Tools to build and to care

Two main themes are at the center of Jelena Fužinato’s outreach scholarship 2022: infrastructure and care work. In the workshop series, new mediation formats will be developed with various professionals from both of these fields. The idea of co-creative outreach, in which the contributors define the goals and create the form themselves, is the guiding principle for the decision-making processes in the collaboration with the groups. Therefore, an important question is: how does art, culture and outreach work relate to the people involved in this process?

To reflect on the city’s infrastructure, the fellow turns to the ‘invisible workforce’: 50,000 construction workers from the Western Balkans work on German construction sites. Among them a large number of illegal and undocumented migrants. They are invited to work on mobile structures (tools) in which they can contribute their knowledge in construction, as well as the experience of the people without whose work the financial capital and real estate market in the city would not exist. These objects will then be placed in public space to be used by all participants in the further mediation process. ‘Care‘ is the basis of many conceptions in current art practice, so the second invited group includes carers. They too immigrated to Germany from abroad to work. As experts in care work, they can share what this topic means from their own, mostly precarious, perspective.

Jelena Fužinato is a freelance artist and art mediator. She works in the media of drawing and installation to investigate authoritarian relationships within institutions such as family, school, museum and state. She studied Painting at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and completed her master’s degree in Painting at the University of Arts in Belgrade (Serbia), she also studied Curating, Managing and Mediating Art at Aalto University Helsinki, (Finland) and completed her postgraduate studies at the Berlin University of the Arts in 2015 at the Institute for Art in Context. She focuses particularly on artistic work with social groups and in cultural institutions. This was followed in 2017/18 by a qualification with an emphasis on anti-discrimination educational work at schools. She has worked as an art mediator and guest lecturer in and outside of various art, cultural and educational institutions.

Events:

June 26–30, 2022
station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf
Workshop #1 – A Fountain in Hellersdorf

Thursday, June 30, 19:00 (de)
Inauguration of the first part of three workshops and a conversation

August 23–28, 2022 (de/en)
Boulevard Kastanienallee, near to station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf
Workshop #2 – Care (internal workshop)

What is care work? Who are the carers? Is care work paid fairly? Who needs this kind of work the most? These were some of the first questions asked in the workshop. The aim was to understand care work as a practice rather than developing further epistemological meanings for the term. The intention was to tackle care work outside the realm of an academic, curatorial or institutional frame and instead see it as a hands-on practice that is “sticky, non-linear, dispersed and durational” (as Bettina Knaup puts it in Curating as Sticky Care), and which deals with pluralities and intersectionality on-site, daily.

Care workers, primarily women, mainly from the Balkan region, were invited to share their knowledge about the profession of care work. The workshop was based on a verbal exchange of experiences and partly recorded in the form of an unstructured interviews. Besides the exchange of experiences, the workshop’s aim was to understand the socio-political development that led to the moment where care work became vocation with many deficits.

During the workshop, the participants carer role was reversed: they were not asked to listen, but this time to be central and critical, based on their long practice of care work. The participants were given the role of knowledgeable guests and were paid for their expertise. They influenced the workshop structure, the speed and the timing of their work together. In the end one-to-one conversations between nGbK’s outreach fellow Jelena Fužinato and the participating care workers resulted. The workshop’s reversed roles allowed them to make their story central, creating an understanding of the long process of becoming a care worker and staying one.

Through the one-to-one sessions, the connection and understanding between participating care workers became more intimate and the workshop has become a long-term project, further developing through word of mouth connections. The Workshop #2 – Care outgrew of its original format and has become an ongoing research.

September 14–18, 14:00–17:00 (de/en)
Boulevard Kastanienallee, near to station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf
Workshop #3 – Meet Me at the Fountain

In the third workshop during this year’s outreach scholarship, the public is invited to gather, enjoy and paint the fountain built during the Summer of 2022. The workshop combines typography and painting practice, and is led by nGbK’s outreach fellow Jelena Fužinato.

This third and last workshop’s starting point is the knowledge accumulated during the first two workshops: WS#1 – A Fountain in Hellersdorf together with construction workers Karlo Nikolić, Mio Nikolić und Josip Miškić, and the WS#2 – Care together with nurses Brankica Gayer, Mirha Saković, Selma Hoffmann, Silvia Habekost and N.N. working in German hospitals and clinics. During the first two workshops, the aim was to tackle construction and care work practices from a practical perspective. In the third workshop, the aim is to use the knowledge accumulated, make it multiply and flow into public space in the form of text-based painting.

Saturday, 16 December 2022, 19:00 (de/en)
nGbK event space, 1st floor
Film screening and discussion “What was done?” by Jelena Fužinato

The outreach scholar Jelena Fužinato will be showing a short documentary video and provide a discussion format adressing topics such as mediation in arts and mediation as an art form. The knowledge and insights are based on three workshops that were held as part of her scholarship in 2022 at nGbK.

In 2022, three workshops dealt with two central themes: infrastructure and care work. During the workshops, building labor and care work professionals were invited to help develop mediation formats based on their practical experience in their respective fields. The third workshop was open to public and included mainly children and passers-by from Hellersdorf.

The workshops sought to explore the possibility of outreach as an organic network of professionals willing to communicate and share their knowledge, respecting the participants’ boundaries, time, and willingness to show themselves and their work.