MSUV – Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine 
12.5.2020, 10:00, zoom
Novi Sad, Srbija
Participants: Sanja Kojić Mladenov, Gordana Nikolić,
Tijana Filipov, Mirjana Dušić

 

Central to this workshop was a discussion around keywords/concepts and thinking about educational strategies that would either be dedicated to minorities or problematize issues of migration. The participants of the workshop were engaged in articulating possible educational directions that Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina would undertake.

The workshop started with theoretical part consisting of text by Merve Bedir and going into two case studies of educational programs involving minorities. In Vocabulary of Hospitality Merve Bedir brings in Derrida’s words:„…the foreigner is first of all foreign to the legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, etc. He has to ask for hospitality in a language which, by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, … This personage imposes on him translation into their own language, and that’s the first act of violence.” The workshop used the text as a tool to address the matters of language that more often function as an obstacle rather than opportunity. Discussion on the vocabulary was used as a starting point when thinking about learning program dedicated to minorities. In particular it was important to think the relation guest-host and what can a museum do as a host, or what kind of host museum wishes to be and what would be the particular politics of hospitality. By looking into case studies of Silent University initiated by Ahmet Ögüt and Želimir Žilnik’s film The most beautiful country in the world the participants developed their ideas on possible learning approaches of the museum.

The practical part of the workshop consisted of the following questions:

How would you imagine educational program dedicated to minorities or problematizing issues of migration? What would be the key issues to build upon?

In which way could you realize a critical potential, but at the same time empowering the participants?

How to include professionals of color and/or with immigration histories from the areas of education and (art) mediation to contribute to the program?

Based on experience of working in your institution, what would be the possible obstacles?

The participants were expected to bring answers to the questions by selecting some of the words that were used as a point of further discussion:

EMPATHY, LANGUAGE, UNIVERSITY/ACADEMY/SCHOOL, GUEST, HOST, HOSPITALITY, ARTIVISM, AUDIENCE, HUMAN RIGHTS, EMPOWERING, POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, INTERVENTION IN SOCIAL/POLITICAL REALITY, COLLABORATION WITH NGO’S DEDICATED TO THE RIGHTS OF MINORITY, ETHICS, CARE, INTEGRATION, MEETING PLACE, DISCRIMINATION, RACISM, TIME CURRENCY, TRANSFORMATION OF INSTITUTION, TEMPORARINESS OF ART FORMS, FRAGMENTED ART PROJECT, COMMUNITY ART PROJECT, ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE, PEDAGOGY, TRANSLATION.

Vojvodina is already a place where many ethnic minorities live and such groups are not underrepresented. Underprivileged minority would be Roma people as well as groups of refugees that are caught in the state of in between in refugee camps. The biggest problem is that those groups that are temporary based in camps are very hard to reach, even though some NGOs did such an effort. In case the museum would undertake some program dedicated to them they would collaborate with NGOs already working with those groups. The issues that participants of the workshop found as the most relevant are: integration, discrimination, racism, access to the knowledge, language.

When thinking about educational program dedicated to minorities, they see a museum as a platform that would provide some visibility to refugees. The visibility is crucial because in the media there is a lot of negative or omitted reporting on their issues and the right information hardly reaches the broader public. For example, during the pandemic crisis there was an uprising of refugees in camps as they, due to the language limitations, didn’t understood what was going on, and the media reported almost nothing.

In that sense the museum would be the space as well as the place for meetings. As an institution they would like to empower them through visibility as well as political articulation. They were thinking on museum as a host and  refugees as visitors who are their guests and the hospitality would be used as a strategy of communication.

When creating a specific educational program, they would seek to collaborate with individuals and groups who have background and experience in work with underrepresented groups. Possible obstacles would come out from administrative or language related inaccessibility.

Also, they are not interested in migrant identity of a person only, they would like to empower all other identities of a person.

The last, but not least aspect that was emphasized was the transformation of an institution. The traditional museum has to re-think its positions and structure and transform itself according to the urgencies of our time.