DEDeutsch Text
From FLORIDA Times and Today
On Representation and the Obligation to Apprehend Life. A Dialog Between Cana Bilir-Meier, Margareta Kern and Katja Kobolt
The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us. We have to ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and
those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible. … Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.
With Margareta Kern, Bosnian-Hercegovina born artist, who escaped the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the UK we sat in October 2017 in a Viennese café. We talked. The occasion was a symposium and a publication on “Gastarbeiter”. Unlike today, when main stream art institutions are happy to host not only women artists who call themselves feminists but also migrant artists who were called Gastarbeiter and also other so-called “minority artists” (and even more happily advertise their temporary hospitality), in 2017 when I was a part of FLORIDA committee, “Gastarbeiter” found their ways as a rule only to art spaces located in some backyards or hard to find walkways – like FLORIDA. With Margareta Kern we worked on the presentation of her project GUESTures I GOSTIkulacije, an archive of Yugoslav “Gastarbeiterinnen” in Germany, throughout the 2010s.
In Vienna I told Margareta about Cana Bilir-Meier’s work. A Munich born artist with “migration background” as the official German wording would suggest, has dedicated her work to the uncovering of history of migrant lives. We have collaborated with Cana since her first solo exhibition in Germany, featured at FLORIDA also in 2017. After the exhibition Cana too joined the FLORIDA committee and we continued to work together till one day I moved back to Ljubljana and officially stopped being a “Gastarbeiter”.
Together with both artists we worked on this mixed-technique Dialog in the years 2017/18 and we thank FLORIDA to finally bring it out. As today, seven years later, we are even more angry and sad because the “precarity” (Butler) in “post-neoliberal unfolding of authoritarian capitalism” (TJ Demos) and the extrastatecraft (Keller Easterling) intertwined with war economy only got more and more people have been forced into migration and invisible life, while lives of people whose annihilation is live-streamed cannot be even mourned (Judith
Butler). It has been an obligation to work for the conditions in which lives are not only grievable but also apprehended as precarious. Together with the people – we don’t and won’t give up! And we shout, while we write, make art and live.
Caffe in Vienna, October 2017
It was the time of the “Paradise or Pandora Papers”, a leak of over 13.4 million confidential documents relating to offshore investments. The Munich published newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung introduced their research into the documents as: “The message of this new leaks is clear: Not a single politician, a single corporate group, no breaker of sanctions neither a single tax dodger or a clandestine power broker could still hope that their business will stay where they want it to stay: in seclusion. In doesn’t matter what happens in the dark corners of the financial world, it will come to light!”
Then, and today, the quoted introduction, the wars and their mediatizations – including live-streamed genocides – and if you want also much of artistic and intellectual production have been caught in the old “The Emperor’s New Clothes” problem. While many people today hear the voices pointing to the “emperor’s nakedness”, only little can agree on who or what has been actually falsely dressed while the nakedness of the skin is peering through the gold and glory. And they don’t point their voices into one direction, they do not build a choir. If there is no common addressee the voices on “emperors’ nakedness” sink into nothingness. And as the ongoing 2024/25 student protests in Serbia teach us, even if there are both, a common voice (in case of Serbia people of different generations and ideological positionings insisting on transparency of public institutions, state affairs and the equality in front of the law) and they point it to a common addressee (corrupted autocrat state apparatus), obviously behind the addressee is yet another one (EU), hungry for more (rare earth metals) acting naked while dressed in gold and glory. The mis-en-abym structure making the place of the appear emperor empty. From the point of political subjectivity in potentia, the place of the emperor has indeed always been empty, however the props of the extrastatecraft including the military complex, have fortressed it.
To whom and how to speak, shout and protest today, when states are more and more becoming only a corridor, a logistic service for the capital? What could be the forms of protests that could not only be heard but which could also help us, captured in the master-slave dialectics, unite? Can an exhibition be a kind of a protest? Can it speak or generate a collective voice beyond itself? If not an exhibition, a performance, or a text – where should we further search for new imaginary templates for emancipation? Producing emancipatory discourse has obviously not been enough. Discourse, especially institutionalised as artistic and theoretical one, have had a shadow side, producing also certain normativity which in many instances affects also agency: stripping the oppressed addressees of the needed emancipation of their agency. The need to come up with representations (signs, words, voices, moves) which would not only disclose the empty space of the emperor but also address ethics (the knowledge on good and bad) for politics (acting for common good) has not been exhausted. And we have searched for voices, words, sounds and moves that could be joined and heard also in FLORIDA.
Margareta told me in Vienna about her new work-in-progress. She has been researching on different plots regarding the extrastatecraft, departing from their materializations in Cornwall. Nearby her home, on an idyllic Cornish beach, the transatlantic high-frequency trading fibre optic cables are entering Great Britain. The nineteenth century telegraph cables needed isolation for which natural rubber was used. The production of the natural rubber has been closely intertwined with colonialism and extraction. The rubber tree or gutta percha, was once endemic to Malaysian archipelago. Due to the social reality induced by the anticolonial struggles, the British deterritorialized the rubber plantations to the rest of Asia. The rubber growing has ever since been connected to land grab and monoculture farming. Today the extrastatecraft only proliferated.
Cana Bilir-Meier has searched for voices, questions and answers also within her family, within the place where she has been born to, in the precarious life of her aunt, a poet Semra Ertan. Together with Cana, we talked about Semra Ertan, her life and her work through Cana Bilir-Meier’s works. Publicly, in different contexts and with different people. In a gallery. On a radio. We exhibited her works together. We named the exhibition together. Our voices interweaved, Cana’s works, the voices in her works, the images and films and works she quoted, used, re-used, re-staged. Semra Ertan gave us a voice by speaking, writing, taking her life violently away. We have given each other a voice. That we hear. That others might hear as well. Where does the voice come from? Where is it going to? What are its affects? Listen.
Attached Material:
THURSDAY WAR by Margareta Kern // Thursday War_Margareta Kern_Florida_September 2025 FINAL
SES ALMA REHBERI by Cana Bilir-Meier // Text Ses Alma Rehberi_alle Teile_CBM
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Footnotes:
1. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War. When is Life Grievable. London, p. 2, 25.
2. See project’s webpage: http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.de/
3. With Margareta Kern we presented her “Gastarbeiter” work-in-progress in Munich twice: at the Kullukcu & Gregorian Gallery (2014) and at Lothringer13 Halle (2018) in the framework of the no stop non stop exhibition on the occasion of 50 years since the so called “Gastarbeiter-Agreement” between socialist Yugoslavia and capitalist Germany. See https://bringintakeout.wordpress.com/category/la-munich-video/ and https://lothringer13.joergkoopmann.com/ausstellungen/no-stop-non-stop/
4. However, in accordance to a proverb only to find its way to a dictionary of idioms – “Once a Gastarbeiter always a Gastarbeiter” –: after almost two decades spent in Germany, my life in Ljubljana still in some aspects corresponds a “Gastarbeiter”-life. But more on this on some other occasion.
5. Demos, TJ. 2017. “Learning from documenta 14. Athens, Post-Democracy, and Decolonisation.” In: Third Text. http://thirdtext.org/demos-documenta
6. “As a site of multiple, overlapping, or nested forms of sovereignty, where domestic and transnational jurisdictions collide, infrastructure space becomes a medium of what might be called extrastatecraft—a portmanteau describing the often undisclosed activities outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in partnership with statecraft.” Easterling, Keller. 2016. Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space. London, p. 19.
7. See https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/en/
8. Booth, Anne. 2007. Colonial Legacies: Economic and Social Development in East and Southeast Asia. Honolulu.
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