Bringing in others in a time of change

Abstract

“This exhibition is for Germans,” Taher¹ said to me and took a drag on his cigarette as we walked to the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) in Berlin's suburbs. He was referring to daHEIM: glances into fugitive lives. Taher, who had fled his war-torn homeland of Syria, was not eager to delve deep into the contents of the exhibition. Familiar with most of it and tired of hearing refugee stories, he remarked though that it was important for Germans to visit the museum and learn about the background and struggles of those who had recently arrived from the Middle East seeking refuge in Germany. He joined the project because he wanted to engage in a creative practice with others when the group KUNSTASYL (Art Shelter) started work on a performance planned for the closing of the exhibition.

daHEIM was a collaboration between the MEK and KUNSTASYL, which was founded by a Berlin-based artist with the residents of a refugee shelter (Heim) in Berlin-Spandau in 2015. The project started during the 2015 “refugee crisis” that unleashed a surge of participatory initiatives in cultural and heritage institutions in, albeit not only, Germany. Participation served as a label for such practices that aimed at including refugees in these institutions and helping them feel a sense of belonging. This participatory turn built on approaches propelled by critical museology's focus on social justice and the envisioning of museums as spaces to counter discrimination and prejudice. Looking at these developments in museums, which increasingly operate as sites for initiatives with “others” invited to participate in various roles, this commentary shows how “bringing in others” into such institutions can lead to a paradox that reinforces a sense of non-belonging, and draws attention to contradictions in collaborative initiatives with marginalized groups, such as refugees. This essay reflects on who these projects are for, who gets to speak, and who sets the overall framework.

“How are we going to live together here?” was one of the questions that guided the daHEIM project. It pertained to the events of the “refugee crisis” and the changes in Berlin's social landscape—and in Germany in general, where more than one million people arrived in 2015 and 2016 in search of refuge. In the framework of “Wilkommenskultur” (culture of welcome), accompanied by the slogan “Refugees Welcome,” the statement “wir schaffen das” (“we will manage this”) by then Chancellor Angela Merkel was intended to reflect a welcoming response towards refugees in Germany. It manifested in a large number of initiatives founded to support newcomers. However, there was also a great deal of ambivalence towards these developments, as evidenced by Islamophobic reactions such as weekly rallies of the anti-Islam movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident; in German: Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). The welcoming gestures and practices also varied, and were characterized by solidarity and motivated by “the need to help” (Malkki, 2015), with the “needy” embodied in the figure of the refugee.

From the outset, the German authorities dedicated much support to cultural initiatives, including in museums, that focused on the “refugee crisis” (Macdonald et al., 2021). daHEIM fell into this category. It started in spring 2016 and completed in summer 2017. The project included an exhibition on refugee-ness and a series of performances and events that accompanied it. A central idea behind daHEIM, which translates as “at home” or “the home,” was to imagine and create a space by and for those who lost their home and were in the throes of making a new one in Berlin.

From the MEK's perspective, the museum did this for the refugees by offering them space to speak for themselves, which transpired, for example, in the texts the participants wrote and put on display, the exhibition design as well as regular inputs on their refugee experiences. This approach partly corresponded to what Elinor Ostrom has conceptualized as “co-production,” that is to say, as “a process through which inputs from individuals who are not ‘in’ the same organization are transformed into goods and services” (1996, 1073). The above-cited statement by the museum staff fits Ostrom's co-production model in that it recognises that those who were invited to participate, and not the museum, had the knowledge and experience needed to address the questions of migration and refuge-ness. Nevertheless, this approach also shows that KUNSTASYL did this project “for Germans,” as Taher pointed out, and for the museum, for that matter. The participants co-produced the exhibition, challenging the image of the refugee and presenting the use of this term as potentially harmful by drawing on their negative experiences. daHEIM questioned the narrow framing of refugees who were often depicted as Muslim at the time of the “refugee crisis.” All the same, precisely the subject of Islam brought to the fore inadvertent effects of collaborative initiatives, as I discuss below.

daHEIM showed that collaboration is as much about the other as it is about the self—in this case also the “institutional self,” at a time when museums face the challenge of reinventing themselves. As Liisa Malkki astutely points out in her ethnography on humanitarianism, doing or making things for others is “a gift of the self to an imagined other, but also a gift to the self” (2015, 10). In daHEIM, the case of Islam illustrates this.

The project allowed Islam to emerge along the way, and it was, in effect, depicted only in three instances, in texts conceived and written by KUNSTASYL members. One was penned by a participant from Afghanistan who wanted to move to “a country in which no Muslims lived,” and the other two referred to the authors' traumatic experiences with the “Islamic State.” All these depictions were absolutely valid, but they inadvertently reproduced a negative image of Islam.

daHEIM did what in theory can be considered a good approach, that is, the participants wrote the texts themselves, and the exhibition content and accompanying events were the result of the project's participatory framework in which Islam was not directly addressed. This led to Islam being presented in only three negative instances. The issue lay not lie in the attribution of authority to the participants but rather in insufficient communication. Although the project was, in many ways exemplary in its participatory practice, it missed the opportunity to engage with others in a dialogue premised on open-ended relationality in which all involved partake in communication, through which the meaning flows from interaction (Bachtin, 1981). Listening plays a key role in this process, in which an utterance is produced in anticipation of a response—or action. Yet often, “self-preservation,” as Zetterstrom-Sharp and Wingfield (2019, 13) suggest, “disables any real dialogue.” In the case of daHEIM, the group and the museum would need to remain actively engaged, reflecting critically on the depictions of Islam on display, which might have had inadvertent effects—as in light of ongoing Islamophobia. Even if only some participants were Muslim, they were commonly perceived as such in German society, so they were regularly confronted with this issue. If the museum had been involved in active communication on this topic with the participants, they would have not claimed that daHEIM had “nothing to do with Islam.” However, this kind of engagement would have required a refined approach to the participants' experiences as well as the political urgency of the topic in Germany, rather than leaving it up to them to decide (they inevitably discussed this subject in meetings and informal conversations). Entering into an exchange on dominant representations of Islam would have allowed for a discussion on context, while opening up the opportunity for the MEK to engage directly with the subject and dismantle preconceived assumptions about Islam.

Dialogue combined with action took place in the project when, for example, the MEK and KUNSTASYL managed to resolve a conflict over the use of the museum space, which necessitated working out a solution for all involved—the institution and the project participants, most of whom had never worked in a museum. Such a dialogue could also have been initiated to address the representations of Islam in the exhibition, with the intention not only to challenge the idea that all refugees were Muslim, but also to present the subject of Islam in a nuanced and contextualized manner in a museum that focuses on “European cultures.” The surge in Islamophobia demonstrates how relevant these questions remain.

Lastly, the daHEIM project reiterated hierarchies that partly resembled “First World salvationalism versus Third World savagery” (Morris, 2022), and “the need to help”, which is characteristic of refugee projects, often obscures such hierarchies—ones that already exist and those that emerge along the way. This phenomenon becomes strikingly apparent in institutional contexts and demands close scrutiny, and therefore museums need to exercise the critical reflexivity about the privileges that come with the status they hold. “Self-preservation” and power dynamics, which are often entangled in the collaborative practices of museums exacerbate the sense of not belonging despite these institutions' attempts to include others.