Fellows

Isshaq Al-Barbary (Campus in Camps), Diego Segatto (Campus in Camps)

Collective Dictionary: Political

In April 2016, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, brought to life the Here We Are Academy: a spirited temporary recomposition of a refugee-initiated platform for learning called We Are Here Academy. Established in Amsterdam in 2012, We Are Here is the first large-scale organization of refugees living in limbo in the Netherlands. Through projects organized with artists and activists, the group explores the space of art as one wherein members can practice visibility, solidarity, self-representation, and action—structurally unavailable to them due to society’s denial of the right of refugees to have rights. If We Are Here Academy is where refugees can learn, Here We Are Academy is where they can teach (each other and those with citizen rights) the knowledge of survival.

Campus in Camps joined the Academy’s temporary “faculty” to co-develop its curriculum and gather with refugees, artists, students, researchers, and activists to continue our commitment to writing-by-embodying an ongoing Collective Dictionary. We have taken to heart curator Maria Hlavajova’s question of how to conceive of “future vocabularies” in times like ours; of how to think and practice a lexicon of “being together otherwise.” Such a lexicon could enable us to move about the current impasse, negotiating refugee participants’ knowledge against the reality of a contemporary western society that hides its own failings behind the label “refugee crisis.” It has been a complex, humbling, and at times conflict filled process of figuring out how to speak a language of neither victim nor victor, but that of confident political subject who recognizes and acts upon the urgencies of the contemporary. It has led us, if tentatively, to shape the contours of an entry for Political into the Collective Dictionary. Download the Collective Dictionary: Political (PDF).

—Isshaq Al-Barbary and Diego Segatto, Campus in Camps

more from Isshaq Al-Barbary (Campus in Camps)

  • BAK Fellows in MaHKU Graduation Show: If Not Now

    Several generations of Fellows are involved in this year’s MaHKU, Utrecht, graduation show If Not Now, taking place at BAK from 30 September–11 October 2020. One BAK 2020 Fellowship position has been awarded to the Mutual Support Platform (MSP), a space for conversations and actions by/between/for students, alumni, and teachers of the MAFA HKU, Utrecht. […]

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  • How to Assemble Now (BAK Public Studies)

    BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Isshaq Al-Barbary and 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith are among the contributors to BAK’s Public Studies Program How to Assemble Now, taking place In August and September 2020.   Read more about the program here.

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  • Collective Dictionary: Inhabiting

    Inhabiting is an outcome of the collaboration between Al Maeishah (Isshaq Al-Babrbary, Elena Isayev, and Diego Segatto) and the Office of Displaced Designers (ODD), who invited Al Maeishah to implement their research on The Alternative Atlas of Lesvos: An Island for the World. The atlas aims to intersect with those forcibly displaced, with the global web […]

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  • Collective Dictionary: Xenia with Elena Isayev

    Elena Isayev is a historian and professor at University of Exeter uses the ancient Mediterranean to explore migration, belonging, displacement and spatial perception. Her research is based on the intersection of Hospitality and Asylum, Potency of Displaced Agency, Common and Public Space. Her interdisciplinary and inter-practice approach has led to collective learning and research beyond the […]

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