Statement of the Convener, Core Group and the Co-curators

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead is a project dedicated to life. It revolves around imaginations, drafts and practices of life that defy its normative models and constructions as produced by the institutions of medicine, politics, law and culture. It rejects the dichotomies of life and death, human and non-human, subject and object, healthy and sick, able and disabled. If the dead are not merely dead, then life is multiplicity. Multiplicity here does not mean integrating what deviates from the norm into the structures, institutions and laws of the normative but rather abrogating normativity itself: a society, an assembly, a multitude of deviators who are not deviating, queers who are not queer, idiots who are not idiots, dead who are not dead, animals that are not animals, things that are not things.

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead is directed against the prevalent politics of death: that is, against politics based on the destruction of the material and intellectual foundation of life of large parts of certain populations, on the exclusionist policies of social death, on violence against that which opposes the norm, on the death of countless people in need, and not least on the destruction of the planet, of a common world. To engage with the dead, with those who are no longer or not yet here, instead means taking on responsibility for the life of the past and the future.

The concept and programme of Bergen Assembly 2019 is based on a collective process. Our point of departure was the concept of assembly itself, which was critically examined both in terms of its political implications and in regards to aesthetic practices. What does it mean when a biennial (or in this case a triennial) is called an assembly? What expectations of art and the curators does this articulate? The focus was on the general frameworks and techniques of collective political or emancipatory action – and the questions of how, in what form and with whom we intend to develop and shape these practices in the context of an art project.

Thus, Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead examines the relationships between art, politics and life. Two aspects are foregrounded: first, the rebellious, dissident body as tool and object of artistic practices and, second, aesthetic forms and formats that make it possible to share the knowledge and experiences of emancipation and resistance. We have consciously decided to focus on long-term projects based on processes of artistic research and/or working together with local groups and communities.

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead consists of a series of both independent and intertwined platforms which include an exhibition distributed across five venues and public spaces as well as numerous events and individual projects – workshops, screenings, lectures, panels, performances, game sessions, educational programmes, parliaments of bodies, and publications – that have been taking place or been realised since April 2019. For us, all of these individual elements are of equal value.

In April, we were able to open the central meeting place, workroom and event location of Bergen Assembly 2019: a place we imagined from the outset as a shared space that would also be open to local groups and initiatives for their activities. Until the end of Bergen Assembly 2019, it will continue to be exciting to see what coexistences result from it and how they will shape this space-in- becoming. We named this site after the Turkish singer Belgin Sarılmışer (1958–1989), who in the 1980s was known as the Queen of Arabesque and took the stage name Bergen after the Norwegian port city. Belgin alias Bergen is a central reference point of Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, since she stands equally for the strengths and contradictions in the struggle for emancipation. In this project, we are interested not in the heroic and triumphal but rather in aesthetic and emancipatory practices in which strengths and vulnerability, mourning and joy, conflict and celebration, the living and the dead belong together.

Murat Deha Boduroğlu, Banu Cennetoğlu, Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, María García, Nora Heidorn, Hiwa K, Katia Krupennikova, Viktor Neumann, Paul B. Preciado, Pedro G. Romero, Simon Sheikh, Nathalie Boseul Shin, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa

Some Thoughts and Notes About This Project

Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler

Silhouette of Ruins

‘One cannot’, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote, ‘love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn’t always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love it as mortal, through its birth and its death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, of my own – which it already is or already prefigures. How can we love except in this finitude?’1

Bergen Assembly is based on critical engagement with an institution whose roots extend back to the first World’s Fair in London in 1851,2 and its two classical types have been, as Simon Sheikh correctly writes in The Biennial Reader, shaped by the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895 – the ‘Olympic model of national competition’ – and documenta, founded in Kassel in 1955 – the model of the ‘statement about the state of art’.3 Bergen Assembly is one of the most recent offshoots of this format for large international exhibitions, which since the 1960s at the latest have been questioned as part of institutional and other critique. The 14th Esposizione internazionale delle arti decorative in Milan in 1968, which planned to show prop barricades to ingratiate itself to the protest movements of the time, was completely destroyed by outraged students even before it opened its doors.

These ruins in Milan manifested a dilemma that is still fervently discussed in the art world, beyond the question of ‘to biennial or not to biennial’: the question of the absorption of every stance, no matter how oppositional, emancipatory and critical, by the mechanisms of the market and its strongest currencies: spectacle and attention. Any attempt, no matter how self-critical, to distinguish oneself from other biennials, is always also an exploitable part of this economy. What could it mean to think about the model of the biennial and the art world as a whole from the perspective of its fragility, its finitude, its spectres and its ruins, rather than by the standard of the heroic and triumphal (better, bigger, more advanced, more exclusive, more critical, more radical, and so on)? ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ – the most recent Berlin Biennale quoted Tina Turner in its title: a singer who stands for both strength and vulnerability, both emancipation and the experience of domestic violence, just as her Turkish colleague Belgin Sarılmışer, alias Bergen,4 who in turn represents a central point of reference for the very project this publication is dealing with. Invisible and visible at once, like a phantom, her name resonates in the ‘Bergen’ of Bergen Assembly 2019.

Faced with the ruins of Notre-Dame, Paul B. Preciado wrote in his commentary for the French newspaper Libération: ‘A work of art is not a work of art if it cannot be destroyed … if its loss doesn’t justify intense grief … Why couldn’t those who clamour for reconstruction wait not even one second to mourn?’5 Thinking of an art institution from the perspective of its ruins could create a space in which to mourn it. In Western societies, the work of mourning is usually intended to ensure that the dead do not return. It is believed that heavy gravestones will prevent them from doing so, because it is feared that they will return to avenge an unpaid debt. Western art institutions, whose wealth and discourses are based on European colonialism with its plundering raids, economies of exploitation and exclusions – as well as on racism, sexism, ableism,6 and so on – are filled with spectres that demand justice.

The work of mourning could also mean turning to these spectres and their concerns rather than fearing their revenge, granting them a place in history, and taking responsibility for the injustice done. The imagination to return, without exception, all looted cultural goods still remaining in European museums means nothing more and nothing less than imagining the model of the European art institution as such – including all its macro-and micro- structures, values and discourses, certainties and uncertainties – from the perspective of its end. It will not suffice to rethink one single element, such as the biennial, but means attending to, over the long term and across all existing structures, the many spectres that haunt them.7

Bergen Assembly 2019

Ways of Working (‘Take My Arse, Look How It Moves!’)

Bergen Assembly 2019, which is titled Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, is dedicated to spectres: that is, to an idea of life beyond the binary oppositions of life and death, subject and object, sick and healthy, strong and weak; a life in which the work of mourning and celebration, the singular and the shared, the self and the other constantly thwart each other. ‘Revellers are no longer themselves, and their loss of self is the party’s gain’, write Pedro G. Romero and María García about a work by the flamenco dancer Israel Galván: ‘Your belly is too small, have mine. Take my arse, look how it moves! Your arm, your leg, your ear aren’t enough? Here are mine. I tear out my eyes and lend them to you … In the topsyturvy world of parties, the man carries the donkey, but man and donkey are brothers [and sisters – Authors’ Note] here’.8

The structure of Bergen Assembly 2019, which is based on a collective and, to use a somewhat shop-worn concept, rhizomatic curatorial process, could itself be described in a sense as a fluid and hybrid organism: more as a celebration of self-loss than an assembly of individuals. We have been exploring such collective curatorial projects since 2005.9 What interests us about them are the possibilities and limits of a rather diffuse and only partially controllable form of collaboration whose diverse energies, lines, flights and strands connect, repel, condense and ramify in multiple and unpredictable ways that occur with different tempos and visibilities in several directions at once. In general, these projects begin with a question, a problem or a concept on which we want to reflect from different perspectives. In the case of Bergen Assembly 2019, by contrast, the focus was on the constitution of the curatorial core group, that is, its composition of people from different social and cultural contexts with whom we wanted to work – not for the first time, in most cases – in exactly this constellation: Murat Deha Boduroğlu, Banu Cennetoğlu, María García, Hiwa K, Katia Krupennikova, Viktor Neumann, Paul B. Preciado, Pedro G. Romero, Simon Sheikh and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa.

The core group members were free to focus more on an individual artistic project or on a curatorial contribution, to invite further participants, and to involve their own networks and/or establish new ones. Simon Sheikh invited not only a series of artists but also Nora Heidorn as an unanticipated 13th co-curator. Indeed, we are interested in open collective projects precisely because of the unexpected guests for whom one was not prepared, who undermine the chosen model, system or rules.

Activities and Platforms (About the Exhibition: A Set of Constellations)

The result of two and a half years of work by the core group is an assemblage of diverse activities and platforms, running in parallel and intertwining: the opening of a temporary shared space, named Belgin,10 in April 2019; the implementation of various individual projects such as the Parliament of Bodies (June and September 2019); the publication of The List in the newspaper Bergensavisen (June 2019); the formation of the 1970s revival band and neoliberalism study group Chicago Boys (August to September 2019); quite a number of workshops, of working and exchange groups as well as an exhibition spread over five venues and in public spaces (September to November 2019).

The exhibition is not structured according to thematic sections or curatorial authorship but rather along constellations that repeatedly rearrange the different strands of the content of Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Two curatorial contributions deviate from that system. Each has its own title and space, and both focus on clearly outlined thematic fields: Nora Heidorn’s exhibition Sick and Desiring and Pedro G. Romero and María García’s project political parties. The exhibition, which is conceived as a whole, thus results from the interplay of different individual and shared curatorial settings that cannot be traced back to individual authorship. This produces an innate rhythm of concentration and opening, intensification and ramification.

One recurring motif at the various exhibition venues is photographs that Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa took of the display cases in the permanent exhibition Inntrykk fra Koloniene – literally, ‘Impression of the Colonies’ – at the University Museum in Bergen. In the photographs, the reflections of the display cases opposite are refracted, fragments of objects, texts, films, photographs and the like overlap and distribute in ever-new, surprising constellations. It explodes the order of the museum and, at the same time, this explosion is transferred to a suspended state in the medium of photography. It is the museum as ruin that accompanies us from place to place.

Long-Term Projects, Communities and Networks (‘Collectives Come and Go’)

One of the first decisions of the core group was to reject the biennial imperative of commissioning new works and thus perpetuating the fictions of the new, the never existed and the exclusive, and instead to use the temporal, financial and spatial capacities primarily to develop existing long-term projects. This concerns, on the one hand, projects from the field of artistic research, such as Pedro G. Romero and María García’s investigation, ongoing for more than ten years, into the relationships of modernity, popular culture and flamenco; Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s critical studies of the (neo)colonial implications of ethnographic museums; Imogen Stidworthy’s work on the marginal areas of language and voice; or the TEXSTgroup’s collective studies of the ‘hauntological’ writings, dedicated to spectres and phantoms, by the British writer and theorist Mark Fisher, who died in 2017.

On the other hand, it concerns projects that are founded essentially on collaboration with local groups, individuals and structures; for example, the Parliament of Bodies, initiated by Paul B. Preciado and continued with Viktor Neumann, which has been held in several locations since 2016, is crucially based on the concerns and activities of local communities. Only through their engagement in the form of open societies does the network continue to grow. In Bergen, several new open societies are currently being formed, such as the Society of Friends of Bergen and the Society in Translation.

The latter grew out of another project: The List, based on a collaboration between UNITED for Intercultural Action and Banu Cennetoğlu. At the core of The List is a collection of information about the deaths of migrants on their way to or in Europe maintained by UNITED since 1993. One essential part of the project is to publish this constantly growing list in various contexts, and to translate it for that purpose. In Bergen, a group of six people worked on the translation of the information on the more than 36,000 deaths. This experience moved them to found the Society in Translation, which will continue to exist even after Bergen Assembly 2019. Julio Jara, who is active in a shelter for the homeless in Madrid is progressing a project in collaboration with people working and living on the streets of Bergen. It collects personal stories about people’s experiences of spending their first night on the streets.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the non-binding structures of biennials or biennial-like formats are appropriate for participative community-oriented projects. For us, it was crucial, especially in this context, to take up projects conceived for the long term that offer points of contact to the past and the future, to existing and new networks, that can build on experience and that are based on serious concerns.

We understand a format like Bergen Assembly to be a decentralised platform or node for sustainable artistic, social and/or political matters that go far beyond a singular and clearly outlined event. In a sense, this is conceived from the perspective of the ruins of the institution, which for lack of sturdy walls no longer locks itself but rather opens the path to unsuspected new alliances: for things that grow, spreading out over the rubble of the pillars of our certainties and connect to other structures.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Malebona Maphutse, who as part of Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead are renegotiating the funeral of the activist collective Title in Transgression they founded in South Africa, write: ‘Title in Transgression comes and goes, much like many other collectives in the broader arts context … The connections and communities that surround(ed) them still exist; collectivity always exists as a network’. 11 They called the funeral service for their collective, which turned into a joyous party, In Loving Memory of Title In Transgression. The love for this institution has as much to do with understanding its fragility and finitude as with understanding that the dead are not dead.

Once Again: On the Relationships of Art, Politics and Life (Can a Biennial Be an Assembly)?

One of the initial questions that the core group of Bergen Assembly 2019 addressed concerned the very concept of assembly. Can an art project such as a biennial or triennial even be an assembly, that is, an independent socio-political structure by which one struggles for emancipation and justice? What are the conditions and possibilities of political and aesthetic actions, and how do these two fields of action relate to each other? There are very different positions within the group on these questions: a biennial or triennial can only be an assembly on a metaphorical level. Art has failed across the board on the existential socio-political issues of this world. Parody and party are the only aesthetic forms that produce a true political space. Art conceals potentials and tools for emancipation that politics does not have. Only the poetic power of the imaginary makes it possible to think about things differently and change them. The hacking of existing systems of power, the creation of counter-publics, and the translation and sharing of (other, dissident, subaltern) knowledge is based on aesthetic methods… and so on.

Conflicts

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead explores the emancipatory potentials of art without a heroic impetus, but certainly with a devotion that inevitably produces blind spots, makes one vulnerable and runs the risk of making a fool of oneself – but also of harming others, which in some cases might be adequate and in others not. Nora Landkammer and Karin Schneider, who are involved in the project initiated by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa concerning the problematic display on the history of colonialism at the University Museum in Bergen, have reminded us that educational work in museums, exhibitions, and so on, especially when it touches on delicate subjects, cannot be about avoiding conflicts but only permitting them.12 With all the marginal groups, the deviants, subalterns, socially and physically dead that Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead involves, embraces, addresses and represents, it will scarcely be possible not to produce tensions and conflicts and to invoke spectres. The crucial question will be how we deal with that, as for example, in the context of the educational work to which a separate platform of Bergen Assembly 2019 is dedicated. The attitude of imagining oneself as unquestionably on the ‘right side’ seems, in any case, inappropriate.

In the context of the exhibition, too, we are interested in contradictions, divergence and self-critical reflections. One important project for us in this regard is, for example, re: assembling emotional labour by Laressa Dickey and Magdalena Freudenschuss. Both have partners who are activists from the so-called Istanbul 10, who were arrested for political reasons in Turkey in 2017 and detained for several months, and whose lawyer is the core group member Murat Deha Boduroğlu. Dickey and Freudenschuss have used Bergen Assembly as an occasion to critically question the function they have taken over in this crisis of providing emotional and organisational support ‘outside’ of prison (an ‘outside’ that exists only inside quotation marks in this situation) by means of a series of texts. Their partners, peter steudtner and Ali Gharavi, are also involved in Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. Interestingly, the four of them have chosen three constellations of collaboration,13 which open up different perspectives on their experiences.

Sharing Knowledge and Experiences of Resistance and Emancipation (When Drawing Becomes An ‘Embodied Way of Reading’)

One central concern of Bergen Assembly 2019 revolves around the question of imparting and sharing knowledge and the experience of resistance and emancipation. This concerns, for example, a series of publication and print media presented and/or produced anew as part of the project; for example, Crip Magazine, founded by Eva Egermann in 2012, the first two issues of which are presented in the exhibition and whose third issue is currently being produced in collaboration with Bergen Assembly 2019. peter steudtner and Magdalena Freudenschuss initiated the web project preparing4prison, which offers a forum for exchanging the experiences and survival strategies of political prisoners. Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Malebona Maphutse held a print workshop in Bergen in July 2019 that sought to articulate everyday experiences of racism in Bergen, and Norway generally, and whose results will be presented as part of the exhibition. The Capital Drawing Group has been working for years on translating and conveying Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in the form of posters. Simon Sheikh writes of their method: ‘They use drawing as an “embodied” way of reading.’ Their posters form a kind of shared territory in which drawing, reading, understanding and imparting knowledge intersect.

A majority of the aforementioned participatory projects are also, at core, related to sharing emancipatory and oppositional knowledge. In Arna, a district of Bergen, a new constellation of the open band and study group Chicago Boys, initiated by Hiwa K in 2010, is formed. The research consists of shedding light on the beginnings of neoliberalism in the various countries of origin of its participants and to recall the music of the period. On that basis, the group compiles a playlist that is then realised musically in several rehearsals and ultimately performed. Hiwa K developed a method for it that simplifies the learning of musical instruments.

Celebrating the Insurrection Instead of the Resurrection of Bodies

In Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead, the emancipatory potentials inherent in art are particularly intertwined with the body: its performativity, rebelliousness and vulnerability, its ‘wrong’, inverted, and dissident employment. The notion that the hand is necessarily the privileged organ of drawing and painting is disproved by Sunaura Taylor and Lorenza Böttner, who work with their mouths and, in the case of Lorenza, also her feet. With their bodies, they resist the social restrictions to which functionally diverse people are subjected, making the body a political object entirely by means of their artistic practice. At the same time, the dissident body is at the centre of their works: a body that is located beyond the norm, in constant transition between the sexes as well as between humans, animals, plants, objects, sick and healthy, and so on. This body in transition also plays a crucial role in the performances of the dancer Lisa Bufano, which are based on the use of special protheses that look like the overly long legs of Empire tables, gazelles or insects. She is a shapeshifter, Bufano once said of herself.

Hiwa K, who in various performances balances a pole on his forehead at the end of which are mirrors offering him his only visual orientation, restricts his physical possibilities with these prostheses but at the same time extends them. He sees not only with his eyes but also his body, which palpates his surroundings and which is lengthened along its vertical axis. For him, the situation represents the experience of migration, fleeing and the associated uncertainty. It is at once an image of autonomy and resistance.

Other dissident bodies are those of the workers in Seoul protesting redundancies or poor working conditions by occupying cranes or billboards for months and even years, and to whom Suntag Noh, Yunyop Lee and Nathalie Boseul Shin dedicate themselves. Dissident, too, are the bodies of flamenco protesting uncertainty even in death, such as the bodies of Stammheim, 14 Chernobyl and Srebrenica. Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead celebrates not the resurrection of bodies but rather their insurrection.

Reclamation of Life as a Struggle against thePolitics of Death

‘When solidarity among the living exhibits cracks’, Alexander Kluge says, ‘then we are dependent on the solidarity of the dead.’ What he proposes is the alliance of the living with the dead, the integration of those who are no longer existing into the living political present. For him, it is about excavating long-ago buried and unused aspects of a possible emancipation that could have changed the course of history. Engaging with the dead means regarding things as they are, not as necessary, as ordained by God or Nature, but rather as contingent, which makes change possible. The spectre, as Jacques Derrida elaborates in his ‘hauntology’, 15 is related not only to those who are no longer but also those who do not yet exist and that appear to demand justice. This concerns the revenants from the colonial past of the West (which is not to say there is no colonial present), who, for example, demand the return of looted objects, as well as those extremely alive spectres who return every Friday from the future that we are in the process of destroying. The Friday for Future movement is interesting, as it also deals with the question of the political status and voice of children.

Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead is a project about the reclamation of life and about the struggle against the politics of death – that is, against politics that accept the physical and social death of thousands of workers, poor people or refugees, that are destroying the planet, that are violent towards ‘other’ bodies, for which certain lives do not count and that therefore do not mourn their deaths either. What work of mourning could be done for these people who the philosopher Judith Butler calls the ‘ ungrievable’? The project The List represents one approach to this, returning to the countless dead of European border policies not only a fragment of their history but also translating these stories into numerous languages, publishing them in newspaper supplements and in other forms and thus bringing them back into our present. This is exactly what makes the work of mourning and responsibility possible.

A kind of encyclopaedia or cosmology of the current routes and infrastructures of the policies of death is provided by John Barker and Ines Doujak’s carpet from the multi-part work Economies of Despair. This dystopian cosmos is inhabited by miraculous beings in between human, animal and botanical species. A series of projects located across the fields of art, science and activism are concerned with the conditions and possibilities of other life models and, like Nora Heidorn’s curatorial contribution, address, from a feminist perspective in particular, the appropriation and sharing of alternative and suppressed knowledge in the fields of health and self-determined life.

Niillas Holmberg, Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski have inscribed into the landscape of the Deatnu River Valley, located between Norway and Finland, in Sápmi, the transnational territory of the Sámi, a poem displayed across 20 plaques that concerns a respectful and sustainable approach of human beings to nature. This intervention is related to other actions, such as The Moratorium Office, which calls for the selfdetermination of the Sámi with regard to land and water use rights that are existentially significant for them and which provide a political instrument of de-colonialising: the moratorium, in which the existing justice, seen as injustice by indigenous groups, is revoked for an unspecified period to make room for a true assembly. The moratorium, the stoppage of the machinery of the existing institutions, the suspension of their warrants and scopes seems to be a suitable equivalent to the model of the ruin.

1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority’’’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 44.

2 See Marian Pastor Roces, ‘Crystal Palace Exhibitions’, in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Ovstebo (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), pp. 50–65 (originally published in 2005).

3 Simon Sheikh, ‘Marks of Distinction, Vectors of Possibility: Questions for the Biennial’, in The Biennial Reader 2010, p. 154.

4 See Bergen Assembly 2019 Guide Book, p. 216.

5 Paul B. Preciado, ‘Notre Dame of Ruins’, 21 April 2019, https://www.artforum.com/slant/paul-b-preciado-on-the-notre-dame-fire-79492 (first published in French in Libération, 19 April 2019).

6 ‘The term ableism describes a set of social relations, ideas, practices, processes and institutions that assumes able-bodied bodies as the standard and, as Fiona Kumari Campbell describes it, “that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, speciestypical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human”’, in Crip Magazine, no. 1, 2012, p. 24; the reference is to Fiona Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 5.

7 One could say that the discourse of the crisis of the museum started with the very beginning of this institution, worrying how it would affect and change the meaning of art, artists and artistic production (see for example Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s ‘Lettres sur les préjudices qu’occasionnerait aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie’ from 1796). The current discussion around the decolonisation of the museum is focusing the undoing of the hegemonic power of this institution itself. The many, fast and unanimous claims to decolonise the museums, institutions, etc. seem suspicious. In the context of a seminar at the Independent Study Program of MACBA in 2014, Paul B. Preciado asked: ‘If the museum was invented as a colonial technology capable of unifying the historical narrative, and as a collective memory prosthesis trying to re-write the past and prefigure the future in order to legitimise its hegemony, is it then possible to conceive a decolonial use of the museum?’ (see https://www.macba.cat/en/decolonising-museum). The current state of MACBA tells its own story about this (see Paul B. Preciado, ‘Inside the Museum’s Body: The Neoliberal Institutional Coup as a Government Strategy in Contemporary Art’, in The Beast and The Sovereign, eds. Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Paul B. Preciado, Valentín Roma [Leipzig: Spector Books, 2018], pp. 96–113).

8 Pedro G. Romero and María García in the present publication, p. 116.

9 On Difference #1 and #2, two-part exhibition project (2005/2006) at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, see
https://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/publications/2007/on-difference-3.

10 See p. 210 in the present publication.

11 Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Malebona Maphutse, in Bergen Assembly 2019 Guide Book, p. 080.

12 Nora Landkammer and Karin Schneider, ‘Past Violences, Present Entanglements: Learning and Difficult Heritages’, lecture at the Bergen Assembly 2019 Introduction Days, 5–6 April 2019, see http://2019.bergenassembly.no//contributors/nora-landkammer.

13 In addition to Dickey–Freudenschuss, Dickey–Gharavi and Freudenschuss–steudtner.

14 The high security prison in Stuttgart Stammheim became iconic during the so-called German Fall, when major figures of the Red Army Fraction, Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, were inmates there and committed suicide.

15 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).