"There can be no simple positions"

Elisabeth Wellershaus: Your program deals with anti-democratic developments in Germany and aims to create moments of encounter. But in order to get people involved in the debate, the institutions also have to move. Is this idea part of your approach?

Holger Bergmann: Absolutely. In order to be able to discuss these things, we also have to get moving as institutions. So, unlike the previous national meetings, this project will not take place at a central location, but will travel to Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Potsdam, Weimar, Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Erfurt and Düsseldorf and offer a program tailored to these locations. The idea of the Bundesweiten Foren was born in the spirit of the pandemic aid measures. And since the pandemic, we have seen an alarming spread of far-right ideas. As an institution, we have come to realize that the inability to tolerate different points of view has increased, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to engage in debate and to keep our thoughts flexible. Time and again, we have to negotiate how we as a society, institutions and artists want to deal with hardened positions. This is how the central question for our project arose: How can spaces for constructive debate be re-established?

EW: On the one hand, many expectations are placed on art and culture when it comes to certain topics. On the other hand, artists need protected spaces to be able to produce their art independently. How do you deal with this conflict?

HB: A large part of our work consists of securing and supporting independent productions – and doing so on the basis of artistic self-commissioning. We don't make programs on topics such as sustainability or diversity, but rather want to reflect diversity in the promotion of artistic practice. We try to issue tenders in a sensitive way, to encourage diverse external perspectives and to create spaces for works that have a hard time in the current climate. One example is the production LECKEN by the artist collective CHICKS, which was disinvited from the Wildwechsel Festival in Zwickau for financial reasons. At the time, far-right politicians and groups had campaigned against the piece and discredited it publicly. This series of events is intended to create a framework for this kind of work. We want to reflect on why, for example, topics such as gender and queerness still provoke such hostility today. After all, we know that queer life was already quite present in places like Berlin in the 1920s, in some ways it was perhaps even more progressive than today. So why is this topic repeatedly misused from a right-wing populist perspective, why is the freedom to shape one's life and sexuality in a self-determined way considered dangerous: this is one of the questions we want to explore within the context of protective spaces.

EW: THE ART OF STAYING MANY is about democracy education and resistance to far-right agitation. These are topics that you want to deploy to reach people who are not part of the regular audience of the independent scene. How exactly do you want to do this?

HB: In a quite pragmatic way and already through the choice of venues we are inviting people to. In addition to the independent cultural venues, we have also addressed the municipal theaters. We are also moving through regions that are often overlooked by art and culture. We are going to places like Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Erfurt, and not just to theatrical venues, but to the cities themselves – in Erfurt, for example, with the Phoenix Festival in a high-rise housing estate. From the very beginning, we were driven by the question of how to create open events in these places. For example, we have a truck that will travel across the country with us and is accessible to everyone. The audience can sit on the open loading area, meet in front of it, drink coffee, just be together. A person who had a big influence on me once said: “Art begins with the barbecue you set up.” And that makes perfect sense to me. The offer to seduce people with art must be one that is widely understood, one that does not exclude. The curatorial team around Felizitas Stilleke, Franziska Werner and Fabian Lettow also worked according to this motto.

EW: What will the artistic and discursive approaches look like?

HB: Among other things, we will enter into dialog with authors such as Şeyda Kurt, Heike Geißler and Mirna Funk in Leipzig to discuss hate, the politics of emotions, and strategies and spaces for action against the far right. We are showing plays such as Sunny Sunday by Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué, which deal with political narratives and symbols. And in Berlin, The Last Supper by the group MEXA, which was created in a homeless shelter in São Paulo and deals with neurodiversity. And there will be a direct exchange of ideas with the audience. The aim is to eat, argue and create together – with workshops and a MECKER choir, among other things, Tanja Krone will remind us that arguing is an essential part of democratic processes.

EW: So, exercises to help deal with current contradictions are part of the program?

HB: At the very least, we want to try to involve all the people who are still genuinely interested in a genuine exchange of ideas. We are interested in those places where opinions have not yet been formed, where movement is still possible. Our aim is not to represent homogeneous opinions, but to test the much-vaunted power of diversity. After all, it’s not acceptable for us as the Fonds to try to promote diversity and flexibility in the independent arts on the one hand, while demanding positions and opinions that are tied to political expectations on the other.

EW: Many artists and cultural workers in Germany have been navigating the debate minefield for months. How do you deal with this confrontation in terms of content within a format that seeks the greatest possible openness?

HB: At the moment, you often find yourself in situations that surprise you, that cannot be foreseen and that you have to face up to. One message that we as an institution want to send to everyone involved with our program is that there are simply no simple positions, nor can there be. Positions always have something to do with the people who express them, with their viewpoints, living environments and experiences. They are shaped by political cultures, currents of thought and traditions. The simplistic interpretations that have emerged in recent months, for example, as soon as the abbreviation IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) or the slogan "Free Palestine" appears anywhere, are of course far too short-sighted. They were and are often inhumane exaggerations that only ever want to perceive suffering from a very specific perspective. I don't think this is justified from either a political or a personal perspective. Unless there is a horizon of experience that is strongly characterized by trauma. At the same time, there is a certain attention market for polarizations that do not want to perceive clearly visible antisemitism or reproduce racist discrimination from the right. It therefore remains important to recognize that war is an instrument that can lead people everywhere to develop certain radicalizations, exacerbations and demarcations toward others. And there is a great danger when an indirect non-experience becomes an attitude that is represented to the wider public that is far removed from the events of war. If we allow this to happen, then we permit the logic of war – and the logic of populism. That's why we're interested in this project: How do we relate directly to each other here on the ground?

EW: You are concerned with social and political mobility. And the word "we" is often used in this context. Who exactly is this we? And despite all the longing for connection, encounters and community, does it also have limits?

HB: Good question. How to answer it is ultimately one of the greatest challenges of our time. As a democracy, we are currently being asked how we can rethink a society that does not follow the reflexes of nationalism or the normative logic of belonging. Far-right and right-wing populist developments must therefore be opposed as a matter of course. Those who spread such views do not want to be part of a diverse "we" themselves, do not want to endure the difficulties of social negotiation processes and do not see the beauty in them. Politicians are first and foremost responsible for dealing with this. But culture also has room for maneuver. Ferda Ataman, the Federal Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, will be speaking at the opening event of THE ART OF STAYING MANY. The fact that this office exists at all already marks the fact that a "we" has to be constantly renegotiated. We are also interested in the political beyond art: the major cultural-political debates about artistic freedom and other fundamental rights. But above all, we want to know how we can succeed in reacting in a way that is neither knee-jerk nor lazy to the current challenges. Because there is a connection between the big words: without art there is no freedom and without freedom there is no democracy!