“In the weeks of cancelling events for Covid-19 I often thought about […] the need to support the continuity of the artistic practice, even in the forced absence of its visible body. Perhaps the role of the institution is to remember the importance of invisible life; to claim that its primary role is not to present an event, through which a practice can then be supported, but rather to support an artistic practice that has visible moments of presentation.”
Daniel Blanga-Gubbay, Voices (towards other institutions) #15 on e-flux

Unprecedented conditions summon a revaluation of necessity. In March 2020 when streets, shops, schools, offices, and museums were evacuated of human vitality, everyday sociality was brought to an abrupt halt. Under the threat of viral transmission, physical distancing became a necessary expression of social togetherness: the enactment of mutual care obliged us being apart. While remote communications proliferated in text, voice messages, glitchy video, and paranoid news feeds, it was not the case that face-to-face exchanges ceased as was often lamented, rather, we were left solely with the face. Boxed faces devoid of context, body, postures, smells, proxemics and touch, demonstrating the irreducibility of communication to sheer linguistic diffusion, despite our devices teaming with information. The flood of purely verbal and textual communication did little to temper the eerie feeling of physical estrangement in conditions conditioned by sensorial austerity.

As artists and curators who traffic in the senses, our work with more than 80 young artists (pursuing their study) began within such isolating, and oftentimes lonely conditions. Bracketed by six visual arts and two theatre classes from around Germany, we began grappling with the question: What does it mean to partake in, and create art in conditions of non-presence, with each other as well as absent audiences? How is collaboration and cultural production possible within conditions of proximal estrangement when creativity never emerges via the sheer pragmatics of informational exchange? How can art institutions adapt their purposefulness when prohibited from hosting publics around works of art? And crucially, are there lessons from this suspended moment of institutional normalcy that ought to be woven into a prolonged strategy for cultural production at large?

As a 1,5 year-long endeavour comprised of various iterations and forms of engagement, Conditions of a Necessity [CoN] can be seen as a propositional model for how institutions may re-organise and distribute resources, adapting their function to the transforming needs, authorship structures, and modes of production from practitioners in the field, particularly as generational shifts reshape its contours beyond pandemic conditions. With practices that increasingly challenge the singularity of an artist-author, or those which blur the separation between display and production, CoN initially operated as a semi-private gathering, hosting experimental and improvised collaborative making (following protocols of daily nasal swabs), when commemorative graduation exhibitions were impossible. CoN manifest as an infrastructure for not only bringing artists into relation, but by allocating material support, mentorship, facilities, venues and personnel towards the facilitation of collaborative production, beyond the relatively short-term commitment of an exhibition. It is through such an infrastructure of commitment, that we may come to see this approach along the lines of what Isabel Stengers named an “Ecology of Practices” adapted to the arts. An institutional understanding of an ‘Ecology of Practices’ implies a systemic participation in the creative process, an articulation of support responsive to the milieu of making – our ‘habitats’ of creativity – where visible, event-based instances of artistic work are seen as residual artefacts of broader processes; processes that require equal support, despite their occurrence off-stage while in the temporality of incubation.

Orchestrating Togetherness

Throughout the course of this process, in the face of ubiquitous obstacles, simultaneous efforts arose in the struggle to invent various means of mutual support and collaborative exchange. One example was the changing modes and settings of online coming together conducted by the four participants from the Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative Class (from Discoteca Flaming Star at ADK Stuttgart). The experiments of these participants culminated in the production of shared spaces through synced bodily experiences in isolation, while other modalities to catalyze forms of distant interaction also germinated, such as the gestural game based on secret object exchanges in a Deutsche Bahn locker in the Nürnberg central train station by the participants of the DAF collective (Dynamische Akustische Forschung initiated by Jan St Werner). These responses originated organically, by the groups as a survival exercise of a typically very social collective, mirroring the psychic space we experienced as an interconnected society in the face of a planetary pandemic. The intentions of these experiments was not the production of artworks, nor projects for the closing exhibition, but that they facilitated playful interactions, serving as a game-like basis for how participants engaged with one another, in other words Homo Ludens. At the time, these experiments were seen as failed attempts, like the Exquisite Corpse Script exercise by the Expanded Cinema class (from Clemens von Wedemeyer at HGB Leipzig), but index how young artists were testing out forms of co-creation in conditions that were deeply ‘together,’ yet in an entirely unfamiliar and different key than how collaborations typically come about.

The multiplicity of these initial, early experiments of collective coming-together emerged as methodological processes that came to orient the projects from the participating groups, in hindsight becoming the proto-forms of the artworks in the closing exhibition. The failed script of the Expanded Cinema group became an organon through which to confront the artificiality of the situation of being forced to work together, resulting in them outsourcing their ‘team-building’ to an aquatic coach, who conducted the choreography of their synchronization while immersed in a pool as a group, which ultimately became their cinematic installation. Another example was the material carry-over of plastic and breath from the ADK Stuttgart groups, that germinated in the initial Gathering of CoN, and later bifurcated into two distinct, yet performatively intertwined, duo-performances. 

While following this process with regular group meetings, it became evident that organizational forms can take myriad modes of cohesion, from hyper-egalitarian to ultra-bureaucratic. The Time-Based Media Class (from Simon Denny at HFBK Hamburg), cheekily adopted a corporate organizational approach structured by a strict division of labour among its members, where a fuzziness between satirical critique and endorsement played out, and whose structure of ‘coming together’ permeated their installation. In other cases, the group acted as a collective organism where members in the creation of a shared work, like in the Bovista Mushroom Club, or as an infrastructure of individuals coming together to create a framework allow for the staging of autonomous works, like in Garden Alliance (both from Hito Steyerl’s Lensbased Class at UDK Berlin), and in others as a union exercising possibilities of collective artistic production through the delegation of orchestration and practice. The varying modes of collectivity – either and singular or heterogeneous assemblages, reflected the ideological differences in inventing forms of organizing collaborative labour, resulting in different expressions of ‘togetherness’ along a spectrum between coordination and communion.

Conditions of a Necessity – The Exhibition

Our approach to the closing exhibition was not that of a polished, neat display of artworks, but a fidelity to its eclectic process: an exhibition of monstrous form composed of artefacts in dialogue with each other. Walking up the ceremonious marble stairs of the Kunsthalle, one was serenaded into the expansive exhibition space through the subtle repetition of words from Expanded Cinema’s audio installation, to then be greeted by a large levitating red-lit lip of the Temporary Spaces Class (from Asli Serbest at HfK Bremen). This lip was a significant marker for the ethos of CoN, insofar as it can be thought of as a carrier-object, acting as a relay between class years, and the duration of the project in its entirety. At the Gathering, the Temporary Spaces Class initiated collective embroidering sessions upon a comforting duvet, which was later repurposed and transformed into a soft-sculptural lip, evoking feminist speech as a linguistic gateway for forms of collectivity. This semiotic exchange between the audible, yet body-less words and the suspended lip, is extended to the fragmented, frozen ice-limbs placed in an rickety commercial freezer presented by DAF. Through a performative procession connecting the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden with the outdoor public sculpture missing an arm (Kniende, 1944, by Ludwig Kasper), in the fountain at the Caracalla-Therme, DAF members collected the infamous spring water that was carried back to the museum, and movingly poured into moulds of the missing arm. As the old freezer did its work to solidify the icy prosthetics, DAF presented sculptural-acoustic intervention in the first adjacent room echoing, distorting and sonically manipulating the machinery in the main space. In the closing ceremony, DAF enacted a ritualized return by offering the frozen limbs back to Kniende, placing them in the fountain until the heat of the water dissolved her fleeting prosthetics. Passing through the acoustic space of DAF, littered by exposed cables, one glimpsed a brightly lit, sterile space organized by monumental, ready-made shelving units reminiscent of warehouse storage architecture. The audience found themselves inside a logistical microcosm of the world of consumer decadence in a room housing the works of the Time-based Media group, mirroring Amazon’s ‘commodity diversity,’ where individual artworks were displayed in similar fashion to unpurchased, commercial objects. With a large touch-screen monitor taking centre-stage, audiences could navigate a digital exhibition within an exhibition, whose virtual Graduation Show ‘venue’ was the interior of a Mercedes Benz engine.

Passing through the logistical vernacular, and drawn by the artificial green light emanating from the third room, the Garden Alliance from the Lensbased class staged various geopolitical and social crises atop a roundtable populated with screens and gaming stations for each member’s work. Inspired by the idea of Viriditas, described by the medieval philosopher Hildegard von Bingen, as a regenerative force endemic to biological life-forms characterized by the colour green, by enveloping viewers in the glow of this colour gestures to a strength in the interconnectivity of struggles and resistant vitality in the face of suffering and injustice. Exiting the green glow and entering into a blue hued space, Expanded Cinema installed a two-channel video depicting a group of artists in an antique pool following the instructions of an Aqua-Aerobics coach, whom they had given the task of coordinating them into a collective body through exercises in the water. The multiple cameras, some distant, others attached to agile, splashing bodies, capture individual reactions to the instructions above the water surface and the strenuous efforts to tread water underneath. While the Aqua-Aerobics coach firmly shouts at her sometimes flailing, team of swimmers, an intense sound of amplified, yet partially obstructed breath cuts into the space from the neighbouring room when she pauses. A lone speaker stands amidst a tangle of self-made, roughly taped together plastic grocery-bag tubing. Initially improvised at a moment when the act of breathing became a marker and medium for our shared vulnerability, the installation emerged from an opening performance enacted by a duo from the Body, Theory and Poetics of the Performative Class duos. They asked: “How can we look at each other, gather, encounter and self-organise collectively despite resistance and failure?”. The live performance saw the duo conjoin themselves via a progressively elongated soft plastic tube, filling with moisture, inflating and suffocating, as they snaked, and contorted their bodies throughout the exhibitions spaces, folding themselves into the installations and visibly strained in sustaining the breath dialogue. The versatility of plastic, as both that which can smother, and that which may give life in the form of a controlled environment, could be seen in the fifth room where a DIY terrarium containing compostable detritus, served as a projection volume for the installation of the Bovista Mushroom Club for the Lensbased Class. Taking lessons from mycelium networks whose underground informational and material exchange structures provide nonhuman diagrams for reimagining processes of (de)growing collectively, suggesting a symbiosis between diverse eco-struggles, resource allocation, and a rethinking of artistic processes evolving. Between the smell of composted leaves and branches emanating from the humid volume, the video projection depicts a fictional cooking show intertwined with storytelling, a walk in the forest entangled with memories of Soviet moss, and a subtle glimpse at the limitless patterns within the surface of a fungi. As one enters the last space of the exhibition from the Temporary Spaces class, a muted yellow-tinged light illuminated an archive of fragmented research materials. These materials were displayed across sprawling tables, inviting the audience to pause and peruse the collection, ranging from drawing, audio pieces, small videos, text-work, and sculptures. For the occasion, the print publication Muhatap [Interlocutor] was also offered to audiences, containing an edited culmination of collaborative works, reflections, and speculations on Queer Ecologies (or queering ecology) as an open invitation to rethink artistic practices within more-than-human conditions and life-worlds – even viral ones.

Instituting Care

It is often repeated that the etymology of ‘curating’ is bound to ‘care,’ however the historical convenience of a mere word is rather empty when not backed up with practice. Initiated by the directors of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Cagla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yildiz, and tinkered with by those involved, Conditions of a Necessity focused on demonstrating the need for museums to care for conditions of art in a systemic and broad sense, beyond sheer display, taking into account the mutual vulnerabilities endemic to the precarity of the field that were amplified during the pandemic. In its modest scope, it facilitated the hosting of groups inside the structure of the public institution, while offering an alternative model for enabling production. Together, with members of the classes we co-created conditions to enter into a game, where rules of collective engagement had to be improvised, in a shift from competitive market-based conditions of art-making. The role of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden as an institution throughout this process also adapted to the altering conditions not only of sociability, but to exhibition-making practices as well. We were both part of this process of experimental, institutional adaptation as interlocutors in the Gathering, interlocutors with class groups over the course of a year, and subsequently as curators of the exhibition. The Gathering was a rapid institutional response from KBB to the sudden closure of museums and lock down measures, for which the directors commissioned architect Assaf Kimmel to design a modular scenography to accommodate the burgeoning collaborations. Rather than cherry-picking a few select future art stars from Rundgänge across the country, the KBB materially enabled a site of production as a form of generational support. This model of support, of caring for broader conditions of making, acts as a proposition for possible relations between state funded museums and state funded educational institutions, while nourishing the sociality of art making over singular authorship. The museum, which is typically a place to display art, turned into a site to gather and make art, collectively. By utilizing its spaces in multiple forms the Museum found its way to propose an alternative to idleness yet still fulfilling its function as an institution in the society, by establishing conditions for artistic support and care. 

The pivotal point in this transformation of a public institution consisted of the notion of care, as a form of responsibility, following historical examples of art institutions showing care under critical conditions like museums used as a hospital facility during war times, or previous instances of mass viral transmission where museums were used as spaces on convalescence. This not only transformed the understanding of what a museum ought to do in such extreme conditions, finding other ways of existing rather than amassing cobwebs, but it also enabled ways in which these new conditions can be incorporated in the existing structures and labour conditions of artists today. Our activities as curators also coincided with fluctuating and uncertain plans with each wave of outbreak, adapting a longer and a slower working schedule with the groups, meeting in intervals, aiming to keep mental proximity throughout each step of the projects.

Operating under such modes presented its challenges which required application of multiple roles throughout the process of organizing the final exhibition. We moved not only between groups and spaces but also between roles of mediating, mentoring, model-making and curating. To find a contextual continuity and sense among this plethora of positions, we had to find paths of coherence as an exhibition without guiding the thematics of the works, nor be enticed by the overlapping content in the projects. From this perspective, our task was to organize a show based on improvised methodological processes: the myriad ways to understand ‘collectivity’. The artist-participants revealed different methods of organizing, some induced by fast intuitive gestures, some creating forest spaces for ‘safe’ meetings, while others adopted a therapeutic approach based on sharing the emotional challenges endured throughout the pandemic. While having the privilege of observing the movement of the participant groups in different directions, we were also not immune from the challenges put forth by the time, conducting walking meetings outside, or distanced benches near the canal in Berlin, not to mention devising exhibition floorplans while queuing for hours waiting for a precious, and scarce, vaccine.

Throughout manifold exchanges, we collectively reflected not only on and through our dramatically altered conditions of sociality, but also on the consequences of these conditions upon institutional, educational, and configurations of collaboration unto themselves. The collection of works – from performance, to video installation, to sound and sculpture – presented diverse vocabularies of form, reflective of future histories for which the seeds are being sown in the present. The experimental works underwritten by these approaches, offer a glimpse at how a younger generation of artists are negotiating such shared, complex, multidisciplinary problems through artistic means. The question is, how will institutions remodel themselves, in view of the ‘ecology of practices’ this younger generation already understands, and is manifesting.