The Trial (A Love Letter to the Racist Colonial Institution that Calls Itself an Art School)
Performance + Poem, July 2023
For my summer semester exams, I decided to put a table across the entrance of the Painting building, blocking the door. I put all of my professors and lecturers (the one that showed up to the exams anyway) on one side of the table, facing outside. I invited as many friends as I could to witness the performance, for which I had prepared a 20-page Love Letter to the Racist Colonial Institution that Calls Itself an Art School, translated it into German and English and printed around 30 copies to distribute. On the table I had my set up of microphone, pedal board and amplifier. Then when the professors have sat down I put my legs on the table and started reading. Using effects such as shifting my pitch, distortion, echoes, and feedback, I spoke the poem as u’u’a’a, a being whose voice doesn’t matter in age or gender, because their voice could belong to anyone.
My piece spoke about the racist incidents that happened in the university, the structural colonialism inherent to the bricks and bones of the institution, its staff, its perspectives and methods, about the colonial binary ex: Human-Nature, Subject-Object, about Beauty and its twisted misunderstandings, and about the department’s failure to take student and marginalized voices into consideration. I also mentioned several authors whose works and politics have greatly inspired me, such as Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Silvia Rivera Cuisicanqui.
Some consequences of that exam in terms of relations to my professors and the institution, I’m still dealing with today.
Documentation by Michael Fink
Full text (“Garuk Garuk” zine p. 18 - 25 )