STREITEN GEGEN DIE ZEIT
by Stella AC susanne fasbender
In this multi-part film, my aim is to express a universal relationship by montaging international struggles against enclosure, displacement and exploitation, against the destruction of nature, war and repression – in the form in which I encounter them in Germany – and also undertake an attempt on the epistemic violence of hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge and of the right to define meaning.
In 2018, I began doing interviews because I wanted to listen and connect. I work slowly and daily, embedded in my life, just as a painter sits at her pictures. Sometimes with, but almost always without public funding and in constant confrontation with the developments of the time. It takes a long time, I work on my films for several years and in the meantime I publish some of the interviews in full length, as well as clips and videos that I put online, but the actual film is something else again.
The new and institutionalized German accusation of antisemitism, which has been directed against Palestine solidarity and Palestinians for a long time – and which has been articulated with regard to postcolonialism since 2020 - placed a stone in my path, for which I am very grateful today: I had to ask new questions to find out how I could respond to the moral imperative of a German campaign of accusations in a way that would make this dispute fruitful for the anti-colonial, feminist and anti-capitalist narratives of my film.
When German politicians instrumentalize the public commemoration of the November pogroms to threaten Palestinian protesters with political punishment, then a fundamental twisting in this “fight against antisemitism” has to be revealed. In 2020, when the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe was uninvited from the opening speech of the Ruhrtriennale (that has been followed to date by hundreds of further disinvitations of authors and scholars criticizing Israel), a world-renowned anti-colonial voice from Africa was silenced in Germany with the accusation of antisemitism, thus initiating the following discourse on antisemitism and anti-colonialism. This new inclusion of anti-colonialism in the accusation of antisemitism obviously points to the ban on criticizing the settler-colonial character of Israel's occupation of Palestine, but it goes further. Articulating and elaborating on this in more detail will be part of the film.
The death threat (187 - You will be the next) sprayed by unknown persons in the exhibition space of the invited Palestinian artists' group “The Question of Funding” before the opening of documenta15 in 2022 was played down by the German press as a “smear” and was neither scandalized nor removed during the entire exhibition. Instead, this attack was linked to a unanimous verdict that categorized the exhibition as “antisemitic” even before the opening. I saw German tourists walking through the exhibition, speaking disparagingly – “good Germans” who know that they are always on the “right” side.
Because it is precisely in the analysis of the fight against antisemitism, as it is being talked about by the German government in agreement with the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (which means also a productive examination of the singularity thesis of the Holocaust) that, with the help of reading the many texts by historians, philosophers and genocide researchers who have dedicated themselves to the question of antisemitism / anti-colonialism since the Mbembe debate in the context of the so-called Historikerstreit 2.0, a liberated understanding of what antisemitism actually is unfolds. How the Holocaust can be understood in relation to other genocidal mass crimes of the 20th century and in relation to the transatlantic enslavement trade was elaborated.
It is important to me to emphasize the extent to which a controversial but scientific and vivid discourse took place here, on the basis of historical research, to remember mass violence beyond the Holocaust, to name and make comprehensible the respective historical contexts, while also rejecting any competition among victims almost unanimously. The authors have discussed questions ranging from denials to comparisons versus equations to public remembrance of genocides in a variety of scholarly ways and opened the way for me to break through a morally instrumentalized dictate in favor of an emancipatory move. The fact that German institutions have nevertheless turned the singularity thesis of the Holocaust into a dogma that simply ignores the richness of this discussion is a question of power, which brings us back to the above-mentioned epistemic violence.
In their book “Safety through Solidarity - A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism” (Melville House Publishing 2024), Shane Burley and Ben Lorber describe an analysis of antisemitism from a traditionally left-wing Jewish perspective. Although the following quote refers to the US-American situation, which is different from the German one, for example, in terms of white, Christian nationalism, it is at the same time a universal statement about a progressive fight against antisemitism:
Antisemitism has not „reappeared“, because in truth, it never left us - the „crisis“ is simply more visible in political life as exclusionary movements create a new populist narrative that provides alienated people someone to blame. Progressive movements have stood up against other forms of oppression, tracing the historic roots, and contemporary fruits, of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, queerphobia, and many other llls plaguing our world. But we lack a similar framework for understanding what antisemitism is, and how to fight it.
This book is an attempt to put the fight against antisemitism back on the progressive agenda, where it belongs.
In the United States, and around the world, progressive Jews and our allies are building safety through solidarity: committing to fight antisemitism alongside all other forms of oppression, as we strengthen each other against the rising tide of white Christian nationalism, which threatens us all. We offer a justice-driven analysis of antisemitism, and a window into the social movements committed to taking it on and building a better world.
The film thus continues to negate the hegemony of the answers that permeate the history of capitalism, including war, genocide and the destruction of nature, and questions the anchoring of the racialization of peoples within human society that has been developed over centuries, so that I can leave the text of the film's previous concept as it is:
How could the powerful distinctions: civilized / primitive, developed / underdeveloped, rational / irrational, livable / killable become politically effective and, at the same time, make the violent processes that led to their creation invisible? What do Eurocentric hegemonies of knowledge mean? Have they perhaps inscribed themselves into “Western” social consciousness in a way that could ultimately be seen as an impoverishment of thought? How can we break open the militarization, demarcation, walls, wars and destruction of nature that are postulated as a factual constraint, in order to sow a new seed in this rupture.
And yet, the end of violence is also present in us – in the midst of barbarism, genocide, the destruction of nature and the apocalypse. It is, to quote Karl Marx, “the dream” that already contains the reality, for which we lack consciousness – or the physical power to act – to bring this reality into the world in order to renew it. In this context, the often lamented dispute about how we should fight, think and orient ourselves is also understood as a productive driving force, as a constant of constantly new beginnings in a permanent, unfinished confrontation with the contradictions of the world. We meet in recognition of all our differences, but with the common goal of renewing the world from below.
My lecture "BRANDSPUREN – Epilog zur Unterscheidung – Von der eurozentrischen Aneignungslogik zur Entuferung des Weltenbrandes" (only in German) was created as part of my basic research
A visit to documenta 15 would also become a site of contention around questions of the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-colonialism. This includes questioning the prevailing “prohibition” on addressing the history of the expulsion of Palestinians since the beginning of Zionism or viewing and discussing their art at documenta 15.
The series “Gaza Guernica” by the artist Mohammad Al Hawajri uses montages with excerpts from European realism, such as “A Rest from Work” by Jean-Christophe Millet, to address the sudden displacement of rural life that befell villagers in Palestine decades before the Nakba. By juxtaposing classic works of European art history with images of the Israeli military, he points to the deep roots of these expulsions in European history and its expansionism. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which the governments of Great Britain and France divided the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire into four permanent zones of influence, is not insignificant in this context.
LE 18 is a multidisciplinary space for culture and residencies in the old city of Marrakech, founded by Laila Hida in 2013 and invited to documenta 15. Laila Hida discusses the questions they posed regarding the translation of their space into a representation at documenta in Kassel. They began their participation in d15 with a talk titled “Undoing documenta”. we wanted to open the conversation with the community in Kassel on what is Documenta, how we understand it, how do people understand it, what is expected from collectives and projects from the global south, that are invited here. And so, in the course of all this conversation that we had in the past months with our team, we understood that we were going the wrong way, when we're just answering, to an invitation from an understanding that was somehow a colonized understanding of what is documenta, what is an exhibition, or what is an art, manifestation. And at the time is that to say, that we are still unequal in this world and, that we don't work as artists in the same conditions. It's still problematic to show works from global south countries in this context because they're not understood properly. So you don't want to be a token in this context, of course.
The film is created with a multitude of voices of thinkers and fighters, warriors, researchers, teachers, writers in conversation and in their speeches, who dedicate their work and their lives to a present in which the seeds of a practice and possible world, freed from the ecocide/genocide complex and from Eurocentric hegemonies of knowledge and thought, are also the seeds and the power of their daily lives. The encounters, recordings and interviews took place over several years in different places and independently of each other. These people may have combative differences in their ideas, theories and approaches, but the common link is always found in taking the end of violence as the starting point.
Bettina Cruz Velazquez (CNI, Asamblea de Pueblo des Istmo) with the "internationalist caravan for global justice and to mobilize against the G7 summit" at a rally at Schloss Elmau during the G7 summit: "I belong to an indigenous people from the south of Mexico, and we are here because we want to tell the G7 that they are not the masters of the world, but that they consider themselves the masters of the world because they have come here to decide our future!"
Activists and researchers of anti-colonial struggles here and there, voices from the Palestinian protests in Germany, women of the Kurdish autonomy movement, indigenous feminists from Abya Yala (South America), the Argentine feminist movement Ni Una Menos, voices from Iran, protests on Afghanistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Namibia and Germany, as well as interviews with artists from Haiti, Congo and Morocco, become a woven work of struggles against enclosure, expulsion and exploitation, against war and repression. The multitude of countries listed here is meant to illustrate the historically fortified line - patriarchy, expansionism and capitalism - that forms the barrier in these struggles across distances.
Communalism is a day-to-day condition without communal solidarity, without forms of communal infrastructure, we are not going to be able even to make a real fight. To have a real fight you really have to have that kind of solidarity that puts our lives in common - in a concrete daily way - in terms of of actually seeing that, when we think of our reproduction, of our life, we are thinking not in individual terms. This to me is extremely important. the commons as a condition for the struggle. It's the only way the struggles can actually grow and not just be episodic. One great moment, everybody in the street and then everybody goes home. But actually - build an infrastructure for struggle, struggles need an infrastructure. You have to reproduce the struggle. Really producing labor power, really producing the capacity to work, therefore we need to reproduce the capacity to struggle. The commons is our struggle to be produced the capacity to struggle. So this is what we have to strengthen.
I do not fight to have an enemy but I fight to be together to realize this world is ours. This world we should care for one another, you know. If we have respect, it's the big thing. Respect either individual or a group. Don't judge. Because some people can say oh you are, you know fighting individually. But we are in a group. We are the best. And then, you know, if you receive that energy, then it becomes, you know, you question yourself. If we respect ourselves, you respect the fight of the other people.