Institute for Artistic Postmigration Research
Since 2008, my artistic research and its documentation, accompanying theoretical reflections and visualizations and finally the associated artistic productions have circulated around the broad topic of migration, in particular around migrating, remembering and arriving.
This different kind of knowledge production, which does not obey any institutional logic or political interests, is also associated with a different kind of knowledge. However, this often remains isolated in elite and segregated circles of art and cultural institutions.
If I want to take a socio-critical and cultural-political stance at an institutional level, I have to become an institution myself, get involved and get involved locally.
An institution that acts in such a way that the formulated criticism already begins with it and is not only demanded afterwards must itself also be a different institution: a quasi-institution that is more of an art project and works with artistic practices and articulates other (i.e. artistic) positions and productions and claims their visibility and autonomous spaces for action. It should be transparent and work in a participatory way, which is why the distribution of privileges and profits of the projects must be openly negotiable and goals and positions must be formulated in a way that promotes solidarity. However, it is also about making visible migrant, political spaces that articulate themselves (more protected) through artistic projects.
In order to be able to work in both directions, actors from the most diverse disciplines of the migration discourse will come together in the form of temporary project collectives: Social workers, refugees, migrants, artists, Stuttgart institution employees, citizens. The IKMF offers a framework and a platform for this.
In the initial phase, the IKMF, which is organized as a non-profit association, is independent and nomadic, without its own permanent studios. The institute functions through temporary alliances, collaborations and participation with various institutions or actors that the IKMF approaches and it operates in different locations that it visits. However, having its own space is a long-term goal.
The planned structure provides for an artistic advisory board in addition to the administration with a board of directors and management. The IKMF has various expandable departments and offices: Department for Feminist Affairs, an Archive of Lost Things and Places, an Office in Migration, Office for Promenadology as well as propagandistic organs and communications.
Funds raised for the institute will be used to enable access for previously excluded social groups. The aim is to make scattered expertise and experimental practices visible in order to network them with each other in Stuttgart's urban space. In this way, attention economies can be redirected and places and practices that are outside the art context can come into the public eye.
The focus is on a process-oriented and long-term working method in the field of migration and flight, without the aim of producing a product. A documentary and heterogeneous archive simultaneously allows a different contemporary history to be written.