone number.
Nora El Qadim: My takeaway is that you have worked hard to make sure there are ways to manage everyone’s participation in the best possible way, but that’s a constant effort, work in progress… How do you envisage the future?
Frederikke Hansen: Oh, the future! In a way it’s an emotional issue, because we’ve decided that CAMP will go from this first phase with a permanent space that can engage an audience for the long haul, and that can engage a theme from multiple angles of attack, into an immaterial phase. In other words, CAMP is pausing as a physical exhibition space in Trampoline House from June 2020 onwards, because we’ve been asked to join the artistic team of the next documenta exhibition. CAMP will continue existing and enter into various collaborations that do not demand us having a physical space, or a real budget, for that matter. The whole fundraising issue is something we could have talked about extensively. It’s in itself very indicative of some of the things you talk about in your article, like how attention tends to cluster around certain issues, but not others, and how the money follows the attention of researchers, artists, and media especially. It can be very, very difficult to raise money for projects like CAMP and Trampoline House.
Nora El Qadim: You mean projects that are not so focused on emergency, or not working with a specific origin?
Tone Olaf Nielsen: First of all, many people have questioned the fact that we have the word politics in our name, saying: “If you get rid of that part, maybe you will be granted more money.” The outspoken political intentionality of CAMP is something that we think may have influenced our funding. I think that funders in the Nordic region right now are very interested in issues of forced displacement, exile, integration and so forth, but only as a one-off engagement. If you’re a big museum, you can get money for one show, but to have a space that continues to produce exhibitions around this thematic is more challenging, especially after the novelty of CAMP has worn off.
Frederikke Hansen: Working with people without social security numbers is something that the foundations use as an excuse to not support us. They’re not obliged to.
Tone Olaf Nielsen: It’s very hard to raise funds for the programs we do for rejected asylum seekers in Trampoline House. It is much easier to get funding for programs for refugees, because they have a residence permit and thus a potential in and for Denmark. Rejected asylum seekers will, by definition, be deported or that’s the intention of the state, so that’s a bad investment. But of course, there are exceptions; there are a few foundations that have supported our programs for rejected asylum seekers. But it’s not easy.
Nora El Qadim: There are a lot of similarities with the funding of research projects. It is important to keep this conversation open, because other researchers, art professionals, and journalists are having similar conversations. Thinking of such discussions and projects as a collective issue might be helpful.
Frederikke Hansen: Let me ask you a question before we end. The field Tone and I work in is visual and representational. It has produced a great number of works about borders and border violence that are, to quote a friend of CAMP’s, Mathias Danbolt, “sublime.” They depict the shocks and the terror that migrants and refugees experience at the borders, but they bracket out the context, and become sublime or, as Mathias would have it, “aesthetic lifejackets.” So, if we’re not careful in our field, we’re just throwing aesthetic lifejackets, like Ai Wei Wei does. What is it like in research? What are the lifejackets of your field that is not, per se, visual and hence representing the direct line to the sublime terror-experience?
Nora El Qadim: Well, I think it’s not the same exactly, because the fascination is not visual. But there is a fascination, which explains why there is so much research on the Mediterranean for example, and death at sea, which we should be made to bear witness to. But at the same time, there is so much focus on the sea and on specific camp spaces, detention spaces or waiting spaces, because they are in a way spectacular, and this border spectacle—the expression has now become famous—has also attracted a lot of research. So, even if it’s not necessarily visual, although some researchers do work with visuals, the spectacular has, I think, a fascination and attraction. Research on the lives of people who have already been in, say, France, for ten years and are still undocumented, is less visible than research on newcomers or on the crossing of the Mediterranean, for example. Funding agencies or foundations often prioritize the most visible research. In the social and solidarity economy, there are trends: take the development of private structures, in many ways “start-ups” of this economy, that specialize in doing social work. They get a lot of funding for teaching code, for instance, to refugees — it’s often either teaching code or helping them set up food-businesses. So the focus is on people who have already been granted refugee status, and who, in many cases, already have qualifications, while asylum seekers or rejected asylum seekers are left out. And with research it’s very similar: the fads of attention and funding go hand in hand. This highlights the need to question the problematic political economy of research or art funding, and possibly reflect on other ways to resist it.