We All Know What It Is to Actually Care for One Another: A Not-Art Workshop Marc Herbst One stop before the end of the number one tram line that runs through Leipzig’s East German–planned Grünau neighborhood is the Flüchtlingsheim, the settlement home for refugees where I teach art classes to the children who live there. The next stop on the line is the last, and after that there is a crystal-clear lake—a decommissioned coal mine whose geological bed is said to have something to do with why the water is so clean. Leipzig’s urban landscape peters out at this park/lake complex, and somewhere beyond it are the unmarked borders of adjacent, smaller towns. Somewhere not too far beyond those towns is the edge of the state of Saxony and the beginning of the neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt. While Leipzig’s voting majority is progressive and forward-looking, within and beyond it are many people who nurture the reactionary, populist values of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. This essay reflects on a week-long art workshop that my coworker Luise and I ran with refugee children living in the Flüchtlingsheim. The workshop took place at greater form, an art space in Grünau that is two tram stops and a thirty-minute walk closer to Leipzig’s city center than the Flüchtlingsheim. This article is grounded in the workshop’s experiences so that the reader might consider the ways in which critical cultural ideas about the social impact of engaged art, design, and non-artistic social practice might relate to cultural transformations embodied in the experiences of youth and displacement in this time of ecological and political change. It is important to note that everything about this art workshop was mundane. Our work with the kids was unglamorous; I can only hint at the balance between actual art making and childminding. Though the workshop was supported by special funds, we were only awarded this funding because competent bureaucratic efforts were undertaken on our behalf. We already knew the refugee kids, and the only thing that was unique for them about this week was that rather than making art in their building’s common room for a few hours a week, we would be spending entire days together elsewhere, and that this would involve an always exciting streetcar ride. A photo of the refugee home where many of the kids that we work with live. (uncredited) Basic Care in Place I am crossing the road from the tram stop—it was just a five-minute ride, but it took an eternity of nerves to deal with the kids’ distractions. There are many younger kids in the group, so immediate safety concerns are only some of the things I must care about. For the most part, I let their activities take their own course. I like the enthusiasm of their questions about anything to do with the tram, even if I can’t generate any questions from them about the comic book workshop waiting for them at the end of this journey. I grab the hand of the youngest kid, Alan. His narrow, slim body teeters on the other side of my bike. I know that when we cross the street, walking will be easier—the route will be along a wide pedestrian path where I won’t have to worry about the kids being hit by cars. When we’ve successfully crossed, I almost drop Alan’s hand to pick up my pace so as to keep up with the slightly older kids who have playfully started to run, but I hold on again when I recognize that he will fall dangerously behind if I speed up. A page from the East German era Georg Piltz's Streifzug durch Die Deutsche Baukunst, with an architectural drawing of downtown Leipzig's Socialist architecture and landscaping, 1973. The pedestrian way is named Stuttgarter Allee. Though Allee is a standard German word for a wide street, here it seems to have a sense of the English word “promenade,” alluding to some sort of public grandeur and the idea that a public way might be worth showing off. Grünau is known for its wealth of Soviet-era urban planning and prefab architecture; its overall design expresses this public splendor. The neighborhood, with its “proper proportion between green space and area,” was devised during the Socialist regime, under a planning concept that understood itself as the antidote to the inappropriate conditions of development engendered under the thumb of capitalism’s speculative real estate market. “Here (under Socialism), scientists from different fields of expertise sit down together to investigate how the city can be made as comfortable as possible for its inhabitants.”1 Since the fall of the Wall, Grünau, has garnered a troubled reputation, one that seems to somehow connect to the former East’s general inability to account for what its use of social power and coercive force co-organized over the course of the German Democratic Republic’s existence. This planned neighborhood has remained through changing governments, and it thus brings to the surface biopolitical questions about how individual lives remain, are cared for, and are managed and allowed to be in relation to varying governing efforts and projects. That Grünau has become a home for trouble rather than a stage for the achievements of a dictatorship of the proletariat suggests that a Socialist system might care for both the common and the individual better than a capitalist system, until one remembers that it was the very dictatorial manner of caring for the common that is said to have driven the former system to its end. A pedestrian street in Grünau, 2009. Image by Joeb07 from Wikipidia.org under creative commons attribution. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Leipzig_Grunau8.jpg When I first began working with these kids two years ago, the difficulty of getting them to follow our lesson plans shocked me. Luise and I were leading a hand-puppet workshop. The first step was to draw characters on paper and to then develop them in clay. The clay would be coated with latex so that faces could be painted on. Once dry, the latex faces could be peeled off the clay. We would make costumes and write scripts for the puppets to act out at holiday gatherings. By the workshop’s second day, we saw that some kids would not participate in anything we organized, while others would be finished with four puppets by 1Georg Piltz, Streifzug durch die deutsche Baukunst (Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag Berlin, 1973), 128. Translation by the author. the third week. If we were a puppet factory, we’d have both oversupply and quality-control problems. It became clear that our real job was not to teach the kids how to make quality puppets, but rather how to spend quality time together. I first assumed that the children’s difficulty with following lesson plans lay hidden in the facts of their refugee experience. These were those kids: the ones fleeing war in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, Nigeria, and elsewhere. They didn’t come to Germany because of a passionate connection to puppetry or comic book drawing. Rather, they were a part of that wave of people I had heard so much about: the refugees. They had arrived with a great wave that began in 2015; they will be housed until they either receive permission to remain in Germany or their asylum claims are rejected. Unbeknownst to these kids, and perhaps their families, and many others like them in different cities in Germany, their presence had upended so much of European politics. At a bar, an art therapy professor with whom I’m speaking suggests that without knowing the details of a child’s life, it’s difficult to understand his or her trauma and its manifestations. Moreover, she says that the important thing about art therapy is not the discussion of the trauma, but rather helping children sense and follow their own creative desires and utilize their abilities to manifest these desires alone and with others. With these kids, then, I recognize that they may have experienced trauma, but I also note that my level of engagement makes it difficult to distinguish behavior stemming from trauma from typical kid chaos. So it is general but particular care that organizes my interactions with them; I let the group of kids define the norms and help each child play within the space they all generally inhabit. What interests me about the possible rejection of their asylum claims is how it relates to what will be an increasingly common circumstance in times of global climate change: displacement. With a world remade, we will all be people living in environments we don’t know about and don’t seem to belong in, even though we do. We all belong though we will all be displaced. The good thing about our work contract is that, as arts educators, there is nothing that suggests that our role is to contribute to either the world we know or the national stockpile of comic books and hand puppets. We do not have to logically contribute to this economy. I’m therefore blasé about headlines like that which appeared in the May 6th, 2019, issue of the Independent: “Germany’s refugee intake begins to boost economy as settlers soothe country’s worker shortage.”2 I don’t see it as my role to make these children better workers, whatever that might mean. I also don’t see it as my job to have these children produce an accountable product that demonstrates that they have been cared for, with the quality of their art and outputs serving as the metric of that care. Rather, our job is to work with them through the medium of art with an ethic of care, in and for itself. So, while there is a meaningful discourse on the global nature of climate change and the debt owed by the beneficiaries of colonialism and capitalism to the rest of the world, this debt has little to do with my immediate drive to care for the kids. I just do. This immediacy of this care is not to suggest that I think we should think about these things ahistorically. Rather, it is to suggest that whether or not these children and their families are sent 2See Luisa Beck and Griff Witte, “Germany’s refugee intake begins to boost economy as settlers soothe country’s worker shortage,” Independent, May 6, 2019, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-refugee-intake-boost- economy-ageing-population-unemployment-a8901161.html. back to their ruined homes, they are still deserving of a care that global and specific economic and political structures neither equally nor adequately provide for. Leipzig-based artist Diana Wesser often works with place-based social histories and histories of psychic displacement within the former East. The multiple psychic displacements she works with include the results of the Second World War and the now-defunct state’s founding as a home for the worker innocents of Fascist violence. Another displacement happened, after all, as the effects of this Eastern German state withered away into today’s state of affairs. Wesser is currently investigating the history of the Spinnerei, a huge factory complex that operated up through the fall of the Wall and has now been transformed into an arts quarter. Under Socialist management, the logic of the factory job was that it participated in a social contract for the benefit of the individual and the collective in Socialist life. “I’m interested in the idea that the Spinnerei is haunted by a future that didn’t take place. And that this ghosting probably takes the form of a neoliberal capitalist art market that now inhabits the walls of the factory.”3 East Germany’s social contract is frozen in an architecture that stands solidly against the more nimble yet precarious horizons expressed in today’s art culture. Among other things, art and art criticism often utilize and profit off of anti-capitalist critique. When reading through layers of history, one recognizes proximities between earlier monumental ethical performative constructions and the urgencies of art’s moral interventions in neoliberal society. Like any actual moment in time, what is expressed by artwork or any contemplated thing is never thoroughly determined, as things and their meanings shift in relation to each other. Any thing’s reflective indeterminacy mirrors the fact that it is difficult to determine whether one has been cared for enough, even despite the vagaries of definitions for meaningful care. Similar to the kid in our workshop who can never eat enough potato chips, there is little way to measure whether or not care has given enough care when what we are caring for, the children remaining emotionally healthy in Germany, has nothing to do with our actual remit. Outside of actually accountable activity, like counting the number of potato chips given, we have little grasp on the value of meaningful caring relations besides our own emotional knowledge: the sense that we were there to care and the sense that if we weren’t, it would haunt us. 3 Diana Wesser, in conversation with the author. A photograph taken inside the Leipzig Spinnerei clothing factory, where artist Diana Wesser is currently working to collect an archive of women’s stories about working in the mill. Once the world’s largest factory complex, The Spinnerei has been transformed into a complex of artist workspaces, museums, theaters, and galleries in the post-Soviet era. Photo courtesy Diana Wesser. Date unknown. Anti-Fascism and Welcoming What Has Changed And so, walking up the Allee with these kids, “these people” marked in so many ways as outsiders, I feel connected to their becoming a normal part of this juncture of time and place--just kids on holiday, even if their behavior in public is marked by political narratives in which they have come to stand for so much more. Allowing newcomers in is a hallmark of the ostensibly color-blind neoliberalism of an economically successful and united Germany that signals to the rest of the EU the triumphs and possibilities of multicultural capitalism. When Leipzig’s settlement houses opened several years ago, there was a can-do spirit that was actively cultivated by the city to help its citizens greet and support newcomers. This spirit was a very intimate thing. Donation centers were overwhelmed by socks, slippers, and shoes, and donation hours had to be curtailed just to sort the items that had already been given. A large public meeting was organized at the library to motivate individuals to become refugee mentors, and with its topic of integration came an empathic opportunity for attendees to discuss their own transformation through the Wendezeit—the post-1989 transition period from Socialist to capitalist governance. A moment of drawing with some of our comic book workshop kids. Photo by Luise Wonneberger. Yet, concurrent with this moment was a racist undercurrent that had the quality of high school gossip; its affect was expressed through furtive statements, each articulated almost as a request for confirmation that it was cool for the speaker to speak as such. This racism was far more vocal than ever before, and it focused on how it was neither fair nor safe that Leipzig had to care for its share of the one and a half million people coming to Germany. Like a mean prank, anonymous pig carcasses were set on the grounds of a mosque’s construction site. Elsewhere in Saxony, disused hotels marked to become temporary refugee housing were torched instead of being allowed to be of service again. By the 2017 election, most of the districts in Saxony had a small majority of voters going for the Far Right Alternative für Germany (AfD) party. From nowhere, the AfD had become the second largest party in the state parliament. Fascist LEGIDA pricks marching around in the cold of Leipzig, 2017. Image by Reise Reise, courtesy of wikipedia.org. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Leipzig_LEGIDA_2017-0109_(1).jpg The rise of the Far Right in the surrounding of Saxony is at odds with Leipzig’s long history of being home to groups that resist fascism. The 2016 anti-immigrant LEGIDA rampage through the definitionally anti-fascist neighborhood of Connewitz4 was an act to avenge the old wounds from the historical beating that dead-ender Nazis took when being chased out of town in the early and mid- 1990s. Knowing this history, then, the racist current of this refugee moment was odd; it created a subtle dissonance, one that was never overbearing and was assuredly louder elsewhere. But since then, Leipzig has become markedly more diverse, and somehow much of the subtle nervousness about what it means to be living in a more multicultural society has calmed with the recognition that not much has changed, except that there is now more variety among the city’s restaurants. When the Flüchtlingsheim was established, the neighbors complained: “We can't have refugees here who 4See, for example, Morgan Meaker, “How Two Cities Encapsulate the Battle for Germany's Identity, ”The Atlantic, September 23, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/leipzig-versus-dresden-and-the-battle-for-east- german-identity/540831/. Meaker’s article looks at the pro-immigrant feel within Saxony’s two main cities, Dresden and Leipzig, and identifies Connewitz in particular as strongly anti-Fascist. Further, Connewitz, which has the feel of a pleasant and Euro-punk neighborhood, is identified in the Leipzig AfD’s 2019 platform as being a home for left-wing extremists who must be policed out of existence. don’t know how we live in Germany.” Now this thought, too, has quieted, not least because the building across the parking lot has been emptied for refurbishment. People and states regulate behavior: holding kids’ hands while crossing the street keeps them safe in traffic; traffic lights guard pedestrians from speeding cars; mob violence against Fascists or the firebombing of left-wing neighborhoods puts checks on political opponents’ activities; and holding public meetings around progressive topics organizes solidarity. Government’s role in managing behavior is often somehow limited to defining wide margins or facilitating individual lives through common biopolitical infrastructures within those margins, whose maintenance is justified by some form of social contract. Less than thirty years ago, hard borders were one of East Germany’s most notable methods of governing. It was very difficult to travel to the West. Within the state, a central government policy was to endow residents with the ideological grace of being the protagonists for an actually existing Socialism. The state prescribed that its citizens’ being and relations were definitionally bathed in the aura of Socialism, that their daily activities would demonstrate the becoming of humanistic Socialist progress. This was serious work. In 1984, discussing the relation between the state Socialist Party (the SED) and its common citizen, the ruling SED said, “The German Democratic Republic is a society that develops according to Socialist principles. Within are millions of citizens— representatives of the working class, the class of cooperative farmers, the intelligentsia, the crafts people and other trades—a true homeland. The leitmotif of their actions is the basic principle of the Marxist policy of the party of the working class, the SED, to do everything for the good and happiness of the people.”5 Following the movement that brought down the Wall,6 swiftly implemented legislation privatized and sold off state-owned industries. The shift affected the nation’s citizens, many of whom hardly understood the terms of the new social relations for life they were now expected to live within.7 Previously, the Socialist state would not allow homelessness or unemployment. To inhabit either of these identities, being unemployed or homeless, was an impossibility, so the new process of individual becoming with the West after Socialism meant a radical subjective precarization that arrived with the right to individualized profit or loss. 5 Helmut Neef, Die Nationale Front der DDR: Geschichtlicher Überblick (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1984), 5. Translation by the author. 6 A movement that, as any Leipziger would proudly tell you, started in this city. 7 I know, for example, of a family that won the sole ownership rights to a dairy collective’s mountain vacation home because none of the dispersing collective members wanted the house. I am told that the members of the collective could not understood the place’s value as a simple asset. So that the collective’s property was properly distributed, the manager was forced to have everyone draw straws to determine who would be responsible for it. A workshop photo-collage made by the kid whose picture this is. Photo by Luise Wonneberger Soon after our workshop week, I have an interaction at a barbecue in a friend’s garden that demonstrates just how easily some people transition from one set of laws to another. We are not in Grünau but a leafy neighborhood of single-family homes. A neighbor appears through the hedge, joining us. He’s retired. Noting that I am American, he starts right in on politics. “I had no problem under any regime. I just went along with the flow of things. I don’t understand why people don’t just do that. I had no problems, I did very well, even in the DDR era. We had a pass to cross the border; I remember going camping on a beach just on the other side of Venice. You can’t do that anymore. It must have been ’72. Do you remember that?” He motions to his silent and slightly annoyed wife. “I like Hungary’s Orbán. I really think we could use a little less democracy. I mean, I like the Yellow Vests in France but they’re not going anywhere. Sometimes you gotta get hit in the head a little bit. It’s good to bash heads. A little more dictatorship isn’t so bad. I did well by the system, keeping my head down and going along to get along.” In response, I told my new fascist friend that through no fault of its own, my family never fared all that well with dictators. I recognize that am sitting next to a man whose political perspective makes no sense whatsoever, except that he makes perfect sense to himself and to a system that rewards profit and individual gain. The facts of his life prove he did well for himself—he is well-off. Unlike the refugee children whose freedom to follow their own desires is not allowed because they are kids and because they are generally perceived as a threat, this is a grown man who has been allowed to follow his path without anyone telling him that he cannot enjoy the rewards of obedience to his desires, for they seem to seamlessly conform to those of the state’s. Though he thinks he is communicating a political opinion, I think he is really just explaining an ontology of power. “Man needs energy, and man should follow the clearest path that power structures for man to gather and expel energy.” In “Life: Experience and Science,” Foucault explores the fact of seemingly sudden and discontinuous historical transitions. In this text, he focuses on the discipline of biology, noting that, alone among the sciences, biology studies an unstable state, life, which is defined by an idealism of what constitutes “living.” Following his teacher, historian of science Georges Canguilhem, Foucault recognizes that scientific consensus around what constitutes health has rapidly transformed over brief periods. Such rapid transformations can be related to how varieties of living forms, from Nazism to State Socialism to neoliberal capitalism, seem to quickly develop and become the dominant ways of living and then just as quickly disappear. “The fact that man lives in a conceptually structured environment does not prove that he has turned away from life ... just that he lives in a certain way, that he has a relationship with his environment ... Forming concepts is a way of living and not a way of killing life.”9 Yet Foucault does not affirm, as my fascist friend might, that life is defined by forming concepts for winning at life. Rather, Foucault takes what could be understood as either a far more granular or far more macropolitical view on what life is. Granular because he affirms that not all lives go according to plan, even if they are good plans, and macropolitical because he recognizes that all ways of living end, and that they end in their own way. Rather than seeing life as defined only by some idea of winning, Foucault defines any life as that which is “capable of error.”10 He understands that to live is to be able to make mistakes and to continue living until death. Human life demonstrates its capacity to invent ways of being in very particular and very general ways. Though history demonstrates capacities for major transitions through different versions of belief and non-belief, Far Right ideology ahistorically suggests that it is proper and ecological to be white and Christian in Europe and North America. Yet one simple way that refugees demonstrate their capacity to manage transition is by re-establishing their lives. While systems that manage the world, such as laws and shipping lanes, qualify conditions they need from their place outside of actual life in order to facilitate or debilitate it, people make their way regardless of where goods cheaply arrive from and which laws formally allow them to be. 9 Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: The New Press, 1998), 475. 10 Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” 476. Picture of kids sword-fighting with their hand-crafted swords and shields. Photo by Luise Wonneberger. Biopolitical Management or Mutual Trust Kids need a certain level of mutual trust to sustain play fighting. Our kids apparently trust each other a lot. Whacking at each other with cardboard swords without knowledge and trust in each other’s dispositions would quickly end in tears, but this doesn’t happen. We know that Craig might jump into the fray with a brilliant fighting stance or drift away bored and testy, that Ela always has to be in control even when losing, that Mo doesn’t know his own strength. The kids want to control their own time, and it’s difficult to keep them on schedule. For the most part, though, given time, they can adequately regulate their own behavior. What trips them up is the fact they have to navigate landscapes they don’t know, like new terrains and new regulations. The walk up from the tram stop is a Situationist-like dérive that does not end even when we arrive at greater form’s workroom, where we set our belongings down on the brightly painted bench that runs along the bottom of the workroom’s windows. There, at the end of the bench against the wall, is a pile of handmade shields and swords that will unexpectedly serve as the week’s creative impetus. What trips us up, as teachers, is the fact that we do have certain, albeit loose, disciplinary boxes we must tick in order to get paid. My co-teacher did little to develop the kids’ mutual trust. Nor have we any authority over where the kids place their eventual focus for the project week. The kids see the swords and shields, and action and idea start falling into place. One finds cardboard. One uses a scissors’ edge like a razor to cut cardboard. One uses an existing sword as a template to make more. When a box that contains colorful tape rolls is found, there is no turning back. Our workshop is supposed to end with a comic book that we would print with the kids and a public presentation of that work. Though we wish it were otherwise, we see that it would be impossible to enact the five-day drawing workshop we’d planned for. So, in order to maintain a minimal amount of creative engagement with our requirements, we employ an attenuated educational method, inserting sketchbooks into idle hands when the moment is right. “If you want us to cut out your sword with the razor, first draw us a sword and shield.” It’s transactional. We are able to make this transaction because we are intimately involved with the kids, exchanging our needs from them for their needs from us. We provide safety and some guidance; they provide us some drawings. Besides getting lost, the thing I want to protect these kids from is the careless violence of racism, an often-unaccountable spirit that hangs around like a ghost. It’s election time, so I look at the poster-laden lamp posts we pass with suspicion, as a certain party’s posters can be openly racist. Thankfully, none of the posters are for the Far Right AfD. I am relieved to not have to explicitly navigate the landscape of state-sponsored hate with the kids in addition to helping them to our chaotic workshop. On Stuttgarter Allee, we pass many publicly funded social services and play opportunities for the kids. There is the Caritas building, where refugees, migrants, and German youth hang out shooting pool or riding bikes on a track that runs through an adventure playground—the kind of play space where children are given a hammer and told to build something. There’s the swimming pool attached to the city youth club. There’s a small half-pipe near the club’s loading dock and a large theater space inside. The distance between the pool and the Linke party’s office (the large party to the left of the center-left Social Democrats) is sometimes patrolled by youth outreach staff paid to get to know the kids hanging out on the plazas. Then there’s the mall, and between the mall and greater form is a small soccer field just before the outdoor skate park. Standing next to that park is an indoor skate hall where for three euros kids can skate, scooter, bike, or unicycle on ramps, rails, bowls, and other obstacles. The hall runs hip-hop dance courses upstairs and graffiti workshops outside. Many of the projects are ultimately supported by German or EU cultural funds and present play landscapes in which children’s behavior can be transformed into normative and more adult ways of being. The unaccountable attitudes and perceptions hidden within people, and the ability for these things to violently surface, keeps me constantly on guard. We don’t want rules we worked hard to establish to suddenly collapse because of something we were not able to prepare for. The closest thing to a racial incident during the week occurs between an old woman with a walker and our sword-fighting kids on the concrete path in front of our workroom window. The woman is old and probably one of the relatively well-off pensioners who have lived in the building since the East German era. She freezes upon seeing the kids’ swinging swords, kicking legs, and flailing shields, likely worried that she’ll be knocked over if she gets too close. She doesn’t know them well enough to trust them and is unable to see that her path is so wide that she needn’t come within five feet in order to pass by. She doesn’t pass. She just stands there waiting for their chaos to play out. This, I think, could be an AfD voter, and if not her, then her middle-aged son who also lives in the block and might find this unruliness another reason to curse these newcomers. A collection of handmade swords and knives. Photo by Luise Wonneberger. “All funding is political,” says a friend involved in German cultural policy, pointing out that of course there are reasons so much funding goes into youth and integration projects in Grünau. The city’s governing factions are likely flooding Grünau with projects to keep things orderly and to push back at the AfD by demonstrating their ability to manage potential problems. The Linke would like to become the dominant party in the neighborhood again. So it’s a bit disorienting when I realize that my instinct to diffuse any racializing interaction could also be seen as an action taken by the long arm of the state. Though I am a bearer of one of these long arms, my arm feels different than the broad utopian/dystopian framework of the East German state, where general social activity pushed toward a clear and manifest political horizon. Rather than utilizing my long arms for the world-historical development of Socialism, neoliberal activity disperses politics into the micropolitical, with macropolitical profit motives disappearing behind the seemingly simple frame of life’s natural play across a variety of desires and goals. Interior of the Heizhaus indoor skate hall with a variety of surfaces to navigate, Leipzig Grünau. Image courtesy the Heizhaus. The work with the settlement home kids is supported by several layers of institutional funding. Our team of settlement house artists, as per regulation, must all have arts or education-related university degrees. Our direct funding comes from NEMO e.v., the Federal Association of Networks of Migrant Organizations, whose money is provided by a large grant given by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. While the grant from the Ministry is intended to support educational opportunities for underprivileged youth, the Association of Migrant Organizations targets grants to support integration activities. Our Easter Week workshop was financed because we had two community partners, the Flüchtlingsheim and the greater form art space. For Luise and me, greater form’s street-front setting is more relaxed and public-facing than the settlement house’s activity room that we usually work in. Further, we have a sense that greater form’s queer-glam “go big and go loud” style provides the right juice for our activities. Later, I am sitting in the closed-door office of a refugee youth program manager. He has a surprisingly removed stance on the projects, though perhaps he’s distracted by the near- constant knocking at the door. Kids are asking him for keys to rooms, cookies to eat, bikes to ride—well, not kids, one kid. There’s no final word with this boy, he just needs a lot of attention. So the manager deals with him while discussing with me his satisfaction with the opportunities provided to his kids. In his reasoning, he sounds like parents everywhere: “It’s good that you do these art projects with the kids. They need to know that there are things that they can do by themselves, to develop their own interests and capacities, to not just sit at home and play with their cell phones. That way, they integrate themselves into the community.” When giving his overall assessment of the situation in Grünau, his analysis turns from “kids these days” to one that knows that politics are about something other than keeping individual kids occupied. In the beginning of the refugee wave, he felt that neighborhood relations were difficult because institutions were not set up to meet the varying needs that the situation produced. He’s now somewhat confident that neighborhood processes and forums have been successful in identifying emerging issues and responding to them with an array of initiatives, strategies, and actions—from policing to education to urban design and social services. With this confidence in mind, I ask him if the city is ready to take on the next wave of immigrants that will surely come as the climate continues to change. He responds succinctly, “We are doing all we can now, it’s not great, but we are managing. If a whole new wave of refugees came, I don’t think we’d be able to handle it. In the way that things are organized now, the whole system would be overwhelmed.” X000€ CASH PARLAMENT!, Lina Ruske / greater form, Leipzig, 2018. Art and Not-Art The project room with the big glass windows that we have been working in is named for the greater form social practice art collective that works there. Both an art collective and an art space, greater form has been in the neighborhood for several years, creating queerly charged projects with titles like Sex, Drugs and Violence. Unlike our not-art workshops, greater form’s youth-engaging art practice draws on the formalizing power that art exacts from its youthful participants and connects through this force to those who consider the project through these same disciplinary terms. Their most recent art project, X000€ Cash Parliament!, involved €3000 and a heterogenous group of teens and preteens—neighborhood German-born, migrant, and refugee kids from the lower and lower-middle classes—working together on a project of self-management in parliamentary form. The promise that artist/organizers Lina, Philipp, and Mirko made to the kids is that the group would have €3000 to collectively spend through parliamentary exchange. A note board at their first session stated that there were yet no rules, but that the project’s rules could be collectively authored and then rewritten. The board also stated that the three adults would participate in all deliberative processes and are needed to dispense monies. After a small expenditure for pizza and doner, the cash parliament’s first decision was to go downtown and buy new sneakers for each attending kid, using up to sixty-five euros per kid from the collective treasury. At the next parliamentary session, after recognizing the project's potential to become a “shoes for Grünau” charity, the artist/organizers pointed out that if this sort of spending continued, there’d be no money to spend elsewhere. Together, the kids found consensus for new rules that defined how shared monies could go towards individual purchases. Further, the kids decided the rules of parliamentary enfranchisement among themselves, deciding who belonged and how one got the right to individual cash benefits. The book that greater form published in order to document this project accounts for all of the group’s expenditures and details some of the more memorable moments of the five months of parliamentary meetings. These memories often concern moral quandaries around problematic subject-object relations; ethical consumption (kids buying sneakers from ethically compromised companies); and performed gender relations. It’s tempting to see these discussions as mirroring the politics that can emerge with consumerist society— highlighting for youth the freedoms and contingent ethics of relating to things in the society they have been enfranchised to. In the book’s conclusion, the artists observed that, “one of the most important experiences for us was to recognize how to keep in mind our role as adults, what things we should be responsible for and the things we should be concerned about.”11 In making queer art projects appear from the atmosphere of public funds’ social expenditure, greater form collaborates with the wider social sphere in an effort to make pointed public meaning. The artists consider how their role is distinct from that of a social worker. Greater form’s youth parliamentarians survey and evaluate the social realm, too, when judging whether or not a “shoes for Grünau” project is just a cool thing or an act worthy of rising above cool to become art. And the judgmental viewer must consider whether or not greater form is simply a community project or is also worthy of the status of art. 11 greater form, X000€ Cash Parliament! (Leipzig: greater form, 2019). X000€ CASH PARLAMENT!, Lina Ruske / greater form, Leipzig 2018 Enacting such a judgement in order to make art cleaves the maker’s momentary consciousness and the artwork from the rest of the world—a world we might call the world of “non-art.” This separation between art and non-art is not something that sex and drugs can overcome; rather, art is ultimately a Western distinction between mundane and notable things that comfortably haunts contemporary Western life. The special distinction of art is based on the idea that its nomination as art might universally guide social and political behavior. Art’s neoliberal appearance either haunts the social terrain with the ghost of a moral other or molds individualized practitioners to think differently from the main flow of order. It also functions to identify new spaces for governance and capitalization. Hegel, whose art theory concerns universal concepts, suggests that “judgments on poetry are worth more than poetry.”12 (Agamben 40) Hegel had a definitive sense of the value of art‘s concepts; he suggested that, as evidence of a civilization’s moral path, art’s literal and littoral accumulation will light the way toward a better world. Yet, in light of art’s seemingly endless capacity to generate things from within the social sphere on which to cast judgment, Agamben says, “In contemporary art, it is critical judgment that lays bare its own split, thus suppressing and rendering superfluous its own space.”13 Moral and ethical art produced for art’s sake finds its end like a snake eating its tail. The gamble of radical social art practice’s attempts to make inclusive space for displaced and marginal youth is that its ethical plays may be more consequential than the force of the governing systems these practices must participate in. Greater form’s ethical discussions have some benefits to the youth participants. Generally, though, the systemic accounting that makes art stand autonomously to the world mirrors the Socialist ideal of East Germany–not explicitly for its Marxism, but rather for its placing a better world beyond the here and now, that sits on the horizon as some kind of eventual social utopia. Despite the bogeyman of “cultural Marxism,” the same sort of idealism haunts the populist Right, for in truth there is no one truly proper way of being in any one place, but rather any multiple ways of being in relation toward any one horizon. Within the United Kingdom, theorist and art historian Josephine Berry writes about the particular economics of neoliberalism’s social contract. “Neoliberalism’s resistance to 12 13Giorgio Agamben, “Les jugements sur la poésie ont plus de valeur que la poésie,” in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50. bearing the costs of social reproduction drastically impacts the city as it collides with crisis capitalism’s urban rent seeking, a model for extracting profit without recourse to the risky circuit of production.”14 Witness how refugees of Western-borne crises are allowed in but can only stay after adjudication—even if they have demonstrated their ability to integrate. Here is the West gathering profits without paying costs. Art’s molding and modeling idealism sits beside the general crises of social reproduction (represented by high rents, low wages, the possibility of dispossession, unemployment, and homelessness) attendant to the capitalist form. As Berry points out, art in the UK is often employed to service these debts without structurally helping out. Importantly, note that Germany spends a higher percentage of its GDP on social programs than the UK does,15 and that Germany’s export- driven economy16 allows for more playful interventions into the social circuit of its own reproduction. Within our project week, we didn’t have to make anything akin to art, rather we just played within the social realm of not-art. The fact that our integration workshop was so loosely governed and had such little oversight attests to the extent to which social play is provided for within this particular system. I am haunted, nevertheless, by the fact that war and climate change make the world homeless. Even if our workshop participants are deported, Germany’s wealth suggests that for the time being there will be many more parents fleeing north, towards Germany, whether or not European cities are prepared. Western state-oriented production employs a variety of aesthetic practices and knowledges to discipline global populations, utilizing architectural and artistic forms to muddy the lines between current realities and imagined utopias or to design objects and relations that may or may not have ethical faces for individuals to encounter. In this light, then, the improvisational work with the children that we do in willful ignorance of aesthetics’ ordering purposes seems most consequential: Why should these youngsters need art’s discipline to learn about the world? By primarily staying in the realm of not-art-oriented social work and not valorizing any mode of production beyond the kids’ capacity to orient towards their own problem-solving, our workshop aimed for something other than fetishizing concepts of “good art” or “meaningful” production. Luise and I unmoored our pedagogical orientation from an insistence that the kids join us in such meaningful production and moved towards a situational, collaborative ethic of just trying to safely and creatively pass the time together. This ethic does not approximate any global response to climate change’s possible social displacement, but it did make a good practice of simply solving the problem of what to do together in time. For decolonial thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, narrative’s potential meanings are always specific to the potential of the systems on which they are contingent; when read through Western-trained eyes, Western art will always blindly conform to the West’s own systemic boundaries. But symbol-making in general, in relation to who we are as human, is “nothing less than that of the symbolic transformation of biological identity”17; it is never limited by 14 Josephine Berry, Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), 305. 15 See the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s statistics on social expenditures: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG. 16 This is a situation that may be changing with a slowdown in the German industrial sector, though the real estate market remain robust. See Neil Blake and Richard Barkham, “Strong CRE Market Belies Germany’s Economic Slowdown,” CBRE website, March 18, 2019, http://www.cbrecapitalwatch.com/?p=3882. 17 Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 67. Emphasis original. any one systemic way of being, to any one social contract. Life meaningfully varies in relation to the ways it is governed at the limits of governing symbologies, which can never actually govern any such life totally. One thing about the West’s utilization of art that makes its own ethical expressions odd is the very fact that, though art is clearly not the only platform for meaningful symbol-making, its studied system of judgments and discipline helps it pretend to have a unique position in making symbols. While the West’s socio-ecological practices have led to global climate breakdown, Wynter suggests that other ways of organizing the telling of meaningful stories are both possible and necessary in order to support other ways of being in the world. And so, while I make no claim that the kids composed other ways to tell stories, I am happy that we had the opportunity, within the relative luxury of German social largesse, to see some of what can emerge outside of the brutality of governmental disciplinary force. With little demand to meaningfully produce anything, our kids’ creative play allowed them to practice flexible relations to the norms of life in time, a social practice that might come in handy in order to keep on living, regardless of those norms, in our changing world. A kid's drawing over our workshop's flyer. Photo by Luise Wonneberger. Cited Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1994) The Man Without Content. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berry, Josephine (2018) Art and (Bare) Life. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Foucault, Michel (1998) Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: The New Press. greater form (2019) X000€ Cash Parliament!. Leipzig: greater form. McKittrick, Katherine (2015) Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis. London: Duke University Press. Neef, Helmut (1984) Die Nationale Front der DDR. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Piltz, Georg (1973 ) Striefzug Durch Die Deutche Baukunst. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag Berlin.