 as really how it should be to be a real cultural diplomat. So I will kindly ask Vida Ognenovich now to present Monika Mokre. Thank you, Milena. Hello, everybody. I am honored by this position. And it's a great pleasure to introduce this wonderful lady, Madame Monika Mokre, who is a political scientist, and she works as a political scientist at the Institute of Cultural Studies, and I can't do it anymore because of the light. But I know that it's also very active in immigrants' policy and very successful at it because she taught at the University of Vienna a semester in 2015 or 2016. He taught immigrants' policy, which is wonderful. And while we are only really very happy to have her with us today. And I also salute this wonderful forum. Thank you, Milena, for organizing it. And please keep it. Let's do it traditionally, bi-annually at least. And I'm sorry for missed some of these wonderful gatherings because I've been otherwise engaged, I've been abroad. And Madame Mokre, the floor is yours. Thank you so much for the invitation and for the very kind introduction. I think this can chime in quite fine. It was heard from Jonathan now, so what I try to suggest is that one way of thinking about cultural diplomacy is thinking about cultural diplomacy from below. And I use some case studies and some kind of structural theoretical considerations about artistic protest with refugees and migrants. So this is, I guess, also what you were talking about, political agency outside of government. This is somehow happening there. The framework of that, I think, is quite clear. I mean, I'm Austrian myself, as you heard, and especially in Austria and in Germany, we had some kind of really breathtaking changes from 2015 and the welcome culture to what is happening now in Austria. It's about border closings, rejection of refugees, recently I read in a German newspaper what we need now as a deportation culture. So this is really, I mean, it's kind of, well, it's outrageous, but it's also an interesting question how discourse can change so rapidly and so dramatically. On the other hand, and parallel to that, we have a huge range of, well, of NGO activities, civil society activities, which are still in this mood of welcome culture and also in the artistic field and artistic projects of working with refugees and with migrants. And this is what I want to talk about and as I also said in my questions with Jonathan, I do this in a really solidary mood and most of the projects I want to present, I like and I know, and sometimes I know the people working in that, still I'd like to raise some critical questions to them to discuss with you because I think it's also important to have this critical mind which goes on and on by questions, as Jonathan also said. So these are basically my questions to these projects. What are the aims and they are different ones and sometimes it might be that the aims of the artists are different from what is actually politically done with this project. So it might be that you have like really the aim of political critique and still it is used as a kind of smoke screen for other things going on, and then as a theater play while you're reporting other people and so on and so forth. But also who is visible, who represents whom and who gains the monetary capital within this kind of art is not that large but also the cultural capital which I think is an important question. And how can you work together? This is not only a problem for arts projects but for all these projects I think how can you work together on eye level when you have radically different privileges, possibilities and risks. And in a way I think we can also think about these questions as a kind of cultural diplomacy because it is mirroring in a very small scale problems between the global north and the global south in this kind of relations. My own position in that is on the one hand as you very kindly said I'm a political scientist, I'm teaching in this field, I'm working in the field of cultural politics and in the field of asylum and migration politics I'm also a political activist in this field. So I'm also, I mean I'm not in a really maybe in the correct distance you should have as an academic researcher to these kind of questions. Starting up I mean with this question also about what are the arts about? What are political functions of the arts? I mean there is this long discussion does freedom of the arts mean that you shouldn't have any kind of political influence I don't go into that you briefly mentioned that all this question of avant-garde of revolutionary art and so on and so forth I would say that irrespectively somehow of the own aims and goals of artists we can argue that in national societies the arts play a huge role for cohesion or for solidarity so the cultural heritage but also some kind of the contemporary arts which are like important expressions of whatever our collective identity is so the construction of the nation which as we know is a construction but this is based to a very high degree on culture and the arts and then we can see obviously cultural diplomacy as an encounter between different national cultures and this is especially important as we also know in democracies because democracies work in this way that we accept that other people have the equal liberty as we have because of this solidarity cohesion collective identity so it's this you know the French Revolution, liberty equality and fraternity whereas fraternity or solidarity is kind of the condition of giving each other equal liberty now obviously when we talk about arts projects with refugees and migrants mostly this means also to criticize this form of understanding culture and the arts this form of understanding national boundaries is something more or less naturally given maybe not constructed and also not easily changeable so this is something that is a part of some of the arts projects but still my question to that is what is actually done here so is it to say okay we can really transgress these boundaries or we should maybe ignore these national boundaries or is it rather about integrating our refugees and migrants into a national culture and even that is done out of a rather progressive kind of point of view I mean the populist rights as this is impossible the culture is different people have to go home but still it makes a difference we integrate people into our culture whatever it might be we change by transcultural encounters by culture translations what this culture is going on and so as a first example I would show you I mean I rather like this I like all the examples I show to you so this is a project it was called Helping As We Do It it was organized by Austrian public broadcasting and it was a project consisting of different video clips where refugees were from Austrian literature poems whatever this is a refugee from Afghanistan and he is reciting a poem by Ernst Jandel whom you might know he's a very renowned Austrian poet and he wrote a poem called Schützengraben which means fire trench in German and he left out the vocals the vowels in the Schützengraben and then it sounds like a machine gun or something like that the internet is working Schützengraben it means fire trench but you will see Schützengraben Schützengraben Schützengraben Schützengraben Schützengraben Schützengraben Schützengraben Sprechen lernt man nur so actually what you were doing then is it was a kind of advertising to pay for German courses and by the way he's an Afghani actor and I've listened to this poem many times it's rarely done as well as he did it so on the one hand you have this Ernst Jandel poem which is an important part of Austrian culture on the other hand Ernst Jandel is a really critical poet so it's also kind of more sophisticated than having I don't know a refugee playing Mozart or something like that and you see this guy so you also have to say there's some kind of self representation of this refugee at the same time I mean he has to present something that was chosen for him by other people and it's part of Austrian culture and what I thought is kind of problematic and not untypical of these kind of projects you see in the movie just his first name so he remains kind of you know it's the refugee another example which also is very much embedded in high culture in Austria is the play the Schutzbefohlen and the warts, the ones who are given to your protection by Elfried Jelenek Elfried Jelenek is a novel laureate as you know she is one of the most renowned contemporary poets writers also in Austria maybe the one and she wrote a play about refugees or maybe it's rather a play about a critique of Austrian government but the warts are put in the mouses of refugees this was shown in different theaters but in Vienna and the Burg Theater which is our main theater so it was really I mean when we talk about political economy of culture it was like in the focus of that and also we I mean this could also lead to a debate about what you said about traditional places so to say okay to put it there where we have a very distinguished audience or something like that that the play in itself is beautifully in languages everything by Jelenek and very critical of the government so that the last sentences of the play go in the translation it will not happen it is not we are not here we have come but we are not here very brief part just to give you an impression of that it's Germans I don't make a whole lot of sense but just a bit of that this is actually from a Germans theater because I couldn't find that one for me okay I guess you get the great of it the stories of these refugees and then also about a kind of showing somehow Austrian culture now what this is it is obviously a play about refugees it is not by refugees it is not with refugees you see a brilliant a play by a brilliant Austrian author performed by professional Austrian or German actors and by the way I think this is a good choice I would have it if I mean it worked out and you only see white faces you only see Austrians or Germans so I think it would really have been a mistake to use this then to bring some migrants there so this would not work so I think it works perfectly well but it is something it is about those people and partly it was also difficult for refugees to accept that the way in which it was like we plea pray help us because they didn't want to express themselves like that based on this play and I think it was also interesting there were two other see a artistic projects at least and those two projects came out of a second another understanding maybe of what you can do in this kind or in the arts working politically and in the field of asylum and migration namely to say okay we have a solidarity struggle here in fact we want to do something together because we want a different society and this holds true for the refugees for the migrants as well as for those who are not we want a different and open society whatever inter-cultural, trans-cultural society and the two examples I want to show you now is a very personal spoken of a refugee protest movement which took place in Vienna and where the people the Austrians as well as the refugees were part of this movement and I would say that this is somehow related this understanding of solidarity to the socialist understanding of solidarity as our common struggle for a better future or whatever there is so the first one is this was a very plurilingual project by Peter Waterhouse Peter Waterhouse is half English half Austrian I think and he has been working with language and translation for a long time and he is doing on the one hand translations but also kinds of where he plays around with the sound of words and so he worked with a group of refugees and they translated part of this Yeleneck play to English, Georgian, Pashto and Urdu which I really cannot imagine how this works because Yeleneck is very difficult even in German but it was also playing around with the sound so what you see here I mean as I said the German word is the Schutzbefolen and the English translation was then, die should see befallen in which sounds like the Schutzbefolen and so this was also something they were playing around and I mean really I know many of the people who worked there many of the Pakistani people they really liked that and they felt they were working together. Still one has to say if you talk about this project probably the name Waterhouse comes to our mind not the name of the other ones who were part of that. The second example was organized Bettina Leisch was a very active theater and movie maker politically active for a long time and she used parts of the Yeleneck play together and converted them transformed them together with the Salem Seekers who are in the largest reception center in Austria and Transkirchen so she found the people there and she made a play with them which was then more about their immediate experiences. See this is a traditional song saying how beautiful we are now. This project by Bettina Leisch got some kind of weird fame so to say because they performed it in the university in Vienna and an extreme right-wing group the identitarians came there to disturb this play which was truly terrible for the people on the stage because they saw somethings going on they were not really shooting the sound of that and they had a lot of artificial blood and people were traumatized still finished the play which I thought was very courageous so this brought some kind of fame to this play and this led to the fact that now it was performed in the city hall of Vienna which is kind of nice but then I talked with Bettina Leisch and she also said well it is really nice but I'm wondering given Austrian politics at this point in time if it is not a smoke screen as in before what is going on by showing my or our work there in a way what is happening in these different projects I think is also that it is a help for refugees this has some I mean talking about capitalism so people earn money and asylum seekers in Austria are not allowed to work basically but as artists they are allowed to earn money so it makes sense from this point of view it can also mean that somehow you can transform I guess traumatic experiences in another way to maybe to approach them from another artistic way and this was something somebody that this is a project I was involved with the young guy you see here Mohamed Muaz he is a friend from Algeria and he made a movie where he repeated his route from Istanbul via Bulgaria, Romania Hungary to Austria made interviews with people we talked about his experiences and among other things this was also an attempt I think by him to deal with his own experiences and his own traumatization I don't think that it worked for him but this is another story now I'm not sure it's I show you maybe also this short trailer about that I just wanted to mention that finance is in a festival I wouldn't say it's a micro festival but it's a small festival which focuses on political issues and this is somehow also where my question came out I mean it's a wonderful festival and I meet all my friends there and half of them have produced something but somehow I mean all of us we go out completely depressed because we saw a lot of stuff about deportation and whatever kind of shouldn't we try to get this to some kind of other audience and also with regard to this festival this is something I thought when you Lois were asking your question when this started there was a lot of critique by professional artists working in public art community however you want to name it who said okay fine we do not get enough money and now you give money for the arts to people who are not artists so why just to mention that like the problems in the next few days we will live in Istanbul to start our travelling to see what happened for me and what happened for a lot of refugees there who crossing the border who travelling from Istanbul when they come from Algeria until there until Austria I start also from Istanbul I think it's hard there and then finally I would argue that the last three projects I showed you really are done in the way of solidarity I mean also this movie I was a small part of that and what we also saw that this is very difficult to work like on eye level as I said before when we have such different cultural capital I mean this movie we always said it's the movie by Mohammed Muaz three times if I could come to discuss that if I could come to present that if Mohammed is coming I can come with him but that's it so you bring it with you I bring it with me I guess so this is the one thing then also as it is a means to gain money it also means that I mean people are interested to be part of the project somebody is deciding who is part of the project I decided to do this with Mohammed and it helped him to get the money for his project and I would argue this comes out could be seen as part of a third understanding of solidarity which comes out of Christianity or especially Catholic and the Catholic social teaching as a kind of charity universal solidarity which is important I guess and unavoidable in this situation where people have radically less whatever money privileges than other ones but still it's problematic as a paternalistic attitude which is kind of furthered by that so this is basically what I want to say now and I just would like to emphasize again I think this project is very important I think they had a positive impact I'm very much in favor of them and solidarity with them and still I think it makes sense to ask these questions to wonder what we ourselves or seen our friends are doing in this field thank you it was very interesting and sort of deep understanding and a view of the problems and I'm sure it will raise a lot of questions and I I thank you very much of mentioning one thing or pointing out that one very important thing I think about refugees and about their culture do you really do we integrate them by dragging them from their culture and putting them almost forcefully in our to and in our culture building them in or we take their culture to broaden our own culture that's a very interesting problem really that's probably the main problem the main culture the most important culture problem with immigration and being contemporary immigrants and what else I enjoy those excerpts that you showed us these examples of doing things and yes the first the first reaction is also the reactions different reactions to to these things are interesting yelling next play went well but the play that integrates immigrants in and takes immigrants as actors well provoked a certain rather interesting or or very I should say imposing reaction and I'm very interested in that plural linguistic material and problem as such because you know I grew up in a multilingual part of Serbia in Vojvodina where we really I for one did not really understand that we speak different languages because when I played with my Hungarian schoolmates or you know of my age I spoke Hungarian with them and to them but when I went home I spoke Serbian I mean with my parents and my grownups so I did not see any difference I knew there was a difference but there was a difference given as such another difference that has some important meaning for me so and you know I'm vice president of Pan International which is a global writer's union as a matter of fact and in comprise like 160 countries among them 45 different languages and that's interesting when they come there is no lingua franca for us there is four languages that I use English, French, Spanish and Russian and then when they speak their own tongue sometimes we don't have some of us don't speak any of these languages some of the writers we don't have any translations and we pretend that we do understand them which is some cow which is like plural linguistic step and well thanks again and I give you the floor yes man could you please I don't see it because see you could you introduce yourself and thank you for this presentation I think that it's very important to use art as therapy because of the traumatism we can witness in the community of refugees and migrants but I will say something which is not linked to the work you are mentioning it's a general consultation about working with migrants working with refugees which became a kind of fashion today I receive every day mails from people wanting to go I'm from Syria and I'm living in Lebanon and people who wants to go to the camps to see refugees as if they are curiosity and it's a way to raise money also because there are there is money to project with migrants at the same time in Europe we have some projects about migration about refugees because it's part of the reality and I accept it because the artist has to see what is happening in his reality and to reflect about it in art but to present a low quality of art because they are refugees it's not a solution there are very good artists between the refugees and they can present very good artwork these can be presented and they can have the opportunity to enter the field of the production the art market but I don't like what is presented with a very low quality only because they are refugees and they are migrants they are human beings and they can be very good artists if they are not don't present them I'm not speaking about what you said I speak in general because I don't like that way to to have compassion with these very nice refugees we have to help them we have to present them and we have very poor quality of art in the name of refugees I don't I can't admit it please think about it you spoke Jonathan about going to the area where people are not artists by profession and it's a very good experience for you as an artist to be in confrontation with these people but if they are not able to present something with valuable things they are not they don't deserve to to present it you understand what I say it's a general consultation again it's not against you what you said I think the using art as therapy is very good and is very important because they have a lot of traumatism after all these journeys and there's two things art as therapy as I agree on the other hand it doesn't work all the time as I said I mean this movie thing I mean was clearly re-traumatized by this it was not a very good idea with regard to the arts projects I mean I also have a problem with this kind of fashion but I think it's a different problem so as I said I'm a political activist in this field and then I get this by artists I don't know could you please organize some refugees from here want to do something I mean what is this now so I think I mean the projects I showed to you came out of a common struggle of a common political struggle we were all together in that and some of us were artists never doing this and I think you can make some very interesting projects if you know what you're doing I mean some of those people like Tina Lai she has been working for her whole life with non-professional artists she did a great movie about the women's prison and the women are presenting themselves in a really charming way so this is a kind of technique also of artists I guess so this I think is important I mean I agree it shouldn't be out of compassion this is another thing it shouldn't you should have your own interest in that but I wouldn't probably agree that every refugee migrant whatever who is part of such a project has to be a professional artist by him or herself also given this very pragmatic reason that I don't know about the situation here but basically in Austria you can only work as an asylum seeker as an artist or as an academic and there are not many recognized academics artists is easier yes thank you I think your statements and understanding are very important because it emerges out of a lot of very strong historic concerns which have done a lot of very important work to understand issues of artistic value and quality and how we kind of understand production and the labor that is invested in production there and the motivations and the talents and the yes just what labor is and so I think the questions of quality are very very important but they inhabit a discourse that these other projects aren't inhabiting which is not to say that these discourses don't overlap they don't dialogue they're not intrinsically related they are but I'd say that the work well talking generally works with refugees and immigrants their aspirations are not the criteria of quality embodied in that other discourse that is not the condition of their practice that's not their aspiration there is if you see the world of culture as a kind of institutional ladder of privileged spaces and every artist is trying to get to the top and become Picasso or whatever you know then you will see it like that but that's not what it is we are working in a very hybrid cultural field of overlapping discourses which have their own understanding of value and representation of value I don't think we should think of it as part of the same thing yes well hi hello Mike from Cape Town just in terms of the previous speaker I was also wondering just about the discourse that you were talking about yesterday Elena you weren't in the session that I was part of but I was just questioning this whole notion and discourse of the culture of humiliation for Africa and for the Arab world and the like and I think that those kinds of discourses are a particular kind of perception of these particular regions that disempower the people from those regions because it takes away the notion of agency that people actually have an ability to change that it's more kind of perception of how people from Europe might see those regions but that's not necessarily how people from those regions see themselves but that wasn't going to be my question you were referencing earlier about the kind of dynamic that is faced because of vertical integration of refugees into Austrian culture has been almost replicating the global north-global-south dynamic as well who has resources, who doesn't have resources what are the terms upon which that integration happens and the like I wondered about the extent to which I'm in Germany at the moment on a bit of a fellowship and we did a bit of a study tour of how different cities are dealing with the integration of refugees and one of the things that you know I really wondered about is this kind of vertical integration because there's a lot of talk about how do you make people from other parts of the world part of German society without necessarily looking at horizontal integration they are refugees from a whole range of different countries are there projects that you are aware of where people from different countries are working together and are there kind of particular strategies that they are adopting where they collectively view the integration into Austrian society as opposed to Austrian society saying these are the conditions under which you need to be integrated into our country go ahead go ahead Christine from Germany I can catch up immediately with what Mike was asking because bringing some examples from the North Rhine-Westphalia Cologne area I also would like to make a plea for lay activity because what we saw happening for instance in schools also as I replied to your answer is this integrating into the culture of the receiving country or something else I would say it's end and end because there the beautiful thing was to see the curiosity of those 15 year old teenagers organizing music festivals within their school which created space exactly for all these whoever was a lay practitioner be it from Somalia, Afghanistan wherever and also this curiosity to discover people of their own age because probably that was the first time for a physical encounter and not just seeing these things on YouTube and somewhere else so I think it would be beneficial to explore this dimension and this also in reflection Jonathan what you say because somehow your initiative is also making a plea for amateur action in a professionalized cultural management field from the responses you got and that made me think about this old tradition of organizing family partings large weddings in Cologne we have this Carnival tradition it's very easy for us to throw a party for 300 people we don't call for professional event agency it's a technique you acquire year after year after year as you go along in these formats because they are so deeply entrenched they were very versatile in welcoming a broad range of refugees from all ages who had fun in doing dance musical activities they really would also invite us to look a little bit to this amateur practice which goes along in addition to the professional fields because it's a continuum yes I have a question to all of us and I would like to hear of course your opinion and it's also kind of the call for thinking together or call for the commune action and thank you very much I think the work is incredibly important that you presented but I'm thinking and allowing me to use very kind of the rough metaphor that what is happening now is that we are us people in culture and arts we are as kind of the first aid people at the battlefield and we are having like the bleeding the wounded people that are bleeding and it needs to be saved so we are saving lives on different levels but who will stop the fire like who will stop the fire so my question is also very literal and also maybe utopia but I think it's very important to think about it how we take the agency through art and culture to ask those questions and negotiate and press our governments in asking new questions or doing actions that would cause to stop the fire at the end and I know it's a big utopia but we are having every day like the artists and the culture workers are getting these funds from you and the refugees are coming and we are helping people like helping them to de-traumatize, integrate and so on but people are dying every moment in those countries in every moment of this day so how do we take this agency that could be I mean it's the question I guess for all of us thank you one more question my question is to you not to Monica the question is to the people in the Balkans because you passed from this same experience before so refugees from the Balkans so what will learn from your own history as I can ask myself what I learned from our Spanish Civil War experience of artists going up and trying to explain and trying to see so I think the story of the humanity is full of this kind of experiments so why not we try to learn from what happens in the past what happens to ourselves our great parents and try to do this in today's situation history is not the teacher of the history is trying to teach but we do not learn very briefly just keywords maybe I think that there is a confusion in terms of discourse and words between integration and assimilation and usually what people are required to do is to assimilate integration would mean that we have an open society where different whatever influences can change the society and still there can be one society and this is precisely what usually is not happening with all this about German and Austrian and I think to have this kind of integration to change something therefore this horizontal level is very important and I see rather not in state activities at least in Austria but in civil society activities which are based on common interests and I think this is an important thing also with regard to schools and whatever there is city quarters I would say let's downplay all these cultural differences there exist no question about that but let's talk about what we have in common and this could be an interest in a quarter just to give the movement this was a refugee protest movement there were very concrete claims for the status of refugees and there were people from Pakistan, Afghanistan Somalia and so on and so forth when you go away from this common political interest you see a lot of cultural or whatever differences and whatever there is in struggle but in this situation of our common interest it can work another brief example I'm loosely connected created by refugees and former guest workers and second generation guest workers from Exuco-Slavia very interesting project saying we are dealing with common and different problems in working together and so finally I think also that this question about political change I mean the arts NGOs, civil society in a way it's always a struggle against wine mills and against states the ambivalence I always see also in this artistic project is between individually helping and being politically active this is not much exclusive but as the day only has 24 hours we have our priorities and I think sometimes it's problematic to say okay we help individual refugees we have a job for them and not at least trying to influence society on a bit larger scale well I thank you kindly thank you both very much it was very very interesting and inspiring thank you for wonderful questions and thank you Milena for all of this