In 2015 close to 1.000.000 asylum seekers arrived in Germany. Those numbers decreased to 280.000 in 2016. This decrease was caused by the closing of the borders that the refugees had to traverse in order to get to Germany. It was also influenced by the deal with Turkey to keep masses of refugees there (a deal that is haunting us today given the developments regarding violations of human rights and attacks on democracy in post-coup Ankara.)

Refugees, even in smaller numbers, still need housing, work, financial support and schooling in language and culture. I am truly astonished how many average citizens of Hamburg are involved in volunteering and donating to all of these aspects of integration. I visited a donation station and was impressed. I heard from friends how many of their immediate surround is and has been involved for years now in teaching German, helping in soup kitchens and the like.

There are, however, things that I found even more astonishing. Cultural institutions lend their space, even have it remodeled, for the temporary housing of those fleeing war and destruction. A well known theater across the central train station, for example, allowed people to crash for the night there if they were stranded upon arrival.

The Hamburg Museum for Industry housed Syrian mothers and children or pregnant women in a refurbished factory hall that used to be – and now will be again – an exhibition site. Clearly good news.  (The museum is worth a visit in any case, always interesting shows.)

Let’s not talk about the bad news today, the ever increasing populist movement and power grab, the xenophobia and crime against those seeking safety.

Ad for a public discussion of the rise of rightwing populism in Germany and Europe.

Blabla alone has never accomplished anything. Don’t just talk, act.

Smash the G20 – enemies of freedom are our enemies as well.

I will report more on both aspects in my artist talk on February 5th for the Refugees’ Dream exhibit at Cameraworks. Don’t forget to save the date!

On December 10th, 68 years ago much of the world agreed that we need to protect human rights. A true achievement.

The links below inform about what that entails, and how much ground we still have to cover. Nobody should suffer because of the color of their skin, their nationality, their religion, or their gender and sexual preferences.

http://www.un.org/en/events/humanrightsday/

http://www.un.org/en/events/humanrightsday/udhr60/declaration.shtml

Let us hope the clock is not turned back with populism and its more foreboding cousins rising their ugly heads all over the world.

In anticipation of snow: The part of me that wants to remind us of why the Black Lives Matter movement is needed decides to quote this:

“And I ask why am I black, they say I was born in sin, and shamed inequity. One of the main songs we used to sing in church makes me sick, ‘love wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”

-Peter Tosh

The part of me that just wants to laugh for a second is ready to quote this:

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

-Mae West

I’ll do equal justice to politics and wit;  and a bonus Peter Tosh reggae song, one of my favorites: of course about Equal Rights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SN7Pko_jCM

Ernest Gaines’ 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The novel provides a unique outlook on the status of African Americans in the South, after World War II and before the Civil Rights Movement. We see a Jim Crow South through the eyes of a formally educated African American teacher who often feels helpless and alienated from his own country.

Wikipedia tells me: “Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundationfellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier.

He was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, living in old slave quarters on a plantation.”

And here is the quote, fitting for these post election days, don’t you think?

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

(Painting on a church ceiling of one of the hundreds of churches whose names I don’t remember but who I loved visiting.)

To conclude this week which was devoted to the concept of action in one form or another, let Johann Wolfgang von Goethe speak.  (It sounds better in German, and also closer to the meaning of taking action; but in English “act” has to suffice.) And let’s remember that that play was about a pact with the devil…..

It’s written here: ‘In the Beginning was the Word!’

Here I stick already! Who can help me? It’s absurd,

Impossible, for me to rate the word so highly

I must try to say it differently

If I’m truly inspired by the Spirit. I find

I’ve written here: ‘In the Beginning was the Mind’.

Let me consider that first sentence,

So my pen won’t run on in advance!

Is it Mind that works and creates what’s ours?

It should say: ‘In the beginning was the Power!’

Yet even while I write the words down,

I’m warned: I’m no closer with these I’ve found.

The Spirit helps me! I have it now, intact.

And firmly write: ‘In the Beginning was the Act!’

Do we really need more stuff? Instead of shopping today I am linking to two long articles that made me think hard this week. Helping to burn calories from too much food yesterday….

One deals with the role religion plays in the current search for answers about the election results. The piece has been widely shared, as far as I can see, but I thought it is worth posting. The claim is, among other things, that the closed system of religious beliefs of some Trump voters will make a dialogue, that we are pushed to seek, close to impossible.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/11/the-dark-rigidity-of-fundamentalist-rural-america-a-view-from-the-inside/

The other article provided an image that sticks in my head.  Here the claim is that many in the precarious middle-class perceive themselves as patiently standing in line, waiting their turn to move to the promised American dream success at the horizon. And then people cut in line, often via government interference, the lazy, the poor, the hand-out takers, the immigrants. All of which isn’t fair and will be stopped under the new regime, or so they assume. Well worth a read.

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters

Tetsuya Ishida  Toyota Ipsum , 1996

Progressive artists make statements via their art, often in ways that are stunningly creative; sometimes they are complicated enough that they need serious explanation – which can be problematic.

Here are two examples: One at the Whitney

http://hyperallergic.com/338783/in-response-to-trumps-election-artist-asked-the-whitney-museum-to-turn-her-work-upside-down/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=In%20Response%20to%20Trumps%20Election%20Artist%20Asked%20the%20Whitney%20Museum%20to%20Turn%20Her%20Work%20Upside-Down&utm_content=In%20Response%20to%20Trumps%20Election%20Artist%20Asked%20the%20Whitney%20Museum%20to%20Turn%20Her%20Work%20Upside-Down+CID_c2eb22fd0a98dbcda71743d8c1496d88&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter&utm_term=Read%20More

and the other in Mississippi:

Mississippi Governor Decries Billboard by Artist-Led Super PAC

I found the first artistic decision by Annette Lemieux – a request to turn her work upside down after the election –  clever;

I have mixed feelings about the second one, for how it can be misinterpreted, abused by those you want to criticize, but it’s also surely a conversation opener as there ever was one.  The problem is that it takes a lot of explaining to get to a correct understanding of the expressed statement if you are not on the same wavelength, and I see that as a problem for a piece of art.  A message can be, should be partisan in some cases, but only if it is clear. Says the artist who is always asked to provide a novel-length artist statement…..