The Art of Resource Development: Here to Support in the Institution of Art

The following essay attends to the appearance of We Are Here (WAH), a self-organized group of undocumented people based in the Netherlands, within the Dutch art system. Since 2013, WAH members have been hosted by major art institutions, artist residencies and art schools, presenting alongside contemporary artists without significant differentiation, almost as if the organization was itself an artistic one.1 Rather, WAH is a direct-action organization composed of undocumented refugees stuck in the Netherlands, who began organizing under the name in 2012. Since, the group has held several dozen public demonstrations, occupied and inhabited more than fifty buildings as part of a campaign to secure shelter, and become a visible organization in the Dutch media, which often misrepresents the role of Holland’s imperial legacy in the contemporary migration crisis from formerly colonized regions of the global south. The group’s agitation has secured an estimated one hundred and six residence permits, its members a roving group of those still waiting for Dutch papers or to begin an asylum process elsewhere.2

The example of WAH’s seamless and unaccompanied appearance within the Dutch art system, when its members are unrecognized by the state, provides a telling contrast to the abundance of contemporary art that works with undocumented people. Recent examples include the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s creation of a functional shelter and social space for refugees within the gallery space at SMAK, Ghent in 2017. The artist also collaborated with ‘real refugees’ as Metropolis M reports, to create a replica of the exhibited Congolese village and human zoo shown in Belgium ‘world expos’ during the 19th and mid 20th centuries, one of which was staged at the site of SMAK. While the artist certainly implicates the museum in a long history of colonial dispossession, the conditions of the collaboration – both to offer shelter and to author ‘with real refugees’ – remains uneasy.3 Another is the rationale of Manifesta 12 in 2018, the ‘nomadic biennale,’ which chose Palermo as the site for the 2018 exhibition because of the city’s widely reported rise in undocumented population from the Mediterranean basin.4 We could go so far as to say that collaborations between artists and groups of undocumented people constitutes a standard formal practice of art in the current period, spurred by (and dated to) the same processes of economic globalization that have dictated the global landscape of contemporary art in the era of artistic nomadism, ‘biennialization,’ and chain museums and art fairs.5

Unlike the contemporaneous and common circumstance of an art work co-constituted with a group of undocumented people, WAH appeared without an apparent artist collaborator. How has WAH appeared on the podiums and in the white boxes of Dutch art institutions, managing at times to benefit from ever receding cultural funding, when its members have virtually no rights in the EU? Without a brokering European artist in sight, WAH’s appearance in art seems to occur directly between the direct-action group and art institutions themselves, the implausibility of this relatively frequent phenomenon unremarked upon in the space of its occurrence. Rather than the goodwill of leaders within the Dutch art world, this illusion of direct partnership has been produced by Here to Support, an organization founded by two white Dutch women, former dancer Savannah Koolen, and artist Elke Uitentuis in 2013. Here to Support began as the ‘We Are Here Cooperative,’ a satellite organization of We Are Here run by Koolen and Uitentuis. It is under this name that the majority of the art events were produced. The organization was retitled ‘Here to Support’ as part of expanding its operations beyond the art field. I have chosen to use the name Here to Support for clarity, and as this is the name of the existing organization.6 The sole purpose of Here to Support’s engagements with cultural institutions was to funnel art’s resources toward WAH; Here to Support itself does not author works of art with or about WAH.

Rather than a winning example of artistic solidarity, I seek to address Here to Support’s refusal to collaboratively author with WAH as an attempt to create the conditions for undocumented people to represent themselves within the institution of art.7 This refusal, on the one hand, identifies a salient limit of contemporary collaborative artistic practice amidst the ongoing crisis of statelessness fueled by economic globalization, or in other words, the free movement of capital but not of people. On the other hand, as I argue, this practice merges with the governance structures of contemporary NGOs. Here to Support seeks to exploit the particular capabilities of art to aid the causes of undocumented groups: such as the ability, for example, to pay the group in the absence of their legal right to work. Büchel’s creation of a shelter is a similar gesture of an artist utilizing the resources of an art institution to aid the causes of undocumented groups; a practice termed ‘infrastructural critique.’ Here to Support however sought to employ the art institution while circumventing the representational problems posed by collaborative authorship between structurally unequal participants. I consider this strategy as an attempted amelioration of contemporary art’s standard partnerships with undocumented people, and as presenting new and critically informative political problems with regard to working across hierarchies of state recognition within Western institutions.

I argue that Here to Support’s silent choreography began its life as an art practice, rather than the machinations of the NGO-like entity it has become. This practice developed as a response to the problem of collaborative authorship in situations of material inequity, the ubiquitous equator between documented artist and undocumented participant. To historically ground the dispossessive structures of ‘economic globalization’ and give a basis to this insurmountable authorship equator, I depart from what the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva names as the entwined ‘total violence’ and ‘total value’ extraction of colonization and enslavement of Africans that has shaped the global distribution of power, resources and life chances.8 Insisting on Here to Support’s activities as art offers a productive counter example to the employment of a re-radicalized understanding of artistic autonomy by recent artists’ social practices that seek to assist the undocumented, and a renewed critical appraisal of claims for art as a privileged site for working for social justice. Works which espouse a critical autonomy (the claiming of art’s resources by an artist – space, money, time or other material or immaterial goods – which are then offered to undocumented persons or groups) have been termed ‘infrastructural critique’ and situated as a historical-critical response to institutional critique, most thoroughly by the theorist Marina Vishmidt.9 Here to Support’s sustained negation of authorship both participates in and seeks to remedy this form of contemporary practice. I expressly depart from Vishmidt’s article on infrastructural critique also because she identifies WAH’s use of the art institution as an example of the infrastructural gesture, yet it is not the focus of her article to delve into the political parameters of the group’s entrance into the ‘institution of art.’10 Vishmidt’s noting of WAH is in a sense paradigmatic of the group’s reception in art, i.e. that being as the art institutional landscape is saturated with activist entities, their arrival can be cited without question of the conditions of their appearance. Instead, we will see how the claims of artistic autonomy as or in the service of political autonomy resident in renowned works by the artists Tania Bruguera and Ahmet Öğüt are reinterpreted by Here to Support’s refusal of authorship, the normatively required basis of artistic autonomy. In its suppression or management (not eradication) of the standard authorship problem, Here to Support’s activities bring to the foreground the bind of reparation at the heart of all such practices, one located in the politics of support, aid and the question of material solidarity between constituencies ultimately located on either side of the border between empire and periphery. Rather than an important example, Here to Support makes clear the impossibility – yet ongoing imperative – of what we might call the attempt at reparational authorship, or collaborative production in the context of state violence and exclusion.

To briefly address the context of Here to Support’s formation: We Are Here was inaugurated on September 4th 2012, when a loosely organized tent camp of refugees in Amsterdam first self-identified to the press, and began to organize for shelter with assistance from local squatting initiatives. The organization of WAH coincided (or all three were mutually stimulating) with two other politicized occupations of urban space in Amsterdam that year: the Occupy wall street camp and the seizure of empty property by squatters groups as demonstration against the criminalization of squatting legislated that same year. Much of the press focused on the initial demonstrations around the first evictions, but protests continued in the form of occupying vacant buildings.11 These squatters groups provided assistance by helping to open and secure vacant buildings, such as WAH’s first major occupation of a church in the center of the city. In more recent years, these groups have helped to broker deals with the city for WAH’s legal occupation of vacant buildings.12 The occupation of vacant property continues to be WAH’s main form of civil disobedience as well as the condition of their livelihood. It is within this larger milieu of support that Here to Support was formed in 2013. It is important to note that Here to Support is not in WAH, as membership is only through an undocumented status. Decisions about the internal organization of the group, its goals and protest strategies are devised within WAH itself. This separation sets Here to Support’s practice resolutely apart from parallel works of infrastructural critique, such as Tania Bruguera’s celebrated Immigrant Movement International (2011-ongoing), an ‘artist-initiated socio-political movement’ which I’ll shortly discuss in more detail.13 Rather than formed by the institution of art, WAH is an autonomous group (by which I mean a collective which is self-organized) who is positioned to benefit from what art can offer. This positioning – the management involved in its execution – is what constitutes Here to Support’s practice.

Here to Support was initially founded as an ‘action center’ which began to carefully construct these intersections between WAH and the Dutch art system. This work takes various forms, but generally operates in the following way: an art institution (school, museum, art center) invites one of the women who head Here to Support to participate in an event. Or, as artists, they apply for residencies, funding or exhibition opportunities within the still functional Dutch cultural sector. Having secured a particular engagement, they instead provide it to WAH members to make themselves visible as a political organization; one which has a developed critique of the Netherlands, but also of nationhood more generally.14 WAH’s status as a political organization is what is most easily denied in their representation in the Dutch media, where their portrayal runs the gamut from the centrist screed of ‘unfortunates’ to the far right refrain of thieves and dependents. Much far right focus has centered around WAH’s ‘criminality’ in alignment with squatters, with an increasing number of ‘law and order’ trolls leaving hateful comments on the groups’ Facebook page.15 The space of art, by contrast, has offered WAH the conditions needed to extrapolate the group’s motivating critique of European exclusion as well as their demands. Here to Support’s practice has resulted in WAH members appearing in dozens of art and cultural institutions in the Netherlands, including the Jan van Eyck Academie, Frascati Theater, Nuit Blanche in Brussels and BAK and CASCO in Utrecht, thus mediating the groups’ presence on the national stage.16

I return to a comparison with Bruguera’s ‘artist-initiated socio-political movement’ to further isolate the character of Here to Support’s practice. While its address is ‘global rights’ for the undocumented, Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International (IMI, 2011-ongoing) is made possible by a U.S. network of art institutions and their patronage systems.17 Bruguera conceives of this relation as ‘black mailing’ the institution, where the money she extracts as an artist is utilized for the construction of a direct-action campaign and a community space in Corona, Queens.18 For Bruguera, ‘blackmailing’ is an artistic exercise, and the term names her posturing in relation to the project of infrastructural critique.19 Made clear in IMI, blackmailing the institution is part of the total work, an art practice in and of itself, which offers immediate access to funds and resources, but also inscribes the artist as the dependent center – materially, conceptually, and symbolically – of what is described as a ‘long-term project intended to create a lasting, global movement.’20 Bruguera precisely understands her authorship as the dependent center, required for the social center in Queens to remain open. Towards this end, she frames the project as a work of durational performance, which imports the focus on a radical extension of temporal structure from 1970s works of performance, such as by artists like Marina Abramović or Tehching Hsieh, onto a multi sited social practice art work.21 This move transforms the 1970s idea of ‘radical duration’ in performance from a terminus in formal experimentation by incorporating it into IMI, an art work which has the express goal of legally measurable social change. In effect, Bruguera’s employment of durational performance time within IMI manages to link a central problem in performance art, the representation of durational performance, to a critical problematic in critical race studies, namely the measurement of long term, incremental social change.22 In the same gesture, Bruguera’s emphasis on duration has also ensured continued institutional sustenance for IMI, whose storefront is still open today eight years on. Functionally successful, the project cannot disentangle itself from Bruguera, despite its rhetorical desire to do so: IMI’s website for example, while listing Bruguera as the initiator, uses a collective first person, ‘we’ and ‘our,’ to describe the history of the project’s first year. While Bruguera was undoubtedly working in concert with a range of constituents, the presentation of IMI as a collective movement is easily undone. One immediate example is the project’s press section, which contains a plentitude of articles inevitably centering the artist. While it is possible IMI could develop into a sustainable movement, it would undoubtedly continue to bear the artist’s name. I point to this desire and failure to construct a collectively organized social movement not to fault the artist, but to identify the essential problem with artistic authorship in an avowed scenario of infrastructural critique. The site of artistic authorship – the hierarchy of voice and patronage that it governs – is indelibly caught up with the same structures of power that distribute the borders of political community. The use of artistic authorship’s particular autonomy against the structures making it possible is the classic work of institutional critique; indeed the imbrication of the art institution with state violence its hallowed subject.23 It is this form of authorship as a site of paradoxical power – one able to critique its conditions of being – that Bruguera and Here to Support both harness but attempt to displace, seeking to further release their respective political projects from the binds of artistic hierarchy. Where Bruguera leans in towards her inevitable position, hoping singular authorship will develop into collective movement, Here to Support inserts an existing social movement into the temporary frameworks of autonomy art enables, utilizing art’s financial and institutional structures in the absence of an identifiable author. Both projects recognize themselves as durational, requiring the documented artist (visible or invisible) for sustained manipulation of the institution. I draw together this comparison not to locate critical winners and losers, or condemn one as part of a valorization project of the other (perhaps the most popular method of analyzing Left oriented art) but to call attention to a shared infrastructural strategy with a crucial distinction: one attempts to negate the authorship function altogether, disappearing from the scene.

Here to Support’s employment of the institution of art is not a marked negation (‘black mail’) but rather a very plain instrumentalization, visible if one chooses to look at the seams and contours of WAH’s movement in the art system. For example, WAH has appeared as part of various art initiatives at BAK in Utrecht, so much so that the institution has a bio page on its website for the group. Here to Support does appear in this bio, but is positioned almost as an art project the undocumented group had formed itself, rather than the brokering organization between BAK and WAH.24 Unlike the paradox of artistic negation characteristic of the avant garde – that it must be announced and therefore exists in spite of itself – Here to Support recedes into the sidelines, under cover of reproductive work. By this I mean that they often appear as women doing administrative and sometimes domestic work for WAH, although they have often designed and executed the art event they literally clean up after. Another way to understand this artistic positioning would be through Hito Steyerl’s phrase for ‘institutional critique’s third wave, or the artist’s integration into precarity.’25 After extrapolating that the act of critique itself has been dismantled by ‘neoliberal institutional criticism,’ by which she means literally the defunding of public institutions in neoliberal governance, she furthers: ‘this produces an ambivalent subject which develops multiple strategies for dealing with its dislocation.’26 Here to Support is an institutionalization of such strategies, a formation materialized through the work of two seasoned members of the artistic precariat, its founders well versed in ‘developing multiple strategies for dealing with their dislocation.’ Steyerl continues: ‘(this subject) is on the one side being adapted to the needs of ever more precarious living conditions. On the other, there seems to have hardly ever been more need for organizing the new struggles and desires that this constituency might embrace.’27 Here to Support represents an attempt to connect artistic precarity, and the strategies this subject has developed to the aligned but more steeply impacted precarious lives of the undocumented. Their practice thus temporarily empties art from its backing, harnessing WAH to the social and financial valuation that the institution of art can still offer. This position manifests in a flickering visibility; at times they must claim what they are doing as art in order to get it done, at other moments they successfully remain absent from the frame. Even as budget cuts continue to dismantle public institutions and funding for the arts in the Netherlands, social practice, for its ability to rhetorically plug the gaps left by a receding welfare state is the form of art that can be justified within austerity. WAH is inserted where an artists’ social practice would normatively be: how then to name Here to Support’s productions? The question has bearing in excess of the staid ‘is it art?’ for it equally concerns the parameters of resource strategy for an urgent social movement, and the conditions of visibility around the practice of solidarity as it is increasingly attempted in, as, or instead of, art.

This next section reviews recent theories of artistic autonomy that argue for its contemporary political capabilities, against decades of post 60s art and theory that shunned the term. Here to Support and the institutional landscape it enters into has been significantly informed by this body of critical literature and its review allows us to discern their work as what the art theorist Sven Lütticken terms an ‘aesthetic practice.’ Subsequently, I argue that their employment of performative negation, the basis of their aesthetic practice, resident in their present disappearance or back stage management, while responding to an impasse of collaborative authorship also reproduces a set of normative relations to insidious detriment. One is particular to the invisibility of gendered labor and one to the NGO as contemporary pillar of what Ferreira da Silva calls ‘colonial architecture,’ or the set of expropriating apparatus stemming from African slavery and the seizure of Indigenous land.28 In the latter sense, I will show Here to Support’s evolution from aesthetic practice to NGO.

Alongside renewed artistic investment in autonomy came accompanying theories which test the possible relationship between political and artistic autonomy.29 Tracing the notion of autonomy from 18th century aesthetic theory to contemporary art, art theorist Sven Lütticken finds that while artistic and political autonomy remain resolutely distinct, never able to fully overlap, a ‘productive back and forth’ can exist, ‘even within single practices.’30 The crux of this argument lies in a separation of the aesthetic from art and its institutions, with the aesthetic being ‘that which is a constant renegotiation of autonomy and heteronomy.’31 Lütticken draws on Rancière’s idea of the ‘aesthetic regime’ of art, which negotiates the boundary between art (and its institutions) and life.32 For Rancière, the aesthetic regime keeps art alive. Art without the aesthetic regime is art pushed to either ‘entropic’ extreme of the art/life dialectic – as entirely self-referential, absent any critical purchase or entirely absorbed into life – both of which entail the end of art as such. Lütticken extracts the movement of the ‘aesthetic regime’ as its own destabilizing entity, reformulating it as a possible ‘aesthetic practice.’ Aesthetic practice re-politicizes artistic autonomy as an ‘act rather than a fact,’ a gesture which tests the border of arts’ separation from the world. Temporally bounded, aesthetic practice is a conception of autonomy as unstable and as always in dialogue with heteronomy, rather than the fixed fact of artistic autonomy (the enduring autonomy of modernist painting or sculpture) claimed by mid-century art criticism. Rather than either a political or artistic certainty, Lütticken extrapolates this newfound autonomy as a ‘persistent problem, and artistic practice becomes properly aesthetic practice when problematizing the limits of art and of artistic autonomy.’33 Aesthetic practice is then that which takes place in confrontation with art and artistic autonomy, but which itself is not exactly, or always a work of art. Such a concept helpfully describes the work of Here to Support and could also apply to any number of operations within the field: Lütticken names the activist group Gulf Labor, which organized against the labor practices of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and we could add the boycotts of biennales that have persisted since Occupy, at Sydney (2014) Sao Paulo (2015) and most recently, the Whitney (2019). Further, this model allows the connection of art adjacent political activities with the aesthetics of protest, such as recent ceremonies by Extinction Rebellion in London.34

While it is difficult to physically see, Here to Support’s persistent management of their authorship is an instantiation of aesthetic practice in its ongoing attempt to allow WAH to appear within political community via the platforms of art. What I mean by this is that the undocumented are a structurally invisible population, lacking the rights of citizenship that would entail representation (the ability to speak and be heard) in the political community of the EU.35 As works of infrastructural critique claim to provide their autonomy to the cause of statelessness, Here to Support challenges the possibility of artistically nominated (and therefore inherently temporary) autonomy through placing the speaking subjects of a hard won political autonomy (aka subjects of a self-organized political movement) in the institution of art. ‘Autonomy’ here remains endlessly difficult, as WAH are of course subject to the force of the Dutch immigration service; as a group they are the inverse of the sovereign’s ultimate power. Here to Support’s productions make visible however how the group’s processes, strategies and internal legislation – perhaps akin to the ‘self-legislating’ quality of artistic autonomy – have secured a degree of livability in the Netherlands, a basis which makes possible a fragile political autonomy, despite overwhelming exclusion. One salient example is the system of food procurement, transportation and preparation WAH developed to feed its’ constituents in multiple squatted residencies, a process made visible by Here to Support in a cook book project that described it and its common recipes. Lütticken stresses that autonomy is ‘an exceptional occurrence in the realm of established, factual relations – including art and its institutions’ as part of designating the temporally bounded ‘act’ of aesthetic practice. Here to Support posit instead a sustained act of solidarity in support of WAH, redefining the meaning of duration in temporally grounded conceptions of autonomy, such as we have seen in Lütticken and Bruguera. Further, Here to Support’s aesthetic practice identifies the limits of re-politicized conceptions of artistic autonomy, pointing out how when the unaffiliated undocumented (the stateless of IMI or Büchel’s project) appear within an ‘art work’ they remain a ‘stateless’ feature of that work, still relegated to the periphery at the side of the author.

Carolien Gehrels, Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal, Beyond Allegories: Resolution No. III ‘Political Representation Beyond Citizenship’ presented by Yoonis Osman Nuur (We Are Here) and artist and initiator of Silent University Ahmet Öğüt, 2014, Amsterdam, Netherlands, courtesy Jonas Staal, photo by Roos van Trommelen.

Here to Support, by contrast, attempts to answer the question of the relationship between artistic and political autonomy central to contemporary social practice and theory through a practice which lands a political movement in the institution of art, absent art and artist, taking ‘infrastructure’ to its barest of bones. Precisely in its problematization of recent social practice, Here to Support produces an empty infrastructural frame – the artists’ talk, or the studio visit, or the exhibition – which they relinquish to WAH for fulfillment. Lütticken also identifies that ‘while an act’s aesthetic and political qualities may never quite converge, some acts may function in different registers simultaneously, or successively. It may precisely be the passage from one aspect to the other that is of most interest – both politically and aesthetically.’36 Where procurement of a negative frame constitutes Here to Support’s ‘aesthetic practice,’ the events produced within them precisely toggle between the frame of Here to Support’s making, and WAH’s occupation of the institution of art. Another way to look at this might be through WAH’s manifesto, which names their current condition as ‘living in a political and legal vacuum.’37 Here to Support temporarily transposes this vacuum from a legal to an aesthetic loop hole, by reincarnating it within the art institution, effectively procuring an ‘aesthetic’ appearance (allowing WAH temporarily into political community, where they speak without accompaniment) under the guise of art.

In a central discussion of the Gulf Labor Coalition, Lütticken argues that the group ‘put (migrant) laborers, these sub-subjects, on the agenda as stubborn and opaque persons, rather than as purely abstracted labor power.’38 ‘Aesthetic practice’ here is thus that which makes visible the way that artistic labor – in all its forms as the production, distribution and circulation of art – enables or participates in the separation of such ‘cultural’ labor from the forms of precarious labor produced in economic globalization. Lütticken points to how Gulf Labor identifies artistic labor within a steep hierarchical separation of ‘performance based labor’ in a ‘genuinely aesthetic economy,’ or the way that artistic work is bound up with the ‘performance based labors’ of neoliberal capital, the service based economy of which depends on increased precarity and undocumented labor.39 In other words, the group isolates ‘precarity’ as a disproportionately shared site for cultural workers and migrant workers. The protest withheld artistic labor (artists like Walid Raad’s refused sale to the Guggenheim) in order to halt the exploitative conditions of construction, effectively ‘putting sub-subjects, on the agenda as stubborn and opaque persons’ through a structural equation with artistic work. By contrast, Here to Support seeks to furnish a situation where ‘opaque persons’ speak themselves. In so doing, they obfuscate their own practice, paralleling the invisibility of reproduction in capital at large. While the suppression of their authorship responds to a constitutive problem in adjacent practices, it also disallows the joining up of two forms of alienated labor as is made evident in the case of Gulf Labor’s protest. Without this connection – without being able to identify Here to Support as ‘producers’ in the Benjaminian sense – they deliver an illusion which carries with it its own compromises.

Towards illustrating how Here to Support’s compromise manifests, I turn to a particular engagement alongside the artist Ahmet Öğüt. The above image documents a panel that took place as part of ‘Beyond Allegories,’ an artwork as congress held in Amsterdam’s city hall in 2014. Produced by the artist Jonas Staal, the congress was made in collaboration with local politicians in Amsterdam and was composed of talks dedicated to pressing social problems. Titled ‘Representation Beyond Citizenship’ the panel pictured proposed self-initiated educational initiatives as a method of civic enfranchisement in the absence of citizenship.

On the left is Yoonis Osman Nuur, a Somalian refugee and WAH member, who spoke as a representative of the We Are Here Academy.40 WAH and Here to Support instigated the free school as the educational arm of the group’s direct-action activities. The We are Here Academy prepared WAH members for state citizenship tests and interviews, taught the undocumented about Dutch law and available recourse to European human rights law, and recruited local activists and academics to run courses on the history and practice of direct-action campaigns. On the right is the Turkish-Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt, who initiated the project The Silent University in 2012. The Silent University (SU) is an art work, dubbed an ‘autonomous knowledge exchange platform’ instigated and launched by Öğüt with the goal that it is ultimately run by undocumented people. The SU takes the form of an academic program, taught by migrants who are ‘unable to use their skills’ – their professional or academic training – because of their illegal status in Europe.41 The SU is an internationally recognized art work. Its first instantiation was at the Tate Modern in London, and it has since been hosted in many cities around Europe, at museums and universities alike. Öğüt has been the recipient of multiple awards, specifically the Visible Award, a significant cash prize for art that connects to ‘emancipatory social change.’42 Aside from the structural locations of these two pedagogical organizations (an art work as school and a school as part of an active direct-action organization) the subjects of the image exist on opposite sides of state recognition. Regardless of political identification (Öğüt identifies as Turkish-Kurdish and is a Turkish national) Nuur is an undocumented refugee unable to freely cross international borders, and Öğüt is a documented artist who frequently does so as part of his labor function. I assert this difference in their positions in relation to the state not to prescribe the actions of either actor or even to suggest a qualitative difference in the two organizations, but rather because the implications in terms of the stakes of their discussed activity – for Nuur, organizing for his life, for Öğüt, as part of a life’s work – was not an aspect of their public conversation. Instead, Nuur became a rights bearing citizen, and Öğüt a more steeply ingrained activist than the requirements of an artistic career feasibly allow.

Rather than argue for or against this elision of structural location, this moment demonstrates how Here to Support’s work creates a continuous illusion of WAH’s inclusion in European political community through the uninterrupted and seemingly unmediated equivalency with Öğüt and his work. This illusion reaped direct material value: on a platform next to the SU, WAH was offered six thousand euro and partnership with GroenLinks, the Green party in the Netherlands.43 Less immediately apparent are the various vectors of value absorbed through WAH’s new found relation to the SU’s status as an art work, which carries financial, critical and institutional value in its considerable success and circulation. What this matrix of value means to WAH’s project is for a longer discussion; I note it here as part of Here to Support’s operation. Rather than ‘transforming the cultural institution from the inside out,’ Here to Support provides – in its unannounced delivery of WAH – a form of legitimacy to art and its institutions that is unwarranted. Where this entire text has sought to describe what kind of relations current art has to undocumented social movements, equivalency – art and political autonomy at the same time – is shown, in theory and practice, to be impossible.

Here to Support’s march toward the total suppression of authorship concluded with the groups’ reification into an NGO like entity, of the social-entrepreneurship type that increasingly allows the integration of corporate processes into the public sector.44 This is evident in Here to Support’s nomination for awards such as, ironically, the European Citizenship Award 2017, which ‘recognizes innovative initiatives and contributions which give real substance to European values, create ownership of public space, and improve the lives of our communities in terms of democracy, social justice and universal access to rights.’45 A French organization called the ‘European Civic Forum’ administers these awards, described as a ‘transnational network that brings together over one hundred associations and NGOS across twenty seven countries in Europe.’46 Where the imbrication of non-governmental practice and neoliberal globalization has been well documented, the figure of the ‘social entrepreneur’ and the ‘social enterprise,’ both of which make up the majority of the award’s nominees, are perhaps less well known. Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s work on microfinance provides contextualization, identifying both the structure of entrepreneurship and the language of empowerment as destabilizing agents of subsistence commons in the global south through new forms of development enterprise. Such non-governmental entities ‘transform (poor womens’) daily micro-reproductive/marketing activities into sources of value creation and accumulation for others.’47 Federici’s work from the 1990s has elucidated the ways that microfinance – and other iterations of contemporary ‘aid’ to the global south – structure debtor/creditor relationships which function to consolidate wealth on a global scale. I cite this scholarship to identify that forms of social entrepreneurship signal a function to concentrate wealth in the global north; as such the European Citizenship Award inevitably serves the interests of Europe beyond its stated generation of humanist ‘values’ for the continent, despite its sponsoring of a number of NGOs focused on the undocumented in the EU. Such organizations further obscure the necessity of the category of statelessness for the European economic project. The language of social enterprise – with its ‘innovative’ approach to human rights – illustrates the intimate relations of contemporary social practice, non-governmental organizations, and multinational capital.

While the façade of the social enterprise offers yet another formal device through which Here to Support can recess even further from authorship, its calcification produced the ultimate negation: congealment into a ‘positive institution of social change’ or as philosopher Theodor W. Adorno put it, when politically committed intentions ‘negate art as well as themselves’ by exiting the limited space of art’s separation and integrating fully with capital.48 Namely, the group’s ultimate form is that which its earliest experiments resolutely reject, as micro performances which attempt to resist a tangible relation of aid. The institution it inevitably becomes – surely through attachment to funding streams – should serve as a warning to all such practical artist allies, wherein the suppression of the invisible aesthetic hand returns as arguably something more violent than the art it sought to undo. The example of Here to Support further allows more immediate appreciation of the aesthetic and logical likenesses of recent social practice (Bruguera and Öğüt alike) and the NGO industrial complex, the ever-developing forms of which arguably parallel the expansion of the social genre in the fine arts. Shared funding sources, platforms and aesthetic or linguistic typologies constitute the increasing imbrication of art and development regimes: Renzo Martens’ ‘Institute for Human Activities,’ ‘an arts-based development program in the Democratic Republic of Congo,’ provides another Dutch example. It is worth noting the total fluidity between art and ‘global development’ in Martens’ project, with the artist taking up a fellowship at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs as a ‘World Fellow.’49 An earlier project of Martens’ expressly connected art and development in a ‘critical project’ of arts led gentrification for the Congo, a process meant to generate wealth for plantation workers.50 The apparent lack of critique of global development, of its connection with the colonial expropriation the project purports to indict and remedy, or even a grasp of the basic function of gentrification as not simply a wealth generating but an inherently dispossessive and divisive spatial regime, are easy summaries of Martens’ project. More insidious is its celebration in the fields of both art and global development, consolidating a form of a practice that forecloses their separation. Martens work signals the coming of an unfortunate and perhaps inevitable partnership. Here to Support’s earlier productions, now of a bygone moment, did generate something in the way of immanent critique, as delivered by the ‘opaque’ persons their practice procured and imaged. The following image was taken at a WAH protest, by an associate of Here to Support.

Untitled, undated, copyright Manette Ingenegeren.

It depicts a WAH activist holding a sign with the famous anti-colonial quote by Thomas Sankara, the Marxist leader of independent Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. It reads ‘he who feeds you, controls you.’ Plainly, WAH works with Here to Support and all allies within an overall program of strategic visibility, which is clearly on display in this image: the group accepts aid while simultaneously identifying it as a method of control. Where Here to Support may have gone the way of Martens, its demise signaling perhaps a new era of social art in capital, WAH’s critique of aid reverberates through Here to Support’s foregone ‘management system.’

1 Deanna Dadusc, ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants’ struggle in the Netherlands,’ in Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy, eds. Pierpaolo Mudu and Sutapa Chattopadhyay (London;New York: Routledge, 2016) 275-284.
2 We Are Here’s website provides a helpful history of the group. ‘Over Ons / About Us: We Are Here,’ accessed January 14, 2019, http://wijzijnhier.org/who-we-are/. Marieke Borren details the Dutch policy of ‘non-deportment,’ unique among Western border regimes, which is the situation many in We Are Here find themselves. Marieke Borren, ‘The Human Condition of Being Undeportable,’ Open, accessed January 14, 2019, http://www.onlineopen.org/the-human-condition-of-being-undeportable. More recently however the group has begun to face deportation and criminalization. In December 2018, despite extensive protests by We Are Here members and allies, one deportation of a refugee to Sudan occurred, with three other Sudanese refugees imprisoned and facing deportation. ‘The Netherlands Deports Sudanese to Khartoum,’ Radio Dabanga, accessed April 27, 2019, https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/all-news/article/netherlands-deport-sudanese-to-khartoum. In 2019, a We Are Here member faced criminal charges for civil disobedience, the first time such action has been taken against one of the activists. ‘We Are Here Press Release April 1l’ accessed April 27, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/events/556059584916072/.
3 Ory Dessau, ‘The Museum as a Shelter for Refugees – Christoph Büchel at SMAK, Ghent,’ Metropolis M, accessed January 15,
2019, https://www.metropolism.com/en/features/33022_christoph_buechel_smak.
4 Dorian Batycka, ‘At Manifesta, Artists Address Italy’s Migrant Crisis,” Hyperallergic, accessed January 15, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/459887/at-manifesta-artists-address-italys-migrant-crisis/. ‘Manifesta 12,’ accessed April 27, 2019, https://manifesta.org/biennials/manifesta-12/.
5 In her now canonical study of site specific art and the rise of ‘artistic nomadism,’ Miwon Kwon references the parallel situation of ‘the migrant and the refugee’ in the introduction but does not further theorize the relationship between the two, or how the forms of art she historicizes, site specific art in contemporary biennales dating from the 1990s, often incorporate what she identifies as its ‘other,’ the refugee. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) 166.
6 Uitentuis left the organization in 2016 and Koolen continues as its coordinator. ‘Organization,’ Here to Support, accessed January 15, 2019, http://heretosupport.nl/organization/. For a recent biography of Uitentuis see: ‘Elke Uitentuis’ Instituto Buena Bista, accessed January 15, 2019, https://institutobuenabista.com/2017/elke-uitentuis/.
7 By the phrase ‘institution of art’ used throughout this text, I draw on Andrea Fraser’s definition as not only the museum, ‘nor even only the sites of production, distribution, and reception of art, but the entire field of art as a social universe….It also includes the sites of the production of art discourse…and the sites of the production of the producers of art discourse: studio art, art history, and now, curatorial studies programs.’ Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,’ in Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) 412.
8 Denise Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,’ The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 82.
9 Marina Vishmidt, ‘Beneath the Atelier, the Desert: Critique, Institutional and Infastructural,’ in Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists: A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice, eds. Tom Holert and Maria Hlavajova (Utrecht: Valiz/BAK, 2018) 218-235.
10 Vishmidt, ‘Beneath the Atelier,’ 222.
11 Toby Sterling, ‘Violent Protests after Dutch Outlaw Squatting,’ Washington Post, October 1, 2010.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100105354.html.
12 Dadusc, ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants’ struggle in the Netherlands,’
13 ‘About Immigrant Movement International,’ Creative Time, accessed January 15, 2019, https://creativetime.org/projects/immigrant-movement-international/
14 See image in ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants struggle in the Netherlands,’ Wij Zijn Hier, accessed January 15, 2019,
http://wijzijnhier.org/tijdslijn/squatting-and-the-undocumented-migrants-struggle-in-the-netherlands/.
15 Sarah Tilotta, ‘Worse than Wilders? Why Refugees Fear Status Quo in Netherlands,’ CNN, accessed January 15, 2019,
https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/14/europe/netherlands-refugees-wilders-we-are-here/index.html. ‘Succesvolle Vluchteling: Krakers We Are Here Moeten Gewoon Terug,’ Telegraaf, June 5, 2018, accessed January 15, 2019,
https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2125456/succesvolle-vluchteling-krakers-we-are-here-moeten-gewoon-terug.
16 A selection of the dates of these appearances: At BAK, Utrecht in November 2013, multiple events at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht between February 2014 and March 2015, at the Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, January 2015, at CASCO, Utrecht multiple dates throughout 2014 and 2015, at the Deutches Theater Berlin in June 2015.
17 ‘Partners and Collaborators,’ Immigrant Movement International, accessed January 15, 2019,
http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress/partners-and-collaborators/.
18 For a helpful overview of the project: Larne Abse Gogarty, “‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics,” Third Text 31, no. 1 (October, 2017) 117-132.
19 Tania Bruguera, Artist talk as part of ‘Common’ event, Trashing Performance series, Toynbee Theater, London, UK, October 29, 2011, accessed April 23, 2019, http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/trashing-performance/home.html.
20 ‘Years One, Two and Three,’ Immigrant Movement International, accessed January 15, 2019,
http://immigrant-movement.us/wordpress/year-one/.
21 For a historical account of endurance performance: Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, (New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012). For an account of endurance performance in interaction with contemporary forms of labor, see: E. C. Feiss, ‘Endurance Performance: Post-2008,’ Afterall,” accessed April 27, 2019.
https://www.afterall.org/online/endurance-performance-post-2008#.XMUVk5NKiqA.
22 I locate the problem of representing incremental, legally obtained social change from a debate between Critical Legal and Critical Race scholars around the utility of civil rights in the U.S. context. This context is pertinent to IMI because the project addresses the U.S. legal system. For a summary of this debate: Wendy Brown, ‘Rights and Losses,’ in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995). 23 A canonical example, consistently cited as one of the first works of institutional critique, would be Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), a work which indicted MoMA’s board and directorship for connections to the Vietnam war.
24 ‘We Are Here’ BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, accessed April 25, 2019, https://www.bakonline.org/person/we-are-here-2/.
25 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Institution of Critique,’ Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2009) 491.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 492.
28 Ferreira da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics,’ 82.
29 Peter Osborne, ‘Theorem 4: Autonomy; Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?,’ onlineopen.org, May 1, 2012, Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice After Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt. Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art, London Berlin: Mute, 2016.
30 Sven Lütticken, ‘Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,’ Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2014): 83.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Aamna Mohdin and Molly Blackall, ‘Extinction Rebellion Holds Hyde Park Rally to Mark ‘pause’ in Protests,’ The Guardian, April 25, 2019, sec. Environment.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/extinction-rebellion-holds-hyde-park-rally-to-mark-pause-in-protests.
35 ‘Political community’ is the theorist Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966) 296. Many theorists have drawn on Arendt to address the current crisis of the undocumented in the EU, reformulating claims about political visibility and agency in the contemporary moment that apply to WAH’s formation and subsequent appearance in art but that I don’t have space for in this text. One examples include: Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2004) 118. Jacques Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2 (June 10, 2004): 297–310. 36 Ibid., 91.
37 ‘Squatting and the undocumented migrants struggle in the Netherlands,’ Wij Zijn Hier, accessed January 15, 2019,
http://wijzijnhier.org/tijdslijn/squatting-and-the-undocumented-migrants-struggle-in-the-netherlands/.
38 Lütticken, ‘Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice,’ 92.
39 Sassen points out how the rise of the financial services industry in ‘global cities,’ has entailed an increase in undocumented or migrant labor in services that support that industry. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its discontents: essays on the new mobility of people and money, (New York: New Press, 1998)
40 ‘We Are Here Academy,’ Here to Support, accessed January 15, 2019, http://heretosupport.nl/we-are-here-academy-3/.
41 ‘Home,’ The Silent University, accessed January 15, 2019, http://thesilentuniversity.org/.
42 ‘Shortlisted Projects for the 2019 Award,’ Visible Project, accessed January 15, 2019,
https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/the-ten-shortlisted-projects/.
43 E. C. Feiss, ‘On Beyond Allegories,’ Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, August 19, 2014, accessed January 15, 2019, http://www.onlineopen.org/essays/on-beyond-allegories.
44 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015) 49.
45 ‘Mission,’ European Civic Forum, accessed January 15, 2019, http://civic-forum.eu/civic-forum/missions 46 Ibid.
47 Max Haiven ‘Occupations and The Struggle Over Reproduction: An Interview with Silvia Federici,’ Politics and Culture, March
10, 2014, accessed January 15, 2019,
https://politicsandculture.org/2014/03/09/occupations-and-the-struggle-over-reproduction-an-interview-with-silvia-federici/.
48 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment,’ in Aesthetics and Politics (London; New York: Verso, 1980) 192.
49 ‘Renzo Martens | Yale Greenberg World Fellows,’ accessed April 28, 2019, https://worldfellows.yale.edu/renzo-martens.
50 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Renzo Martens – the Artist Who Wants to Gentrify the Jungle,’ The Guardian, December 16, 2014, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/dec/16/renzo-martens-gentrify-the-jungle-congo-chocolate-art.