Einfach gesagt:

Gerechtigkeit beim Reisen: Wer darf reisen? Ein runder Tisch

Mobility Justice heißt auf Deutsch: Gerechtigkeit beim Reisen.

Wir haben uns im Mai 2024 auf Zoom getroffen und gesprochen. Es waren Künstler*innen dabei und Personen, die Festivals oder ein Theater-Haus leiten:

● Anna Mülter (Leiterin Festival Theaterformen, Deutschland)

● Dalibor Šandor (Künstler, Per.Art, Serbien)

● Nadine McKenzie (Künstlerin, Unmute Dance Company, Südafrika)

● Saša Asentić (Künstler, Per.Art, Serbien)

● Sven Heier (Leiter Roxy, Birsfelden, Schweiz)

Alle haben über die Frage gesprochen: Wer darf reisen? Nina Mühlemann hat das Gespräch geleitet.

Viele Künstler*innen müssen reisen, damit sie ihre Arbeit zeigen können. Reisen ist auch wichtig, weil man auf Reisen andere Künstler*innen trifft. Wenn Künstler*innen reisen, lernen sie viele Leute kennen. Künstler*innen lernen voneinander. Wenn Künstler*innen miteinander reden, entwickeln sie ihre eigene Kunst weiter. Aber nicht alle Künstler*innen können reisen. Manche haben zu wenig Geld. Oder sie dürfen nicht in ein anderes Land reisen. Oder sie haben eine Behinderung. Und es gibt Barrieren.

Reisen ist oft schlecht für die Umwelt. Wenn man wenig reist, ist das für die Umwelt besser. Nadine sagt: Künstler*innen reisen aber nicht zum Spaß, sondern für die Arbeit. Manche Künstler*innen müssen sogar reisen, weil sie im eigenen Land zu wenig Geld bekommen.

Die Arbeit vor Ort ist aber auch wichtig. Manche Gruppen arbeiten bewusst in ihrer Stadt. Zum Beispiel die Gruppe Per.Art in Novi Sad. Saša sagt: Reisen in der Umgebung von Novi Sad ist schwierig. Es gibt keine guten Busse und Bahnen. Deshalb ist das Reisen für die Gruppe Per.Art schwierig. Und auch für das Publikum ist das Reisen schwierig.

Online-Arbeit wurde durch Corona wichtiger. Künstler*innen haben online miteinander gesprochen. Online-Arbeit ist auch heute noch wichtig für Menschen, die nicht reisen können. Dalibor findet: Es ist wichtig, dass man sich online trifft. Aber: Das Internet und die Geräte kosten Geld. Manche Menschen brauchen auch eine Person, die ihnen hilft. Wer zahlt dafür?

Anna erklärt: Festivals wie Theaterformen kämpfen für Gerechtigkeit. Das Festival lädt Künstler*innen ein, die sonst wenig reisen können. Ein kleines Theaterhaus wie das Roxy arbeitet vor allem mit Künstler*innen, die in der Nähe wohnen. Sven erklärt: Das Roxy versucht, direkt mit Menschen zu sprechen, die Barrieren erfahren. Gemeinsam versuchen sie, Lösungen zu finden.

Zusammenfassung: Das Reisen ist in der Kunst wichtig. Aber nicht alle können reisen. Auch Online-Angebote sind wichtig. Es braucht mehr Gerechtigkeit, Barrierefreiheit und Hilfe.

Nina Mühlemann: We are going to talk about mobility, justice, distribution of resources, and who is allowed to travel. It would be really nice to hear a little bit about how you or your practice relate to this topic.

Anna Mülter: This is a topic that we are very busy thinking and reflecting about at the festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig/Hannover. We are an international festival, but like any other festival, we have to make decisions about limited resources and how we distribute these. Invitations, travels, and so on. In my first edition, due to the pandemic, travelling was especially difficult and complicated. Festivals started to become less global but more international inside Europe. And we decided that the few international travels should mostly go to emerging artists, giving priority to artists who don’t have so much access to travel because they get fewer invitations, and at the same time, from the non-European context, their freedom of professional movement is very much limited by visa regulations. These are decisions we made to show awareness that we are operating in a field with global inequalities that we are, of course, also part of. And at the same time, we can try to make decisions that counter these inequalities to a certain extent.

Sven Heier: Maybe I can add something, as I’m working in an institution that is not a festival, the Roxy in Birsfelden, Basel. Our priority is working with artists who are not very far away. It’s not as international as a festival. We mostly invite companies based in Germany, Austria, or France. But before, I also worked for the same festival as Anna, and I think travel is kind of a must for artists. Because whatever you do, if you always show your work in the place where you live, nearly everybody has seen it. And also, to be an artist, or to show art, is a thing of exchange. So, I think travel just in general is a must.

Nadine McKenzie: We, Unmute Dance Company, focus specifically on inclusive work, and there are very few disabled artists in Cape Town, but also in South Africa. So, it makes inclusive work quite small where we are. And there are not a lot of artists that are practicing or doing inclusive work. It makes it a little bit limiting in some sense, which makes travelling quite important. And we do quite a lot of collaboration and exchanges with international artists, and if it hadn’t been for being able to travel, those partnerships or exchanges would be really hard to do. Or probably almost impossible, because travelling provides an opportunity for artists not only to gain access to more opportunities or work but also to future collaborations and skills development and also to learn from one another. What is out there? What are people doing, and how can we better our craft as artists?

Saša Asentić: How do we understand what an artist is when we say it is a must to travel? Does it define being an artist? We feel that because of our local work with Per.Art in Novi Sad: we are artists even if we don’t travel. But there is a certain moment in the work or in the career when this request is being introduced to us as artists. And what does it mean to travel? Can we travel? Because the work that we do is very much about the local context and the community these works belong to, it creates a community of disabled and non-disabled people in Novi Sad. And then our interests also come from what we are experiencing in the society in which we live, and in that way there is so much work to do locally, as an artist, that one almost would not need to travel. But the problem is also that nobody travels to us because we live in a part of Europe where people usually would not travel. To share the work is a big effort, with a lot of issues to deal with, to bring people, colleagues, to show their work in Serbia. But also to go somewhere else with our work.

Dalibor Šandor: I would like to add that for me it is also important to travel. Because by travelling, for example, I have been able to show my lecture performance, Something Very Special. And it is really important that I can travel, also to different places. Not just in Serbia and other Balkan countries.

Saša Asentić: Over the last 20 years, conditions changed a lot for us so that travelling in the region, or even to another town, became almost impossible because of the centralization. The connections between towns and within the region were first affected by the war, and then there was a period where we were independent cultural scenes, working a lot to reestablish connections, and in these processes our disabled colleagues were not included at all. Once those connections were established and started to happen, the idea that disabled artists are also part of this was demonstrated only through Per.Art. But in general, the connections disappeared. For example, you don’t even have a direct train or bus from Novi Sad in Serbia to Zagreb in Croatia anymore. Which then makes it even more difficult for everyone, and especially for our disabled colleagues, to travel. Even if they would get an invitation. In my opinion, there is a connection between the internationalization of the performing arts scene that has been happening since the mid 90s in Europe and a very strong impact that it has on local scenes and regional scenes that then lose the possibility to be mobile.

Nina Mühlemann: Thank you so much for sharing. I was wondering whether one of the other people would like to respond to some of the things that were said. And maybe also more specifically to this point that travelling is part of what makes an artist.

Anna Mülter: Yes, that is easily said, that traveling makes an artist.I would agree with what Sven said, that being in an exchange is definitely part of the artistic work. But whether this exchange is valuable inside a certain local context or internationally depends also on the kind of artistic work. And our idea that artists travel internationally probably also comes from the pure need of travelling internationally. Because a lot of artists that can’t rely on local funding systems actually need to travel internationally, especially to Europe, to sustain their work and fund their projects. And also, something that I noticed is that it’s really exhausting for artists, for many reasons. Mainly for artists from the global South, there are new initiatives from artists to create more local contexts for themselves, prioritize those, and invest more in their local community, which I find a really important countermovement to the international travels.

Nina Mühlemann: Thank you.There are particularly disabled artists who really try to build a practice without travel because they find travelling impossible, for example, the Bay Area US collective Sins Invalid. They build a practice around streaming and local work. I was wondering whether you relate to these ways of working.

Nadine McKenzie: I think Covid opened that up quite a lot: for artists and also disabled artists, being able to share our work online, becoming more comfortable with doing work online. I think more and more artists now are doing work or projects online, which is amazing because so many artists are able to connect in this way. Especially artists who are not able to travel. This opens up another avenue for us to be able to work together as artists and not have to deal with all the challenges of travelling, whether it’s funding to be able to travel or the accessibility and the hassle of getting on a flight and being on a plane for many hours. That has opened up an avenue that many artists are still following now. But also, just to mention, as an artist living with a disability and working on a professional level, had it not been for being able to travel as well, artists like myself would not have been exposed to other disabled artists in the industry that are doing phenomenal work out there. I think it’s important that we hone the craft that is in our homes, in our countries, and in our cities. But it’s also equally important for us to have these connections to other artists. If I’m forever working in my own space, not exposed to the world outside, will I be growing as an artist, or will I be stuck doing the same thing for years and years to come? I think both are, at the moment, quite equally important.

How are we able to find alternatives that are solution-driven? Like having a festival on WhatsApp, for example, that is maybe creating access for audiences that might not have been able to see a performance prior to that. And I think the bottom line, again, is about creating better access for anyone.

Saša Asentić:Sins Invalid’s practice is extremely important because it comes from their struggle for justice. What happens a lot in the performing arts market is that all political practices are being depoliticized. And of course, what we experienced during Covid is very important, how artists and also the disabled community self-organized, and also how non-disabled artists somehow learned or got to understand how certain procedures, media, and channels of organizing and communicating are important and useful.

Somehow those practices were also appropriated without really understanding what the political ground behind them is. What is happening with cultural institutions is that Zoom, WhatsApp, or other ways of being present are used as an easy way to deal with issues instead of engaging and making environments accessible. It’s easier to just push it into the realm of the responsibility of artists and claim that it is available to everyone. But who pays for the internet? Who pays for the rent where we are sitting now at home? Who has a computer or phone, or who buys the computer and phone, and who takes care of all the other matters related to the access needs of everyone, even in the place where they are connecting from? All of this is ignored.

And I think for that reason, it is so important to insist that Sins Invalid’s and other disabled artists’ struggles are for justice, that we don’t confuse that meaning and what we still need to insist on. Especially those of us who are privileged.

Anna Mülter: I think that’s a really important point that you just made, that referring all access to the online realm actually makes it very easy for institutions to bail out of physical accessibility in the live performance. And I think, especially in the pandemic, there were also many online programs that were not accessible in multiple ways. Online formats take away the inaccessibility of transport but have, of course, other access barriers. Also, when I look at the field now, in basically all of the festivals and theatres that I go to, except for a handful, everybody who had an online program during the pandemic has actually stopped them again. So that moment when things became more possible and more openly accessible online has already ended. As a matter of fact, I think that there are very few opportunities where you can show your work online in the theatre institutions or festivals in Germany at the moment. Although I think that we really gained a lot of important new experiences on how to use these different media.

Nadine McKenzie: And I think the question also comes down to how to get funders on board to support companies or festivals and artists with a budget for access needs. Because in South Africa, with programs we’ve done before, things like access needs tend to be overlooked so much. And in most cases, if you apply for funding, you would not even get half the money or even way less. So how do you really get the message, the need for accessibility, not only across to audiences but also to the funding bodies – that this is important, not just for the work to exist, but for artists to be able to continue doing the work that we are doing? That it’s not a one-off thing, that it’s something that is very important. And we need sustainability, you know? I don’t think they get it. And I don’t know how to get the message across that it’s not just something we wish for, but it’s a need in the industry. Funding is needed for accessibility, for artists to be able to do the work and to survive.

Dalibor Šandor: During the pandemic, when we created the whole idea for Something Very Special, we were talking over WhatsApp or Zoom. So, in that way, I could talk to my colleagues who were helping me with this project. And also, I could make some progress with my work during Covid. It showed in one place in Serbia that is close to Novi Sad. In one studio, and it was also broadcast online, in schools, and in some faculties also. And in our gallery of Matica srpska that we have worked with for many years, and at my working center.

Saša Asentić: After Dalibor’s performances, there were also some comments that more people should watch this lecture performance. And then some people even said this should be broadcast on TV. And this is something we are thinking of: how this experience that we have with broadcasting and live performances, how it can be brought to the next level. To have it broadcast on the regional TV station would also allow us to have sign language interpretation, for example, and also audio description. That would be really the next step. How to come to the public but not travel to all these places.

Anna Mülter: The question of choice for the artist is something that comes up more and more. And what Sins Invalid say, that transportation is ableist, is absolutely valid, and so the choice for disabled artists to make decisions about where and how they want to share their work with the public is really compromised in so many ways. If I think of our very practical work at the festival, a lot of work goes into helping to navigate barriers in mobility and transportation. And this is limited to what we can actually change to make the system that is in place more navigable by trying to create a condition in which artists actually do have a choice to say yes, this is a festival that I actually want to travel to.

Nina Mühlemann: In the interviews I got the feeling that a lot of your resources as companies are actually put into mobility, getting artists from one point to the other. And for me, a big question is how responsibilities are divided. Do you see this as your responsibility as artistic companies? How much is it the responsibility of institutions and festivals to take care of this?

Sven Heier: If we have disabled audiences or artists, we take a lot of responsibility for how they come to us, for sure. But I think if I see the whole situation in general, there should be much more responsibility by the government. In the case of our small theatre, we are very flexible, and before we start a big thing with politicians, we do it by ourselves. If somebody calls, we pick them up at the tram station. In our organization it’s easy to handle because we are flexible and small. In a festival you need many more people to organize this.

Anna Mülter: From our practice in the festival, I see the responsibility mainly on the side of the festival or the institution. But of course, none of this can be navigated without very specific individual information from the artist. So, there is always a certain part of labour for the disabled artists or manager from the company’s side, who knows the access requirements very well. So to do this labour 100 percent on the institution side is actually, from our experience, not possible. At the same time, as a festival, we definitely have to allocate quite a lot of resources to making the access possible, which means not only financially but also in terms of staff capacity. And I think it is absolutely necessary to do that. So, this is not something on which we would compromise.

Saša Asentić: For me, it is also interesting to add how the international standards and conditions of the existing dance, theatre and performance scene also affect the aesthetics and types of performances that get to be produced, co-produced, and toured. I can see a big change over the last 15 years. But I also see a big gap between what’s being produced locally and what gets a chance to tour. For example, in Novi Sad, the work that we made locally often could not tour. And we had to understand what needs to be done on our side in terms of accessibility, making the travelling possible and accessible, but also how it affects the work, the format of the work, and the aesthetics of the work. There are works that we could only make locally, the existing structures make it impossible to bring 25 disabled and non-disabled people from Serbia to work for two months somewhere and to perform a piece that requires this. It simply is like that. And then this somehow gets accepted: the fact that it cannot be possible. The »why is it not possible« is often dismissed from the discussion. Because it requires more time, more people, more means. But the scene is based on a minimum time that is required, very ableist requests in terms of all aspects of production. And this really affects what is being produced and then what people start to think, both disabled and non-disabled artists, about art is possible and how art should look like. Especially if they count on income from the international touring. And this is an interesting phenomenon to observe: the change that is significant if we compare local scenes, international scenes, the changing of conditions, and how it affects the aesthetics if we look really through the perspective of mobility.

Nadine McKenzie: We are quite a small organization as well, of artists with disabilities and without. But with the artists that have disabilities in the company, everyone is quite mobile and able to move around fairly independently. So that perhaps makes it easier for us to move around or to travel. But what happens if you have a larger cast of people in a production? Does this mean that now you have to downsize on the amount of artists that you have in a production? Or you have to exclude certain people from a production, that seems a bit unrealistic. Always to be expected by society or institutions of being able to fit in these boxes in order for us to coexist or to have our work on different platforms means that we can only work within certain limits or certain barriers. If you want to create a work with ten people, for example, and you want eight of those people to be wheelchair users and only two able-bodied people, it means that the work won’t go anywhere. You’ll only be able to show the work within your own city and, if possible, in your own country, but nowhere else. So, this also places restrictions on how much we are able to do and how many people we are able to include in our work. It’s interesting, but it’s also sad at the same time because you can only think outside of the box to a certain extent if you would like your work to travel as far as possible.

Nina Mühlemann: Jérôme Bel is a famous French choreographer, and before the pandemic he got a lot of media attention about his decision to no longer travel due to climate change and instead, for example, to have his work performed by local artists. On his stance that abstaining from travel is a necessary measure, he got pushback from a lot of people. The Mexican artist Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez wrote a quite extensive open letter back about how it is a very different situation for artists from the global South than it is for Jérôme Bel, for various reasons. I was wondering whether you had any thoughts.

Sven Heier: Of course everybody should travel responsibly. There are many other opportunities. But I think if nobody is traveling anymore, this is the end. The exchange between cultures, different people, different opinions is so important for the world. There was a funny idea by Swiss artist Martin Schick four or five years ago. He produced a piece and said: »I’m not going on tour anymore. I want to stay in my hometown. But I make a piece and send it to Hannover, and if they like it, they should find the people to perform this piece.« So it’s compatible with other people. It’s his idea, it’s his piece, but it’s only the text, the sound, etc., that is travelling, not the people. This idea I find much more charming.

Nadine McKenzie: It is such a privileged thing to say if you’ve travelled around the world for such a long time throughout your career and one day you wake up and you’re tired of travelling. And now, suddenly it’s such an issue that these people travel all over the world, which has been done for decades and most likely will still continue.

Anna Mülter: I totally agree with the critique that was published in the open letter to Jérôme Bel that you mentioned. And reading that was one of the reasons that made us really reconsider how we distribute the resources of the festival and how we can also have a part in distributing them in different ways. And at the same time, at every press conference, I get questions about how much we fly and how much the artists fly and how we compensate for that. And with most funders in Germany, you still can’t compensate. And if you compare it with other economic sectors in society, the resources they spend and the emissions they produce are so much higher. The cultural field is really tiny. How many international festivals do we have in Germany? Not many.

Saša Asentić: The response is super important. Bel’s way of thinking and his way of proposing this and continuing to keep his privileged position are only possible because he himself belongs to an imperialist worldview and colonial heritage. And that’s why he is allowed to do so. And nobody dares, obviously, to challenge him and to cancel him and to not produce him. But of course, the system that he belongs to and represents will not question this but goes for the option to aestheticize all of this and to justify his procedure in this way or that way. So, I think he’s a very corrupt artist and should be addressed as such.

Dalibor Šandor: My first instinct to respond is that we should travel and we should fly because everybody needs to have equal rights, in my opinion. I’m aware that air travel is really polluting the environment. But for example, my lecture performance, Something Very Special – it is important to be heard and seen. And seen in lots of different places.

Nadine McKenzie: I also felt some type of way when I read that. Well, firstly, how dare you? I think each to their own. If he has a problem with pollution and traveling, then he should stay home and not travel and let people just be and let people do the work that they do and take the work wherever they can or wherever they wish to. If you feel strongly about something, cool, good for you. But, you know, let’s not impose our beliefs and ideas onto each other. There might be people out there, artists, who have not travelled or who have not travelled enough.

Nina Mühlemann: Sustainability is often addressed together with mobility, a basic measure of sustainability is that people should travel less. And I was wondering about the role sustainability has in your practice, as well as accessibility and disability, and whether there is also friction. Because quite often in environmental measures, disabled people and our needs are ignored.

Nadine McKenzie: For us, sustainability is something that we find a little bit challenging within our organization. We struggle to find enough artists to work with that have disabilities. And so, we had to reconsider how or where we present work and how we find people, or young people especially, to be part of training programs. This is mainly because people do not have enough access to come and experience performances. So, it’s made us really look at where we have performances and how to create more accessibility. Because it’s such a huge thing here in South Africa that a lot of disabled people don’t have the privileges or the financial means and are not able to move around or go watch a performance at a theatre. So how do you solve these challenges? A lot of the work we do is not just presenting our pieces in the theatre where we are based but also going to the communities where a lot of people are that don’t have a means to get out of their communities. It’s such a tough thing. I feel like the disabled community is something that can feel far away because there are so many challenges that many disabled people still face today. How do we create a better and more sustainable environment? Not just for us as artists, but for people in general, and specifically people with disabilities. Because disabled people do suffer the most when it comes to access.

Anna Mülter: During my first edition of the festival, we had a big project about climate justice. So, it is something that we are really thinking about. And, as part of that project, we also had a process with an expert, who was accompanying us for one year, setting our own goals towards more sustainability. But when I think of sustainability, I always think of it as a more holistic concept because on one side you have emissions, but on the other side you also have things that you gain, like bringing artists and artistic works here and actually giving the local audience the possibility for an international cultural exchange that in a city like Braunschweig doesn’t really happen in the performing arts outside of that festival. And especially with the world as it is today, we really need more of these encounters. And also, the artists are not travelling for their own entertainment – it’s their work.

Our festival this year is using even more car transportation than we have done in the last three festivals. Because we deal with quite a big problem of racism in public spaces in the city. And so, with public transport, in terms of disability, there are accessibility problems, but it’s also not always as safe for everyone. So, there are multiple factors that need to be considered in these decisions of just forcing everyone to use public transport. And we also have a lot of artists in our festival, especially this year, who are first-time travellers.