manifest

As early as 1969, the visual artist Mierle Ladermann Ukuele asked in her 'Manifesto of Maintenance Art' what art means when it understands itself as care work. A central sentence from Ukuele that has repeatedly preoccupied us was her question: "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?" Who carries out the care work for the revolution, for the assembly? Who is there but never visible? And to what extent can these bodies that are not negotiated become part of our artistic practice? What kind of assembly is it when those who are, who are not initially intended to appear in the theater, come together? And who says that those who do want to appear in the theater at all? How must institutions be structured so that those who carry out the care work for art are also part of the art? Where and in what forms can an artistic moment lie in everyday, routinely performed care and maintenance work? 

Based on these questions, we are currently working on an update of Ukeles' manifesto from a contemporary feminist and queer feminist perspective. We would like to network with other artists who operate at the interface between art and community work and, through interviews, attempt to explore which spatial and temporal conditions are necessary to Maintenance Art at an institutional level. We would like to ask how we need to subvert the institutional system in order to understand the care work that needs to be undertaken as part of artistic practice. 

In cooperation with the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Made possible by the #takecareresidenz of the Fonds Darstellende Künste

Eleonora Lela Herder is working as a freelance director, curator and dramaturg in Frankfurt Main, Barcelona and Warsaw. Her work oscillates between performance and spatial installation. In her current work she deals with urbanist and city political topics.  

She is the founder and artistic director of the interdisciplinary label andpartnersincrime and a member of the artist association ID_Frankfurt, where she also co-curated the site-specific performance festival IMPLANTIEREN in 2018 and 2020. 

She received a scholarship at Theatertreffen Berlin in 2015 and at Bienal del arte Buenos Aires in 2017.

I'm an artist, I'm a manager, I'm an employer, I'm a woman, I'm a wife, I'm a lover, I'm a friend, I'm going to be a mother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm a granddaughter, I'm a scholar, I'm a teacher at university, I'm the cool aunt, I was an emerging artist, I'm an activist, I'm a target [kind of random order]

Inga Bendukat is a theater scholar, freelance dramaturg, and in her free time, an activist. She is currently working on her PHD: "Beyond the representative public. Spaces of appearance of the other (working title)." In it, through the perspective of queer theory she examines the disruption of ideologies and searches for a theater of Desubjugation (Foucault), resistance and solidarity practice. Since March 2021 she receives a scholarship from Ad Infinitum at the Goethe University. 

Am I an artist? I am a theorist [but not terrorist]. I am an activist. [I wish] Radical queer [all your friends are criminals]? I am a dreamer, planning the revolution from my desk. [no order] 

Lela and Inga became better acquainted while working together at and in the ada_kantine. While Inga supported the project on a theoretical level, Lela, together with her group andpartnersincrime, repeatedly attempted to explore the boundaries between art and reproductive work through performative settings. This resulted in a multi-part project on themes of assembly and art as communitization, which was shown last year at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and the Historisches Museum Frankfurt.  

Supported by the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt and the #takecare scholarship of the Performing Arts Fund.

For Ukeles, being an artist and being a mother represent two mutually exclusive dynamics of being in the world. 

Avant-garde artists are autonomous, progressive and advancing; they define themselves through their uniqueness and must seemingly be able to act independently of material circumstances. 

For her, motherhood, on the other hand, represents a cyclical system of maintenance, dependence and restrictions, routine, boredom, and acting in a network of interdependencies. 

Art (as defined by Western modernity) and care work are, in their very nature, contradictory and incompatible. 

For several years now, however, art formats that attempt to resolve this dichotomy have experienced a social upswing. More and more artists are attempting to escape the dynamics of eternally temporary, self-referential project work and place their political and social concerns at the center of their work. More and more art institutions are coming under pressure to legitimize themselves, not least due to dwindling visitor numbers, and are attempting to escape their snow globe existence with participatory, sociocultural formats.

Everyone is aware that we as a society urgently need to test a sustainable approach to the spatial and human resources available to us. 

Unfortunately, these social experiments by art institutions are often accompanied by the symbolic exploitation of precarious and marginalized social groups or their explicit exposure. In very few cases is the work done in a way that proves sustainable and transformative for society. Too often, the neoliberal depletion of human resources common in the art market is simply extended to wider sections of urban society. Maintenance does not occur. Nor does reformulation.