Collective Responsibility as the Regeneration of Resistance

In this very short citation from his address to a global arts conference, renowned Bangladeshi photographer, curator and activist Shahidul Alam does not define ‘we’ as only Europeans nor highlight that within the ‘us’ exists a diversity of perspectives on controversial issues, influenced by our upbringings, our cultures, our social media feeds, the standpoints from which we view the world. Yet this – being surrounded by contentious and polarising issues – is where we – the arts sector in Europe – are at. It is to this European ‘we’, of which I am a part, that I address this article.

In these dark days of killing in Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, the arts sector in the West is now at an ‘understandings crossroad’. Our colleagues see who provides the weapons that are killing and maiming their families. They see which governments are pushing back refugees and migrants including artists fleeing war, corruption and poverty, discarding them to unsafe third countries for dubious processing, making our Europe more a Fortress than ever.

Amongst blatant abuses of international human rights law, our colleagues can also see where we in the arts sector collect sponsorship and public funding. Our marching and demonstrating, petitioning and funding causes is important, but it appears limited to our public squares, not the corridors of power and decision-making politics. We can no longer wonder how ordinary citizens living through past atrocities seemed to look the other way and let things happen. We are now those ordinary people. We in the arts and culture sector have considered ourselves to have a special purchase on intercultural understanding. Do we? In this, our own historical moment, either we realistically and collectively redefine and enact the concepts underpinning our overly-familiar words – such as inclusion, equity, diversity – or we are our own fake news, betraying our words and ourselves.

Although these problems are global and dependent upon elite circles of wealth and politics, it is also true that one can be effective within one’s own circles of influence. Our circles include artists, whether at risk and displaced artists or those who are settled; audiences; public and private funders and politicians and arts organisations. For me, the response must entail collective resistance by embracing shared responsibility.

Feminist sociologist and political theorist Iris Marion Young described a system in which we are all, however much indirectly, complicit in injustice due to the global, interdependent nature of our socio-economic-political era². She defined structural injustice as:

[S]ocial processes that put large groups of persons under systemic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them (Young, 2011: 52).

She determined this as:

[A] moral wrong, distinct from the wrongful action of an individual agent or the repressive policies of a state... it occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limit of accepted rules and norms (Ibid.: 52).

Structural injustice obstructs what philosopher Nancy Fraser calls ‘parity of participation’.³ Young accurately observes that such injustice often follows a pre-existing logic, a policy, set of habits, or even legislation. We can (still) see this in the interculturally diverse arts sector in Europe.

My focus since 2009 has been with persecuted, atrisk and relocated artists whom I refer to as artists impacted by displacement. They can face challenges to the exercise of their own agency and a barrage of obstacles to participation parity when relocating to Europe, from pre-entry through to the development of their own work once settled. Visa applications are often out-sourced, assessed by those without understanding of the arts (it is unrealistic to expect that all artists can present themselves with the same professional experience of a successful Western artist).

Once in the country, their aesthetics can be disparaged if not aligning with current trends or canons in the host country. Depending on their legal status, they may not be allowed to work, earn fees or accept arts subsidies, denying them of the dignity and right to earn from their artwork. They may face racism in the streets or when looking for housing. Once starting to work, the incoming artist may, on one hand, face the need to understand and be fluent in a heavily bureaucratic context of public subsidy and grant applications or on the other hand, face a competitive environment of arts entrepreneurs already linked to valuable sponsors or politicians.

If the artist does not already have a strong international profile, they can be fetishised as victim (or hero), and need to rely on ‘performing suffering’ in order to get work.⁴ In addition they may be expected to be eternally grateful to the organisation that ‘rescued’ (sic) them.⁵ Underlying all of this is what Miranda Fricker calls ‘epistemic injustice’ – the withholding of credibility to a knower of their own situation.⁶ How far does our empathy rely on our individual emotions and points of view, rather than an understanding of the culture and perspectives of those we host? As Aruna D’Souza analyses in her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, our empathy can also ensure our position of supremacy, ‘doling out justice as a matter of kindness – or, perhaps, pity’ (2014:30).

Derrida described what he called ‘hostipitality’ as the inevitable hostility inherent in each act of hospitality. Nevertheless, he urged us to seek the ‘best possible arrangements...’.⁷ And this seeking for the best possible is where we may start to work. Writer Rebecca Solnit defines hope not as optimism or idealism but simply as work.⁸ Whether supporting the agency and dignity of the artists in our residencies and our international collaborations, we can identify what needs to be rethought. Our work is clear if we wish to continue working internationally, and it starts with reflection. In her deeply insightful report for On the Move on transforming perspectives on cultural mobility, South African curator Ukhona Ntsali Mlandu exposes an urgency for cultural operators in the West to change their points of view, to enlarge and deepen them with respect to the perspectives of others. She calls for:

A refusal to continue the collective amnesia and selective application of logic in the analysis of the status quo and the action around it. Imagination and re-imagination are the cornerstone of what is needed to continue the momentum of the world’s cypher in ways that are regenerative⁹ (Mlandu, 2023:13).

This leads me to discuss regeneration in the international human rights regime. It upholds many of the rights crucial to the arts, such as freedom of expression and freedom of artistic expression, of mobility, work, education, cultural expression, of assembly, creating and joining unions and so on. However, it is increasingly challenged from two sides. On the one hand, we see countries in the West, and even the European Commission, avoiding the migrant and refugee rights agreed following the movement of populations devasted by World War II, by off-shoring migrants for processing to Libya, Albania or Rwanda.

Apart from a few exceptions (Spain, Ireland...) we also see that national politicians, ignoring thousands of their citizens, continue to sell arms to a government under investigation for genocide, including a head of state under an arrest warrant for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. On the other hand, there is an increasing call for decolonising human rights, not by dismissing them, but by reinforcing them – separating them from the dominance of sovereign nation states that continue to selectively interpret, evade and abuse legally binding rights legislation. This brings human rights away from elitist cloisters of specialist legal experts and closer to ordinary people to discuss and analyse them as relevant to their own lives.¹⁰

Some arts organisations, to a limited extent, have brought human rights discussions to audiences, but it is my contention that the arts sector needs to make strategic alliances with human rights in order to bring our audiences to better understand how arts and rights are mutually dependent.

What then is our work, as an arts sector? Young describes a way forward that she calls the social connection model. It is a collective responsibility, as Young explains, that is:

[D]ifferent from the standard conception, which focuses on individual action and its unique relation to a harm... The social connection model finds that all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice. This responsibility is not primarily backward-looking, as the attribution of guilt or fault is, but rather primarily forward-looking. Being responsible in relation to structural injustice means that one has an obligation to join with others who share that responsibility in order to transform the structural processes to make their outcomes less unjust (2011: 96).

As many are now doing, clearly evidenced in this publication, we can first of all listen to our colleagues, both within and outside our countries, to hear how they view the issues in which we are all enveloped.
We can read what they recommend, share our reading, discuss among ourselves and with colleagues as the ‘Future Hospitalities’ initiative described here has been consistently doing.

We need sustained work to redefine our collaborations and our understanding of solidarity. As Mlandu writes: ‘allyship is active, not passive. It requires frequent and consistent behaviours’ (2023:7).¹¹ We need to form coalitions with other sectors such as human rights, free speech and migration, developing what D’Souza calls coalitional solidarities based on focused, commonly agreed aims, not on the assumption that others share our own Western perspective; we need ‘collective acts’, not merely individual empathy (2024:19).

To avoid superficial solidarities that hide the privilege of dominant group members, Syrian writer Yassin Al-Haj Saleh offers his conception of partnership as a relationship that: ‘has no centre; works in multiple directions; and is based on equality rather than power.’¹²

If we are serious, we are also tasked to demand meetings with our public and private funders – and as coalitions we will have a stronger voice. We cannot rely on petitions; we have to tell decision-makers that, apart from the immorality, it is unacceptable to put us in situations where the same funding that sells weapons that kill our colleagues is the funding that we are obliged to accept in order to continue our cultural work or to host the artists we do.

All of this will be work and I do not believe we have a choice.

This essay is based in part on my thesis, ‘Artists Displacement and Rights: Citizenship, Care and Advocacy in the Networked Arts Sector in Europe’, 2024. Centre for Socially Engaged Research-based Practice, TU Dublin.

Station to Station is the online magazine of DutchCulture | TransArtists, bringing together a variety of people working in the cultural field, from residency organisers to curators, museum managers, biologists, philosophers, as well as the expertise from our team.

¹Alam, Shahidul. (2024). ‘In Conversation: Artistic Freedom in an Age of Complexity’, IFACCA World Summit on Arts and Culture. Stockholm Sweden, 3 May.

²Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

³Fraser, N. (2000). ‘Recognition without Ethics?’ in Garber, M., Hanssen, B and Walkowitz, R. (eds.) (2000) The Turn to Ethics. New York: Routledge.

⁴D’Souza, A. (2024). Imperfect Solidarities. Berlin: Floating Opera Press.

⁵Yazaji and Schmidt. (2022). An Exercise in Sitting with Discomfort.

⁶Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

⁸Derrida, J. (2000a). ‘Hostipitality’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 5(3), 3–18.

⁹Mlandu, U. N. (2023). An invitation to transform your vision of the cultural mobility ethic from an African perspective. Brussels. On the Move. Available at on-the-move.org/resources.

¹⁰Perugini, N. and Gordon, N. (2015). The Human Right to Dominate. New York: Oxford University Press.

¹¹Luthra, P. (2022). 7 Ways to Practice Active Allyship. Harvard Business Review, 8 November 2022. Available at: https://hbr.org/2022/11/7-ways-to-practice-active-allyship.

¹²Al-Haj Saleh, Y. (2018). A critique of solidarity. Aljumhuriya, available at: https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2018/05/18/a-critique-of-solidarity.