Together with the Frankfurt Food Council, the Association for Climate Justice, the initiative A city for everyone, the kitchen Food That's Left, Together with ada_kantine and many other initiatives, we have founded an alliance for greater food justice in Frankfurt.
Our motto: From Frankfurt cuisine to Frankfurt's neighborhood cuisine.
In her text, Michaela Filla-Raquin guides the reader through the exhibition. A journey through time, tracing the course of urban struggles in the early 1970s.
The exhibition „"This house is occupied! Frankfurt housing struggle 1970–1974"“ found in Student residence on the Bockenheim campus instead and was by September to October 2020 It was shown by the Frankfurt Archive of Revolt e.V. and the Open House of Cultures Initiative It organized and addressed the housing struggles of the 1970s and their relevance to today's housing struggles.
Thirty years after the first squat in Frankfurt am Main in 1970, a team from the “Frankfurt Archive of Revolt“ developed and organized the exhibition “This House is Occupied! Frankfurt Squatting Struggle 1970–1974,” which presents the background and course of the first nationwide cycle of squatting. This period is staged like a wall newspaper-style journey through the course of urban struggles in the early 1970s.
In addition to looking back, the exhibition also attempts to offer a brief and concise glimpse into the present, as many of the starting points of the conflicts of the 1970s are still present today: housing shortages, unaffordable rents, gentrification, investor-driven luxury housing construction, etc., are still evident in Frankfurt today. Accordingly, protest and resistance are also perceptible. The goal of a "city for all" remains on the agenda.
The exhibition includes approximately 20 posters with background information and photos, newspaper clippings, leaflets and other materials from the time.
The crisis-ridden nature of social reproduction necessitates forms of urban care that are currently being discussed as "shadow care infrastructures" (Power et al. 2022) and that take place beyond decidedly state and small-family care contexts. In this article, I explore how care is given and received in the concrete everyday life of a solidarity-based neighborhood canteen, the challenges this entails, and the extent to which hegemonic urban care relations are challenged. Conceptually, the article draws on the academic-activist debate on Caring Cities and connects it with radical care as an analytical perspective. The empirical results are part of a caring ethnographic case study conducted at the ada_kantine in Frankfurt am Main in 2022. Looking ahead, I outline the transgressive potentials for a "caring urbanization" (Strüver 2021) suggested by these care practices.
Published in sub\urban Journal for Critical Urban Research
Democracy is more than institutions and processes – it is a lived, embodied practice that shapes our coexistence. Formations of Power – Performing Democracy examines the material and performative dimensions of democracy and asks: How do we experience democracy as a form of coexistence? Who can participate in shaping society, and whose voices are heard? Through interdisciplinary artistic and creative interventions – from theater to dance to augmented reality – the performance program during the Frankfurt Days of Democracy 2023 critically examined the tensions between individual expression and collective political action, questioning the limits of representation and the fatigue of neoliberal self-optimization. Formations of Power positions artistic expression as a driving force for shaping democratic life, ensuring that democracy remains a continuous, participatory act and does not degenerate into a static ideal.
A Queerfeminist Perspective on the Intersections of Reproductive Work, Commons and Aesthetic Practices
Master's thesis MA Performative Arts in Social Fields
The text From the Academy of Work to a Collective Kitchen. A Queerfeminist Perspective on the Intersections of Reproductive Work, Commons and Aesthetic Practices is an analysis of the theoretical concepts of care, commons and art with an intersectional approach. The aim is to interlock different perspectives of social science, aesthetic theory, philosophy and gender studies in order to propose how the hegemonic social system can be made more equal. The basic assumption starts from the problematic of the prevailing (sexist and racist) neoliberal capitalism and sees in this social structuring the reason for unequal and partly unliveable living conditions. Spheres that could potentially become dangerous for those in power seem to be particularly affected here: care work, which cannot be completely integrated into the capitalist logic of efficiency; commonism as a socio-economic counter-model, in which the goal of social action is not exploitation, profit maximization and constant economic growth, but resource conservation, environmental health and the principle of sharing; and finally art, as a sphere of emergence, reflection, experimentation and breaking out of habitual patterns, which can open our eyes and show us what capitalism tries to conceal from us: That we can think and act outside a fixed framework. This political kind of art is introduced here under the concept of Maintenance art. After first establishing structural similarities between the three areas, what then emerges from this analysis is, that it makes sense to link this triad. While they share common goals, such as community, democracy, equality and critique of domination – which makes them all targets for hegemony – they have different problems at other points. Although reproductive labor is already very established in our system (as it is inescapable), there are few resources and recognition for it. Commons, on the other hand, lacks a broad mass of supporters. And art, while enjoying visibility, can and is repeatedly used for propagandistic purposes for this very reason. It is therefore proposed that the three areas can be brought together to form a complementary triad in which their respective specificities complement the problem points of the other areas, so that all three emerge strengthened from this connection. Particularly considered is the role of Maintenance art, which as a “practical utopia” can equally develop a utopian, experimental potential through art autonomy, as well as already actively test parts of the utopian within the framework of the real art project. The role of art is thus to create a space for experimenting with the utopian. An example of this is the project ada_kantine in the old Akademie der Arbeit in Frankfurt am Main, which illustrates the theory that was put forward in advance. The analysis of the project according to the three areas of reproduction, commons and aesthetic practices based on interviews with project participants shows that the collective kitchen can be seen as a “practical utopia”. Transforming a capitalist ideology of labor into collective care work is art.
Resistant temporalities in performance, art, theory
Not conforming to linear time
What is time if it is not linear, progressive, and synchronous? In the face of current and past crises, the model of a Time has come under frequent criticism. Particularly in the performing arts, there has been a lively debate in recent years about how time as a resource, (colonial) infrastructure, and lived experience structures historical and contemporary power relations, but also about which other concepts of temporality can be countered.
At the intersection of philosophy, theater, media, and cultural studies, Julia Schade explores the historical and contemporary implications of what is defined as 'time' in Western modernity and what is excluded from it. Her focus is precisely on those resistant temporalities in theory, performance, and art that do not conform to the notion of a homogeneously measurable time.
Through her method of 'thinking in the material', the author shows how in works by the South African artist William Kentridge, the Lebanese theatre maker Rabih Mroué, the Frankfurt collective Anpartnersincrime and the Berlin performance artist Eva Meyer-Keller, (de)colonial, post-apocalyptic, traumatic, speculative, (queer)feminist and post-anthropocentric temporalities are designed.
Untimely On the one hand, she negotiates figurations of interruption, event, and caesura, as they are shaped by poststructuralist approaches to post-Shoah thinking and are currently being further developed by thinkers from the context of Black Studies and Black Feminism, who focus on the temporality of the afterlife of slavery and colonialism. On the other hand, Julia Schade examines relational models that attempt to conceptualize the entanglements of something more than human.
Circle (Imagine us together) is part of the Academy of Radical Caregivers, a performative symposium by andpartnersincrime in cooperation with ada_kantine as part of the Politics in Free Theater Festival, funded by the Performing Arts Fund Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR. andpartnersincrime is supported by the multi-year funding of the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt.
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.
Guest at “red park” “Run the dish”
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.
ART AS LABOUR – Motherhood as institutional critique.
Discourse format and publication within the framework of “Care City”, Miracles of the Prairie 2021, Mannheim.
At the end of the 1960s, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles had to learn that being an artist and being a mother were considered two mutually exclusive ways of being on the free art market.
Over fifty years later, Ukele's critique remains relevant: Artists who are also mothers are seen as unreliable and less resilient, a risk to production processes. What would an art institution have to look like that places reproduction rather than production at the center of its understanding of art? How can motherhood and care work be made visible in the art world? How can strategies of maintenance be countered to the neoliberal forms of production in the art industry?
Eleonora Herder and Inga Bendukat from Anpartnersincrime Together with accomplices from art, activism and theory, we invited people to discuss, update and rewrite the "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" and to put forward new demands for the compatibility of care work and art.
With inputs from Marcia Breuer (artist and initiator of »More Mothers for Art«), Hannah Cooke (artist), Katrin Hylla (director and co-author of the 2018 Care Manifesto), Magdalena Kallenberger (member of MATERNAL FANTASIES), Olivia Hyunsin Kim (performer and director), Mary Jirmanus Saba (filmmaker and geographer, co-author of »Why Call It Labor?«).
The publication created during the academy is available Download here.
In the 24th issue of the Journal of Media Studies, we discuss our experience with the ada_kantine. The conversation between Eleonora Herder, Tim Schuster, Inga Bendukat, Phries Künstler, and Jana Mangold explores the role of (us as) artists in a social neighborhood project. The topic of the issue, "MEDIA OF CARE," is practices and techniques of caring and concern, but also politics of affect, forms of government, and their interrelationships.
Information about the magazine and the article as a free pdf is available here.
