Journal

»Notausgang: Mapping the Journey of Spaces«

02/26/2021
Online Launch
Download journal here

»Notausgang: Mapping the Journey of Spaces«
Literary and Visual Publication

Language: German
54 Pages

Contributors:
Nerges Azizi
Ahmed Isam Aldin
Simin Jawabreh
Dachil Sado
Kofi Shakur

Design:
Chau Luong

Editorial team:
Kofi Shakur
Erkan Affan

Introduction

When the project of “Open Sesame: A Photophobic Experiment” was originally conceived, there was a slither of hope among the curatorial and co-ordination team that we’d be back to organising physical events by the end of 2020. A naïve thought it seems, as not only was this not possible but the entire exhibition that we had planned eventually found itself moving to a new medium of presentation: VR/360.

Heading into 2021, these protracted delays of physical access invoked the very desire to question the validity of how one normalises and approaches ‘space’ itself. Can we hold space without physical proximity? Can we create an “event” that offers a constellation of thoughts and information in the form of discourse, artwork and literature? One with no end date or spatial barrier that could limit its access?

The result of these questionings is the following journal.

Erkan Affan

Editor’s Foreword

Social relationships do not exist in the abstract, but are shaped and specifically expressed in how people (can) relate to one another. Spaces are also of central importance here. However, they don’t just serve as a lifeless backdrop for daily business. Spaces are the products of human labor, as a result of architectural creation, they are equally a mirror of the technical possibilities, the ideological struggles of different ways of understanding the world and wanting to shape it. At the same time, they are the answer to political dynamics, the framework and structure of life in the field of tension between the possible and the necessary. The demands of shaping human societies in a sustainable ecological manner, which are becoming evermore evident, pose new challenges. Especially for cities as centers of human life. More than ever, however, there are political limits to what is historically necessary. In the United States, in response to the illegalization and criminalization of migrants, the city of solidarity has evolved. People without papers and secure residence status should be able to take advantage of a minimum of education and health care without fear of persecution by the authorities. When marketing their cities as potential business locations for transnational capital, these increasingly see their own population as a disruptive factor. Gentrification has become an integral part of the cityscape of the metropolises. The upgrading displaces workers from the (former) workers’ quarters, declares homeless people, refugees and migrant young people to be personae non gratae and creates parallel societies in condominiums and office buildings with mirrored glass facades.

In this issue, Nerges Azizi describes how the (missing) urban infrastructure, often in the form of authorities that control not only the asylum process but also the lives of asylum seekers, exploring the fictional story of a young Afghan woman. The text describes the story of Azadeh, who previously lived in Iran as part of the Afghan minority and who ended up facing the bureaucracy of the asylum system in Germany.

A work by Simin Jawabreh is dedicated to the police as another instrument of public control. She deals with the emergence and role of the police in maintaining a racist social order and questions the construction of danger areas and the associated stigmatization of the people who live in these places. It describes how the security measures of colonialism finally find their way into the metropolis.

The artist Dachil Sado deals with the colonial legacy in his own way. Through “transformation and contextualization” he gives the flyers of the Pergamon Museum, on which the Ishtar Gate is advertised, a new form and thus stages his own exhibition.

In the spirit of an Afro-diasporic culture of remembrance, Ahmed Isam Aldin names a virtual square after Theodor Wonja Michael (January 15, 1925 – October 19, 2019), a Black contemporary witness of National Socialism and an important member of the Black community in Germany. “In order to move forward with our task we must claim these public spaces so that they represent the real history of the people who have experienced racism and colonialism on their own bodies.” 

Kofi Shakur

Nerges Azizi is currently doing her PhD in Law at Birkbeck, University of London. She works as an interpreter with refugees and is interested in abolitionist and feminist theories alongside the history of anti-colonial liberation struggles and resistance.

Simin Jawabreh is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin, with a thesis on the subject of “Governing Race”. Jawabreh also works at the Humboldt University Berlin, and is active as a journalist in the field of political theory and political education alongside anti-racist organising. Jawabreh regularly explores the topics of abolitionist theory, decolonialisation, & migration and border regimes.

Dachil Sado was born in Shingal-Mosul, Iraq. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2015. In 2016, he attended lectures on civil engineering at the Technical University. In 2017 he completed a fellowship at Bard College and finally studied fine arts at the Weissensee School of Art. He is the initiator of the KUNSTASYL e.V. project, founded in 2015, and tutor of the *foundationClass at the Weißensee School of Art.

Ahmed Isam Aldin is from Khartoum, Sudan, and is a graphic designer and blogger. He studied physics in Khartoum and graphic design and photography in Cairo. His works have been exhibited in the Schwules Museum Berlin. Aldin’s work deals with the topics of migration and psychology, anti-colonial cartography and revolutionary processes. He is currently studying visual communication at the Weißensee School of Art.

Kofi Shakur is a masters student of African Studies at Humboldt-Universität Berlin where he also studied social sciences. He is a lecturer on German colonial history, a freelancer in political education and a journalist writing for different magazines and newspapers.