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Artistic and aesthetic concerns are valued as pillars in social transformation and antiracism projects throughout Europe. This paper focuses on the city of Dresden, Germany, in which heightened right-wing extremism have made social transformation efforts difficult and arts a primary form of intervention. This research evaluates how independent civic actors – namely artists – who start antiracism initiatives require transition intermediaries to apply for funding. I present findings from my ethnographic and policy analysis (2017-19) of Dresden’s independent arts scene and its relation to cultural and integration policy to show the challenges involved. Urban geographers remind us that even though intermediaries are important for translating between niches of civic engagement and incumbent regimes, they are also subject to structural challenges (Ehnert, Egermann, and Betsch 2021). This paper takes the structural challenges that transition intermediaries and their niche partners face as its subject of reflection. I analyze the engagement of the intermediary “Projektschmiede” with the local musician collective Banda Internationale regarding the implementation of its music education project “The Kids Are Alright” in Dresden to illustrate the struggles for maintaining sustainable arts-based antiracism efforts. This paper expands our understanding of growing neoliberal antiracism (Nelson and Dunn 2017) by including often neglected authors: independent artists and activists. I suggest that localized antiracism projects by niche actors in Germany encounter similar problems as institutionalized interventions. A decline or a lack of transition intermediaries who work with civil society are indicative of that as their absence erodes the structural foundations of antiracism work by civil society.

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The artistic scene is a strategic point of observation on racial and postcolonial relations in Italy. On the one hand, in the last years many racialized voices emerged among writers , performers , visual artists , musicians and others, imposing a transformation in the debate on race and racial issues. On the other, the visibility gained led to – and was led by – growing opportunities for racialized artists within white institutions, such as awards and fellowships . This increasingly important presence of racialized subjects proves firstly that art remains one of the privileged spaces of subjectification for people of color/with migrant background; and secondly that white institutions are ambiguously interested in facilitating the entering of racialized artists. The examples of the ethnographic museums Mudec (2021) and MuCiv (2020-2021) are particularly illuminating. Although the stated operation is to provide space for racialized artists and decolonial perspectives, the curatorship and management risk recreating dynamics of colonial subalternity and re-fetishization. This contribution highlights the duplicity of these processes, namely the processes of racialized subjectification and simultaneously the contradictory attempts of inclusion between reparations and subsumption.

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Rockhill Gabriel 2013 Critical Reflections on the Ontological Illusion

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Cultural Deficits and Racial Archipelagoes: The “Immigrant” in Contemporary European Cultural Policy

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Cultural Deficits and Racial Archipelagoes: The “Immigrant” in Contemporary European Cultural Policy

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This article critiques the focus on social cohesion and integration in European cultural policy. I argue that the emphasis on social cohesion produces a problematization of the immigrant as a “culture of deficit.” Art projects aimed to help inadvertently risk becoming arenas for racialization.

My argument is divided into two parts: the first develops a sense of the “technical game” (Rottenburg 2009, 2015) played in cultural policy, drawing on historical records from UNESCO and examples from French, British, and Swedish cultural policy in the 1960s and 70s. The historical context will establish how cultural policy has problematized art and culture in terms of social cohesion from its inception. It will also demonstrate how cultural policy has generated “a specific language,” enabling “transfers, comparisons, aggregations, and manipulations standardized by calculations, and routine interpretations” (Desrosières 2015: 334). This “language” is at odds with legal practice and aesthetic philosophy. A central foundation in legal and philosophical definitions of art is that it engages us in ways that cannot be reduced to a set of propositions or measured in exact proportions. This undecidability also defines how courts in the US and Western Europe have approached art. Cultural policy breaks with this tradition, exacting a kind of normative expediency on art and culture that turns it into a political technology facing the problematics of the population.

The second section develops a sense of how this “technical game” of cultural policy shifts the focus of art and culture from Enlightenment understandings of individual Bildung and competence-based sociability (Geselligkeit) to a “problematics of the population.” Here, the connection between cultural policy, immigrants, and social cohesion is made. The early development of cultural policy in Europe focused on accessibility and democratization. However, because the policies of accessibility failed, a discourse around the idea of a “cultural deficit” developed (Daboo 2018). When cultural policy shifted the focus of accessibility from the working classes to the immigrants, the “cultural deficit” mutated into “a culture of deficit.” Here I discuss the inadvertent connections between cultural policy and racialization. Theoretically, I will bring cultural policy’s conceptualization of “what art does” to bear on what Loïc Wacquant calls “the diagonal of racialization” (Wacquant 2022). I will attempt to show how the competence-based sociability envisioned in the legal and philosophical formulations of art has, in the hands of cultural policy, become grounds for a boundary-making. When cast together with inequalities of, for example, class, gender, age, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and locality, this new formulation of the aesthetic is co-producing what I call “racial archipelagoes.” I end by suggesting that the current production of these racial archipelagoes will become tomorrow’s seeds of “urban rage” (Dikeç 2017).

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Trailer of case study example "Vuta N'Kuvute - Tug of War" (dir. Amil Shivji/ 2021/ Tanzania)

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Trailer of case study example "Vuta N'Kuvute - Tug of War" (dir. Amil Shivji/ 2021/ Tanzania)

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Vuta N'Kuvute (Tug of War) (2021) Trailer

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Short interview conducted by TIFF with director Amil Shivji

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Short interview conducted by TIFF with director Amil Shivji

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Amil Shivji's work VUTA N'KUVUTE is the first Tanzanian film to ever screen at the Toronto International Filmfestival, one of the largest and acclaimed international independent film festivals to date.

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TIFF 21’ Film: Tug of War Interview with Amil Shivji

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adding an update - working paper presentation

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adding an update - working paper presentation

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Thanking Anna Betsch for reflecting with me on this.
Excited to learn about your thoughts :)
Please contact before citing.