You Don’t Do Those Things Alone

Abstract

This interview was held on 15 April 2019 at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin – an art space, a platform for discourse and a meeting place for good conversations, food and drink founded in 2009 by Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung as a place of communal hospitality.¹ When I entered the historical premises of this former crematorium in the Berlin district of Wedding, I could feel that something was strange in the way Bonaventure was talking to me. The art space, otherwise so lively, full of vibrant ideas and life, was filled with an outlandish heaviness, an outrageous sadness. It was the morning Okwui Enwezor², an internationally renowned curator and friend, had passed away. Bonaventure had got the message that he had died that very morning, shortly before our interview. I did not ask if something was wrong. I heard the news some hours later. In retrospect, I understand that Bonaventure, while addressing a very personal relationship in this interview, must have been deeply affected by these circumstances. In his moment of loss, that must have been made much more difficult by my unknowing questioning.

Notes

1 See SAVVY Contemporary website https://bit.ly/3qkG1MG The organization has since moved to new premises, a former casino, also in the district of Wedding.

2 Okwui Enwezor was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet and educator specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked twenty-four in the ArtReview list of the 100 most powerful people in the art world. From 1998 to 2002 he was artistic director of documenta 11 in Kassel. From October 2011 to June 2018 he was director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The highlight of Enwezor’s curatorial work is his function as artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

3 See http://bit.ly/3uVi8yF

4 See https://bit.ly/2RaNFNG

5 Neukölln is one of the twelve boroughs of Berlin. It is located in the south-eastern section of the city. It features many Gründerzeit buildings and is characterized by having one of the highest percentage of immigrants in Berlin. With 329.917 inhabitants (2019), Neukölln is the most densely populated borough of Berlin. It was originally characterized by mostly working-class inhabitants and later a relatively high percentage of immigrants, especially of Turkish and Russian descent, but since the turn of the millennium an influx of students, creatives and western immigrants has led to gentrification.

6 See https://bit.ly/2Q89OLY

7 Harun Farocki was a German filmmaker, author and lecturer in film. He was born in Neutitschein, Sudetenland, which is now in the Czech Republic. His father, Abdul Qudus Faroqui, had immigrated to Germany from India in the 1920s. His German mother had been evacuated from Berlin due to the Allied bombing of Germany. After World War II, Farocki grew up in India and Indonesia before the family resettled in Hamburg in 1958. Farocki was deeply influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. He studied at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin and began making films in the mid-1960s. From 1974 to 1984 he edited the magazine Filmkritik. In the 1990s, Farocki taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He was later a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

8 The school strike for climate, also known variously as Fridays for Future (FFF), Youth for Climate, Climate Strike or Youth Strike for Climate, is an international movement of school students who skip Friday classes to participate in demonstrations to demand political leaders take action to prevent climate change and for the fossil fuel industry to transition to renewable energy. Publicity and widespread organising began after Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), holding a sign that read ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (School strike for climate).

9 The Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter) is a neighbourhood in Wedding, a locality of Mitte, Berlin, Germany. A large number of streets have names related to Africa, particularly parts of Africa that were involved in the German colonization of Africa. These include Afrikanische Straße, Kameruner Straße, Kongostraße, Sansibarstraße, Senegalstraße, Tangastraße, Togostraße, Ugandastraße, Usambarastraße, and Windhuker Straße, along with Nachtigalplatz.

10 The Shiraz Festival of Arts was an annual international summer arts festival, held in Iran, bringing about an encounter between the East and the West. It was held from 1967 to 1977 in the city of Shiraz and Persepolis in central Iran by the initiative of Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi. Accompanied by symposia and debates, the festival program included music, dance, drama and film performed in a variety of locations in Shiraz and surrounding areas. For the historical significance of the Shiraz Festival, see also Mahlouji (2016): Festival of Arts: Shiraz-Persepolis, Black Dog Publishing 1970.

11 MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues is organized within the cultural programme of the Berliner Festspiele. MaerzMusik sees itself as a venue for experiencing art and thinking about how we deal with time. Contemporary music is its centre and point of departure for an exploration of the nature of time in life, art and theory. See https://bit.ly/3s1qWR0

12 Gestaltung is the German word for creation, configuration and embodiment. It implies a creative and inventive process in which a thing (a material object, a structure, a process, a situation, an idea, etc.) is changed, that is created, modified or developed through the work of the designer and thereby given or taking on a certain form or appearance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is an independent , a sonic platform curator, art critic, writer and biotechnologist. He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, and guest curator for the 2018 Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019. He was Artistic Director of the twelfth edition of Rencontres de Bamako, the Biennale of African Photography. He was Visiting Professor of Art Theory and Curatorial Studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and was appointed Artistic Director for Sonsbeek 2020, the quadrennial for contemporary art in Arnhem, Netherlands.

By September 2020, SAVVY had moved to a larger building. The organization continues to navigate hybridity with the development of SAVVYZᴧᴧR that includes: First Voices International Radio, a new radio programme streamed via Berlin 88.4 FM and Potsdam 90.7 FM to ensure the continuance and survival of Indigenous cultures by airing voices who tell their own story in their own words, often in their own languages and ways of speaking.