Hub for Collective Learning 

*foundationClass - from within the crack

neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin

from within the cracks is an audiovisual show, an archive, a construction site, a method, a space of reformulating power relations, born and raised in the togetherness of the *foundationClass collective. A crack is a breaking point, a sign of destruction, but also an undefined space from which opportunities arise. Operating from this space of brokenness that is in but not of the art institution, the members of the *foundationClass collective are very much confronted with absence, impossibility, obstacles - everything that forms part of the mechanisms of structural discrimination.

In the current project the *foundationClass collective decided to turn these power structures upside down, to blow up that concept of limitation and to forbid structural discrimination to continue to marginalize *foundationClass members. Instead, it is turned into a research object, into energy and creative potential.

In a large-scale installation at nGbK, a digital hub for collective learning will be set up. The material of offer includes a collaborative podcast series, an online archive and a digital presentation of artworks on the nGbK website. In this way, the *foundationClass shares working methods, viewpoints and questions resulting from the limitations to collective learning in the analogue social sphere. In this project, works by the participating artists form the point of departure for collective work.

*foundationClass - from within the cracks //chapters:

*foundationClass/speaks

WEST 2016/20

we found love (barricade)

Intersec* femme, the Super Empowered

Monument of Existence

TRUST US

untoured

What is burning under my skin

*foundationclass/speaks

WEST, 2016/2020
Installation, inkjet print on canvas and sewn textile, 11 works, 300 x 250 cm each

With its large-scale curtains, »WEST 2020« sets up the architecture of the space, creating niches of secrecy and intimacy from within. Their design challenges the well-established and celebrated bourgeois fantasy of individualism and exceptionalism. Instead, *foundationClass artists are using different materials, merging a wide range of artistic practices, without exposing just the one author, the one single story. There is no authority. There is no front and no back. All or none.

»WEST 2020« is a reference and a new edition of *foundationClass’ first show, exhibited at the gallery West den Hague in 2016. Back then, some members of the *foundationClass collective were not allowed to travel and to physically bring their works to Den Hague due to their legal status. Out of this repression, *foundationClass created a method that they later called ›the WEST method‹: From painting and sculpture to graphic design and filmmaking - all works were arranged into a digital collage and a manifesto was written. Digital files of both of the new works were printed on curtains and exhibited in the absence of the artists bodies. As citizens of predominantly Western states you tend to overlook that the question if you are travelling around with your work, or end up sending a video file, is very much determined by the very existence of your legal documents, as well as the status inscribed into them.

Fortunately, for WEST 2020 no files have to be sent through the world. The artists have the chance to produce on site, dedicating all their craft love to the actual material and collective production process.

we found love (barricade)

we found love (barricade), 2020
2 channel video-installation, full HD, 46:31 min – 01:27:41 min, color, audio 09:25 min

[…] What is the aim of *foundationClass? To piss off the right people. To change the conditions of access to institutions. To create jobs for cool people. Finding friends and allies. To share marginalized forms of knowledge. A way of hacking the school to get access to resources. To continue the struggle. […]
The physical space of *foundationClass – room H 1.08 at the kunsthochschule weißensee – has always been many things at once: a studio space, an art space, a social space, a space dedicated to practice, to joy and to mourning. It has been a space of refusal and a space of reaching out. A space to experiment and a space of dedication. It has witnessed innumerable hours of talking, of teaching, of discussing, of (un-)learning, of art making and sleeping and dancing and eating and drinking. But during the strange year of the pandemic, the physical space of *foundationClass turned quiet. Like so many other spaces of closeness, intensity and encounter, its promises had turned into the very things that needed to be avoided.

In August, when the pandemic seemed to have calmed down for a moment, the collective were able to spend some time in the studio space and use this extraordinary moment to look back on five years of *foundationClass. Trying to verbalize all the issues, the goals, the politics, the ideas, the contradictions, the desires and the struggles that are woven into the fabric of *foundationClass a sprawling and complicated map materialized - an arrangement of polyphonic questions, notes, answers, annotations and digressions. The artifact of the encounter was documented (left screen) and with it the space: Deserted, frozen in a state of enduring, stuck between hope and desperation (right screen). In the audio another trace of the encounter can be experienced: Clandestine whispers, shared laughter, the scratching of thoughts and the droning of the electric fans, that kept the aerosols and the heat away. On this audio recording our friend and comrade Aref Torkaman who has left us can be heard as well. And it is a reminder, that some things can never be represented.

Intersec* femme: The Super Empowered

Intersec* femme: The Super Empowered, 2020
Wall-installation with Miss Banana, Blue Najia, Hom, Hopy, Mother, Nefertiti, Bâtarde, Rodalicient, Sexy Lady

The Super Empowered merging both past and future. They are slipping through the wormholes of another dimension far beyond the myth of the male saviour, hero, outlaw, war machine with inexhaustible, steely body. This is a galaxy where everyone knows that life experiences are strongly shaped by how our multiple identities intermingle. Ten Super Empowered characters manoeuvre exactly at that intersection of gender, race, age, class, socioeconomic status, physical or mental ability, gender or sexual identity, religion, or ethnicity. What can you do for feminism? They will answer you: Recognize the intersections of power and powerlessness and create a feminism that has room for all oppressed voices.

The ›intersec* femme: genesis‹ will be part of the podcast series *foundationClass/speaks

The Monument of Existence

The monument of existence, 2020
Installation

The »monument of existence« is a place of dignity. It is driven by all those whose lives and hopes to find a safe place were taken away. Taken away in the middle of the oceans, deserts, refugee camps, isolated countrysides and mental hospitals. Taken away by racist migration policies and oppressive EU border regimes. Among them is our beloved friend and fellow artist, Aref Torkaman. The monument takes the shape of a chair. A chair has always been a symbolic article of dignity and authority. It creates presence even if nobody sits on it. The prototype at nGbK is the beginning of a monument rooting in a collectively experienced loss. The monument of existence will return both dignity and presence to those souls among us, to the living and the dead.

In the podcast series »*foundationClass/speaks« the conversation on resistant commemoration will continue.

hear them cry

the long dead

the long gone

speak to us

from beyond the grave

guide us

that we may learn

all the ways

to hold tender this land

hard clay direct

rock upon rock

charred earth

in time

strong green growth

will rise here

trees back to life

native flowers

pushing the fragrance of hope

the promise of resurrection

bell hooks, »Appalachian Elegy« (1)

TRUST US

untoured

untoured, 2019/2020
Installation, audio tour

For centuries, the West has robbed communities around the world of their cultural and material property, removing it from its contexts and transforming it into collectable, exchangeable objects. »untoured« questions the imperialist practices of Western museums and rewrites their narratives with alternative stories. The unconventional audio tour questions the power to define meaning with selected artefacts from the Pergamonmuseum and the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin and thereby offers alternative histories.

What is burning under my skin ?

*foundationclass/speaks

The *foundationClass' non-Cafeteria of the Academy of Misery, 2018/2020
Performance/Installation

Art academies reproduce mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Who is teaching, what is being taught, and who is accepted are not contingent on assumed ›talent‹ but on the subjective assessment skills of those in power and therefore on individual and indisputable criteria. The autonomy of the arts as well as teaching thus legitimizes the contradictions inherent to the institution.

we found love (barricade)

Intersec* femme: The Super Empowered

untoured, 2019/2020
Installation, audio tour

For centuries, the West has robbed communities around the world of their cultural and material property, removing it from its contexts and transforming it into collectable, exchangeable objects. »untoured« questions the imperialist practices of Western museums and rewrites their narratives with alternative stories. The unconventional audio tour questions the power to define meaning with selected artefacts from the Pergamonmuseum and the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin and thereby offers alternative histories.

What is burning under my skin?, 2020
Wall installation with 42 posters, 60 x 42 cm each

The poster collection »What is burning under my skin?« is posing a simple, but rather absent/neglected question. One, that seems to be displaced by countless (visual) messages reaching us every day, overwhelmed by duties, buried under our own skin. Asking ourselves and each other became an act of intimacy and the starting point for the whole production. There is hardly any older and more direct/accessible means to reach people relatively independent from their social status than the poster. By entering the process of choosing its forms, language(s), layout, font, image(s), positioning, color(s), unique narrations are created and inscribed into the seeing habits of society. In other words: Posters make ourselves known to the world. Each and every poster of this collection is carrying a message/scream into this world, whose urgency can not be ignored any longer.

„What knowledge has been made part of academic agendas?
And what knowledge has not?
Whose knowledge is this? [...]
Who can teach knowledge? And who cannot?
Who is at the centre? And who remains outside, at the margins?“
Grada Kilomba

The *foundationClass is a study program and an artist collective based in the Foundation Year (Grundlagenjahr) at weißensee academy of art berlin. The goal is to support people who migrated to Germany, who are affected by racism and who want to start or continue studying with their application at an art or design academy. At the same time, *foundationClass strives to build a community within the institution where new forms of skill-sharing and self-empowering artistic practice are produced collectively. In the spirit of Grada Kilomba, *foundationClass sees art academies as a powerful site of knowledge production, which (un)consciously excludes/includes by still setting white, heterosexual people with young and powerful bodies from privileged backgrounds as the norm. The pandemic situation intensifies precisely those structures of intersectional discrimination, also and especially in the educational sphere. Questions like ‘who benefits from staying and studying at home, who can access digital teaching-learning settings and who not’ became highly relevant for *foundationClass by the time of the lockdown and still are today. The access to (work) space, platforms, material, internet, software, translation and equipment is as well driven by privileges. But while the decision to continue *foundationClass in the digital space was and is connected to a huge risk of frustration, it also creates an positive experimental space where strategies of inclusive teaching and connecting gain new urgency. A spark of it resonates in *foundationClass’ audio-visual installation presented at the ‘weißensee TV’ streaming festival.