Presentation text for the exhibition Zum Umzug, April 2024 at H4MM [Leuschnerdam 19, 10999, Berlin].
Zumzumzum
text by Adelaide Ivanova
a stone from birth, entrails the soul.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
In 1851, suspicious of the so-called “decree no. 798”, free citizens in the Northeast of Brazil began to organize a series of riots against the decree, issued shortly after the promulgation of the Eusébio de Queirós Law (which prohibited trafficking, but did not abolish slave labor). It removed the monopoly over birth and death records from the Catholic Church, and passed the task into the hands of the Empire – the first General Census of Brazil.
These workers, the absolute majority of whom were non-white Brazilians, freedmen or descendants of slaves, asked themselves: if human trafficking is now prohibited, where will the landowners find slave labor? The (correct) conclusion they reached was that the elite would use them as new slave labor, which was scarce after the Eusébio de Queirós law. And how would they identify the “lucky ones”? Easy: using data from the new General Census.
But these people were not willing to return to forced labor. Between the end of 1851 and the beginning of 1852, from Sergipe to Ceará, community organizers traveled through the cities, raising workers’ awareness of the dangers of the decree and mobilizing them to fight. The protests paid off: the so-called wasps emerged victorious and the first census would only be carried out 20 years later. And why were they called wasps? Because of the noise – similar to wasps’ buzz – they made when they entered the villages with their work tools (scythes, hoes, sticks, machetes), tearing up the announcements and rioting in front of police stations, newspapers and registry offices.
If in 1851 Northeastern citizens fought for the right not to be watched by the empire, this fight continues in 2024 and is far from exclusive to the Global South. On the contrary: the states at the center of capitalism are masters at monitoring to punish. Did you know, for example, that what we call Anmeldung was previously called polizeiliche Anmeldung? The old name described its function much more honestly. The Big Brother is real, and it is so wrapped up in racism and class prejudices, and with German bureaucracy (“please request your Termin via fax”), that it works like a Monster who has lost his glasses, stepping on everything and everyone. He lurks in the Bürgeramt, the Ausländerbehörde, the Finanzamt, etc. and makes life in cities hell. You know the drill: he demands Anmeldung after an Umzug, but there is no Termin to do your Anmeldung, so he goes after you and charges you a thousand euros for not doing it. You can even understand why he lost his glasses and doesn’t want to find them: this “clumsiness” chaos makes money.
A need for glasses would be a lame excuse for such turmoil, anyway. Angélica Freitas proves very well that it is not the lack of them that produces brutality. She takes off her glasses not to bother us, but to free herself (us?) from interpretation – it doesn’t always make sense to make sense, and sometimes only by being a little foolish can we navigate the arbitrariness of capitalism. I love when Angélica complains that “making sense is almost an imposition”. Because if we look closely, often the same people who complain that art doesn’t make sense are the first to give up dealing critically with reality. The same people who complain that poetry is a senseless activity, wasted days and days analyzing who applauded who at the Berlinale. What is more nonsense? That, or the Myopic Poems by Angélica Freitas?
What makes less sense: the works in this show, or the fact that, in one of the richest countries in the world, self-employed workers are not protected by the Minimum Wage Law, nor by the terms that regulate freelance work? According to the Federal Statistical Office, around 1.3 million people in Germany work in the cultural sector. Of these, 40% are self-employed, in other words: in the
cultural sector only, there are at almost 500 thousand people, in the fourth largest economy in the world, who live and work without labor law protecting[1]. Isn’t that absurd?
It’s important to ask ourselves not only why this Monster nest is so absurd, but whose twigs are seized to build it, and whose are left alone. For example: while Tesla (whose owner has a fortune of 190 billion dollars) is destroying, in Grünheide, water sources protected by law, people who do not even have the right to the minimum wage are sent to jail because they were unable to pay the fines they got for travelling without ticket in public transport. Now that is much more absurd than writing poems: the fact that 7 thousand people a year are arrested in Germany because, caught 3 times without a ticket, they were unable to pay a fine[2].
At the German language school, I learned that traveling without a ticket was called Schwarzfahren. In my activism I learned that Schwarzfahren is a racist term, and that even more racist are the laws that criminalize poverty – because, if people from so-called “ethnic minorities” are the group most likely to be poor in Germany, then it can only be concluded that the majority of people arrested for traveling without a ticket are from ethnic minorities too. It is precisely there, at this intersection, that the Monster’s twisted criterion (tormenting the poor, while leaving the rich alone) thrives.
Monster is, therefore, the watchdog (and fattening dog) of capital. Among many other forms, it takes the form of bureaucracy – it was fighting against this Monster that the Northeasterners made their zumzumzum in 1851, and it is the same thing that is being fought against in Germany, in 2024. Therefore, hurray for initiatives such as Anmeldung für Alle, the 9-euro-fonds, the Freiheitsfonds, or Wir fahren zusammen.
Speaking of traveling together, both Stephanie Fernandes and Valeska Brinkmann focus on observations made while using public transport. In Bahn Poem, Stephanie uses the Berlin metro network as a starting point, building a continuous and juxtaposed poem, with her trajectories in the city – and the emotional implications of these movements, which are not necessarily fluid. Comings, goings, hellos, goodbyes, disorientation, waiting, boredom, rush – all of this is part of the experience of urban mobility, but also of our emotional life. Stephanie weaves these two worlds together in a refreshing way.
Then in Ringbahn Observatory, Valeska uses poems to record meetings with fellow travelers. It could be simple, and it is, but in times of neoliberal individualism, it’s refreshing to read texts that show that someone is paying attention. You could say: how nosy, taking care of other people’s lives. But attention and vigilance are absolutely different things. Attention is the purest form of generosity, Simone Weil once said. When Valeska describes these interactions, she shows us what humans (and non-humans!) are capable of when they pay attention to each other, when they invest themselves in being attentive to mutual existence. These poems are beautiful, and will be beautiful forever: it is a testimony to our infinite potential for candor, for being understanding.
But Monster doesn’t want us to understand each other: not only does he criminalizes poverty, he also criminalizes survival tactics against it, including solidarity (and isn’t solidarity precisely what happens when we understand each other?)! Did you know that a person who offers a Scheinanmeldung can be penalized with a fine of up to 50 thousand euros[3], because they want to help someone to have the almost-impossible-to-get Anmeldung?
He, Monster, doesn’t want us alive or dead, he wants us as buzzing zombies, obeying rules that make no sense in the face of people’s material reality. Zomzomzombies in the queues at the Ausländerbehörde. In the virtual queue on the Bürgeramt website. In the enormous line to see the Zimmer for the temporary sublet, advertised on WG-Gesucht: a 10m² room, without Anmeldung, outside the Ring, on illegal Kaution – for 450 euros/month! Without Nebenkosten! But without other options (homelessness waiting just around the corner), we take it. And here we go again,
Umzugzombies, annoying our friends, asking for their help with yet another Umzug, the 11th since you came to live in Berlin.
But not all Umzug is bad. There is that of birds: from late winter to late spring, starlings, song thrushes, chiffchaffs, black redstarts, swifts, nightingales, orioles and cuckoos arrive in Germany. This spring, the kingfisher also enters the list, not flying, as it is not from these parts, but in Ana Hupe’s work, Ultramarine Blue. But none of these little birds would get here so easily if they had to show a visa and passport at the borders between countries, Monster on the prowl. Nature is naturally in motion, and there is nothing natural about border control.
The opposite of the haunted zombie of bureaucracy is the migratory bird that, being free, blesses us with its temporary presence. The kingfisher, in particular, is special to any conversation about freedom of movement, as it is both a physical presence and an entity. It is both birdlike and an enchanted spirit: in rural Macumbas like Catimbó and Jurema, the figure of the Marujo Martim Pescador (“Kingfisher Sailor”) is a counter-hegemonic one, “a drunk, black, sailor, [...] an entity in solidarity with the socially marginalized and stigmatized”[4]. The kingfisher that appears in Ana’s work is the synthesis of The Insubordinate: one who does not bend to capital because it belongs to a group and is in eternal movement, even crossing the border between the material and immaterial world, that of the living and of the dead, Orún and Aiê. It is not an Orisha, it is a humanlike entity with the birdlike capacities of dismantling borders, while at the same time connecting territories that borders are supposed to separate. All of Ana’s works go along with these movements, including the others she brings to this exhibition.
Not long ago, Monster put Captain Carola Rackete behind bars, when she was trying to bring to safety 53 people that her team rescued in an inflatable boat, wandering in the same Mediterranean where Ana collected pebbles. Today, the same Monster is somewhere else, preventing humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza. There is no poem that is capable of stopping this – for that, only popular organization. But without poetry it is impossible to endure the world, while we fight for it to change.
1 Data from the Scientific Services of the German Bundestag, February 2021 report: “Working conditions and social security for artists in Germany”
2 “Four months in prison for damages worth 2.90 euros”, June 18, 2023, Süddeutsche Online
3 Federal Registration Act (BMG), § 54 Fine Regulations
4 in “Coexistence and co-Agency of the Marujo Martim Pescador in a family of blood and saint in the Sertão Baiano”, article by Flávio José dos Passos, 31st Brazilian Anthropology Meeting, 12/2018, Brasília/DF.
Presentation text for the exhibition Zum Umzug, April 2024 at H4MM [Leuschnerdam 19, 10999, Berlin].
Zumzumzum
text by Adelaide Ivanova
a stone from birth, entrails the soul.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
In 1851, suspicious of the so-called “decree no. 798”, free citizens in the Northeast of Brazil began to organize a series of riots against the decree, issued shortly after the promulgation of the Eusébio de Queirós Law (which prohibited trafficking, but did not abolish slave labor). It removed the monopoly over birth and death records from the Catholic Church, and passed the task into the hands of the Empire – the first General Census of Brazil.
These workers, the absolute majority of whom were non-white Brazilians, freedmen or descendants of slaves, asked themselves: if human trafficking is now prohibited, where will the landowners find slave labor? The (correct) conclusion they reached was that the elite would use them as new slave labor, which was scarce after the Eusébio de Queirós law. And how would they identify the “lucky ones”? Easy: using data from the new General Census.
But these people were not willing to return to forced labor. Between the end of 1851 and the beginning of 1852, from Sergipe to Ceará, community organizers traveled through the cities, raising workers’ awareness of the dangers of the decree and mobilizing them to fight. The protests paid off: the so-called wasps emerged victorious and the first census would only be carried out 20 years later. And why were they called wasps? Because of the noise – similar to wasps’ buzz – they made when they entered the villages with their work tools (scythes, hoes, sticks, machetes), tearing up the announcements and rioting in front of police stations, newspapers and registry offices.
If in 1851 Northeastern citizens fought for the right not to be watched by the empire, this fight continues in 2024 and is far from exclusive to the Global South. On the contrary: the states at the center of capitalism are masters at monitoring to punish. Did you know, for example, that what we call Anmeldung was previously called polizeiliche Anmeldung? The old name described its function much more honestly. The Big Brother is real, and it is so wrapped up in racism and class prejudices, and with German bureaucracy (“please request your Termin via fax”), that it works like a Monster who has lost his glasses, stepping on everything and everyone. He lurks in the Bürgeramt, the Ausländerbehörde, the Finanzamt, etc. and makes life in cities hell. You know the drill: he demands Anmeldung after an Umzug, but there is no Termin to do your Anmeldung, so he goes after you and charges you a thousand euros for not doing it. You can even understand why he lost his glasses and doesn’t want to find them: this “clumsiness” chaos makes money.
A need for glasses would be a lame excuse for such turmoil, anyway. Angélica Freitas proves very well that it is not the lack of them that produces brutality. She takes off her glasses not to bother us, but to free herself (us?) from interpretation – it doesn’t always make sense to make sense, and sometimes only by being a little foolish can we navigate the arbitrariness of capitalism. I love when Angélica complains that “making sense is almost an imposition”. Because if we look closely, often the same people who complain that art doesn’t make sense are the first to give up dealing critically with reality. The same people who complain that poetry is a senseless activity, wasted days and days analyzing who applauded who at the Berlinale. What is more nonsense? That, or the Myopic Poems by Angélica Freitas?
What makes less sense: the works in this show, or the fact that, in one of the richest countries in the world, self-employed workers are not protected by the Minimum Wage Law, nor by the terms that regulate freelance work? According to the Federal Statistical Office, around 1.3 million people in Germany work in the cultural sector. Of these, 40% are self-employed, in other words: in the
cultural sector only, there are at almost 500 thousand people, in the fourth largest economy in the world, who live and work without labor law protecting[1]. Isn’t that absurd?
It’s important to ask ourselves not only why this Monster nest is so absurd, but whose twigs are seized to build it, and whose are left alone. For example: while Tesla (whose owner has a fortune of 190 billion dollars) is destroying, in Grünheide, water sources protected by law, people who do not even have the right to the minimum wage are sent to jail because they were unable to pay the fines they got for travelling without ticket in public transport. Now that is much more absurd than writing poems: the fact that 7 thousand people a year are arrested in Germany because, caught 3 times without a ticket, they were unable to pay a fine[2].
At the German language school, I learned that traveling without a ticket was called Schwarzfahren. In my activism I learned that Schwarzfahren is a racist term, and that even more racist are the laws that criminalize poverty – because, if people from so-called “ethnic minorities” are the group most likely to be poor in Germany, then it can only be concluded that the majority of people arrested for traveling without a ticket are from ethnic minorities too. It is precisely there, at this intersection, that the Monster’s twisted criterion (tormenting the poor, while leaving the rich alone) thrives.
Monster is, therefore, the watchdog (and fattening dog) of capital. Among many other forms, it takes the form of bureaucracy – it was fighting against this Monster that the Northeasterners made their zumzumzum in 1851, and it is the same thing that is being fought against in Germany, in 2024. Therefore, hurray for initiatives such as Anmeldung für Alle, the 9-euro-fonds, the Freiheitsfonds, or Wir fahren zusammen.
Speaking of traveling together, both Stephanie Fernandes and Valeska Brinkmann focus on observations made while using public transport. In Bahn Poem, Stephanie uses the Berlin metro network as a starting point, building a continuous and juxtaposed poem, with her trajectories in the city – and the emotional implications of these movements, which are not necessarily fluid. Comings, goings, hellos, goodbyes, disorientation, waiting, boredom, rush – all of this is part of the experience of urban mobility, but also of our emotional life. Stephanie weaves these two worlds together in a refreshing way.
Then in Ringbahn Observatory, Valeska uses poems to record meetings with fellow travelers. It could be simple, and it is, but in times of neoliberal individualism, it’s refreshing to read texts that show that someone is paying attention. You could say: how nosy, taking care of other people’s lives. But attention and vigilance are absolutely different things. Attention is the purest form of generosity, Simone Weil once said. When Valeska describes these interactions, she shows us what humans (and non-humans!) are capable of when they pay attention to each other, when they invest themselves in being attentive to mutual existence. These poems are beautiful, and will be beautiful forever: it is a testimony to our infinite potential for candor, for being understanding.
But Monster doesn’t want us to understand each other: not only does he criminalizes poverty, he also criminalizes survival tactics against it, including solidarity (and isn’t solidarity precisely what happens when we understand each other?)! Did you know that a person who offers a Scheinanmeldung can be penalized with a fine of up to 50 thousand euros[3], because they want to help someone to have the almost-impossible-to-get Anmeldung?
He, Monster, doesn’t want us alive or dead, he wants us as buzzing zombies, obeying rules that make no sense in the face of people’s material reality. Zomzomzombies in the queues at the Ausländerbehörde. In the virtual queue on the Bürgeramt website. In the enormous line to see the Zimmer for the temporary sublet, advertised on WG-Gesucht: a 10m² room, without Anmeldung, outside the Ring, on illegal Kaution – for 450 euros/month! Without Nebenkosten! But without other options (homelessness waiting just around the corner), we take it. And here we go again,
Umzugzombies, annoying our friends, asking for their help with yet another Umzug, the 11th since you came to live in Berlin.
But not all Umzug is bad. There is that of birds: from late winter to late spring, starlings, song thrushes, chiffchaffs, black redstarts, swifts, nightingales, orioles and cuckoos arrive in Germany. This spring, the kingfisher also enters the list, not flying, as it is not from these parts, but in Ana Hupe’s work, Ultramarine Blue. But none of these little birds would get here so easily if they had to show a visa and passport at the borders between countries, Monster on the prowl. Nature is naturally in motion, and there is nothing natural about border control.
The opposite of the haunted zombie of bureaucracy is the migratory bird that, being free, blesses us with its temporary presence. The kingfisher, in particular, is special to any conversation about freedom of movement, as it is both a physical presence and an entity. It is both birdlike and an enchanted spirit: in rural Macumbas like Catimbó and Jurema, the figure of the Marujo Martim Pescador (“Kingfisher Sailor”) is a counter-hegemonic one, “a drunk, black, sailor, [...] an entity in solidarity with the socially marginalized and stigmatized”[4]. The kingfisher that appears in Ana’s work is the synthesis of The Insubordinate: one who does not bend to capital because it belongs to a group and is in eternal movement, even crossing the border between the material and immaterial world, that of the living and of the dead, Orún and Aiê. It is not an Orisha, it is a humanlike entity with the birdlike capacities of dismantling borders, while at the same time connecting territories that borders are supposed to separate. All of Ana’s works go along with these movements, including the others she brings to this exhibition.
Not long ago, Monster put Captain Carola Rackete behind bars, when she was trying to bring to safety 53 people that her team rescued in an inflatable boat, wandering in the same Mediterranean where Ana collected pebbles. Today, the same Monster is somewhere else, preventing humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza. There is no poem that is capable of stopping this – for that, only popular organization. But without poetry it is impossible to endure the world, while we fight for it to change.
1 Data from the Scientific Services of the German Bundestag, February 2021 report: “Working conditions and social security for artists in Germany”
2 “Four months in prison for damages worth 2.90 euros”, June 18, 2023, Süddeutsche Online
3 Federal Registration Act (BMG), § 54 Fine Regulations
4 in “Coexistence and co-Agency of the Marujo Martim Pescador in a family of blood and saint in the Sertão Baiano”, article by Flávio José dos Passos, 31st Brazilian Anthropology Meeting, 12/2018, Brasília/DF.