An interview with Tools for Action
We interviewed the artist collective Tools for Action to get a sense of their subtle, nonfascist, political
spectacles that occur on nationalist holidays. We chatted with members Artúr, Tomás and Shailoh at their 2019 action in Dresden Germany.
Tools for Action describes their practice this way: "We are an artist group and collaborative platform to open the way for experimentation and poetic forms of engagement. We develop open source too\ls for collective leverage, catalyzing self-organization through skill-sharing and participatory making processes. Our practice oscillates between performance and protest, searching for new forms of public assembly and lines of flight in the face of oppression, exploitation and surveillance."
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Editors: You have been working on this project on and off for a year, building off of your past Berlin remembrance project. Can you talk about this?
Artúr: In Summer 2018 we were approached by Kulturprojekte Berlin(a subsidiary company of the state of Berlin, which develops, coordinates and promotes cultural projects in the city) to do the opening performance of “100 Years of Revolution, Berlin 1918 | 19”. This was an honor, and also remarkable that they asked a foreign artist group to commemorate the German November Revolution. We came up with light sculptures that you can carry on your back, harking back to the General Strikes that led to the proclamation of the Republics in Germany.
This was one line of thought. Next to this, we were also interested in developing new tools and a new visual vocabulary for future assemblies. These lights help enable collective communication, putting the spotlight on the individual within a collective. It allows a form of collective intelligence within the crowd, to have this interaction between the individual and the crowd, to find a new form of agency. To experiment and practice this form of agency.
At the same time, the light also had a very personal motivation and background story. Tommi, maybe you can speak about that?
(Participants setting up to begin the participatory performance in Dresden with the flickering-light backpacks designed by Tools for Action for their performance)
Tomás: Well, OK. Lights have always been my fascination.
How lights affect the individual and also the city. I was always asking myself, “why don’t we have amazing lights in the city, ones that we can enjoy. Or if you are really sad, you can go in and have an experience and it will change your day?” Why not? We can do crazy things like this in the city.
Since I’ve been collaborating with Artúr, one of our big wishes has been to do something with lights. I lost someone who was almost my sister, she was my light. So we started to do this project about memory, and the way I remembered her. To light a candle all night, all day. I asked Artúr if I could design the piece, shaping the form, and he said, “yes, we’ll do it together”. So this became the lights blinking, its moment-ness. It's really specific blink… a certain amount of time and then it disappears again. I think it also strongly relates to what history means, that it's also pulsating as a light.
Sometimes, it too disappears.
I learned as a child that memories are like flashes. You catch it or you lose it. That is why we chose to do this on the 9th of November. The red color has a lot of connotations. I found it important to have this kind of intimacy or atmosphere coming from these red lights in the city.
Shailoh: So, what you’re saying is, there’s a whole aesthetic layer in the project coming from commemorating your friend. How do you relate this personal commemoration to a larger commemoration?
Tomás: Both are ways to cast a light, a way to find something. They point towards remembering your own history, and what you want from the world. In your personal history, you cover something of the global history.
I think it is our goal to illuminate things that are hidden. The histories are there, but at any moment they can disappear. They are just covered. This relates to the political history in my country of Colombia, where memory is a big issue.
(At evening’s end, participants and member Tools for Action took to the Königsufer steps, where the city said they
could not tread even though the right wing Pegida always mounts them. Tools for Action spelled out “Wir”, or
‘we’. This is in reference to the contested “Wir sind das volk”- ‘we are the people!’ slogan arguing over the legacy
of the post-socialist democratic transiton.)
Editors: I’m curious how this process unfolded in this city; this process of rolling out this project here. How you found space here, and also diving into the currents of this place? What specific strands were you shedding light on here in Dresden?
Artúr: One important experience in Berlin was to experience the many taboos: in schools where we did workshops, the kids said, “are you crazy? You’re not going to walk with these lights in the streets.” You have to remember, it’s somehow also referencing the dark history of the way the National Socialists were also marching the streets with torches.
This very important moment, the proclamation of the Republic happened on the 9th of November. However, 20 years later the November Pogroms, or in national-socialist terms, the “Kristallnacht” took place. Hitler and the National Socialists wanted to erase the memory of this communist and democratic November Revolution.
So the Berlin authorities decided that we should do this commemoration on the 11th of November. Because the Pogrom Night is more important in German Memory Culture.
I find this curious because the founding moment get under-represented in German Memory Culture. In a time of rising right-wing populism, actually, the 9th of November should be the night when we remember these movements, recalling the groups that wanted something democratic, something different.
The spark for the Revolution were actually the sailors, German military that decided not fulfill the suicide pact at the end of World War I. So the National Socialist hate against the November Revolution could be also against the disobedience within their own military. I find that interesting, how a founding moment of German democracy was rooted in disobedience. By commemorating the November 9, 1918, we also resist how the National Socialists want us to commemorate history.
That was a motivation for us to continue with this project here in Dresden, a city of polarization, where the Nazi emergency was declared 5 days ago.
Shailoh:You are talking about the dates and time that have certain resonances throughout history, because they are either remembered or have been suppressed. We are also talking about different places. How can different places and times resonate?
Artúr: In Berlin, for our performances, we were promised by the city that we would be allowed to walk through the main historical sites in the city center: Brandenburg Gate, where the revolution happened, and down Unter den Linden. We even had flyers already printed with Brandenburg Gate as our meeting point. But through an absurdist play of bureaucracy, our action radius and visibility was increasingly minimized. At the end, the entire procession had to stay on the sidewalk.
Shailoh: Why was that forbidden?
Artúr: Because the torch marches, such as January 1933 when Hitler took power, also went through the Brandenburg Gate, and our performance would have strong associations with these representations of fascist power. But also, uncertainty and unclarity from the authorities, regarding what to do regarding ambiguous projects like ours- “what is this about? How do you explain it to the public?”
So they chose to hide us by letting us walk on the pavement on Saint Martin's Day. And we were, not allowed to walk in the streets.t. We could have resisted and walked on the street anyhow, but instead we chose to reveal the absurdity of the situation. The most important place we visited was Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the book-burnings took place - in order to light it up. I myself was hesitant at first, I was unsure how to deal with these sites of memory Is it a sacred place? Tommi helped me overcome my hesitancy.
Editors: What I find so fascinating is your (Artúr’s) seemingly straight-forward political-strategy-based thinking, and Tommi’s more personally-oriented thought. Obviously collaborations are a site where each collaborator’s individual voice is strengthened by the support and in relation to their collaborator.…Your collaboration deals with things that are very public - things that seem to be very common knowledge, but also things that hit very intimately- which is in a way the play between what is officially and formally remembered and what is actually felt. This project intends to reweave the political and emotional in some new and strange way. I want to know where those lines of politics and emotions cross- from 1918 to today, the 1940s, in the 1950’s… a long time ago!
Tomás: I see the personal and the historical meeting in the body. The people who join us, carrying our lights, share with us. It is the way, too, that I as a foreigner, can also have an approach to this history. It's something I’ve been reading or have been told about. It’s something that allows me to meet the people who are here, and have experienced these histories and have connections. For example, here in Dresden we met Johanna Kalex, an anarchist who organized forbidden protests during the DDR. It's not the same as if we were there, but she can tell us what it was like to be in the DDR and be in the opposition. There is the personal issue of Johanna that gets worked into and through this project.
Artúr: If you want to think about how we translate all this from the past until today, you have to think about how we debated for a long time what words we should use. So, for example, we decided to say that we are sending a signal here in on the Königsufer, in the heart of Dresden. With this sign, in this temporary moment of coming together, we wanted to create a monument of remembrance that leads us to remember the past through these actions. The challenge is the temporary nature of the ‘we’ that is composed at this moment, and how to create a really inclusive temporary we and how difficult that actually is, as we are practicing it on the streets. When I think back to my intentions of why I wanted to do this in Dresden - the heart of right wing movements in Germany - my hopes were to create a temporary monument of resistance. And what is the resistance? It’s actually the moment of coming together, of occupying space. It's actually that simple.
Tomás: Being in this place, on that day, with these different bodies, is already political. It is before the sign. Abdu from Libya, me, the girl from Iran, Johanna Kalex and many others, just taking place in the city, in this way, in this place. This place is significant because the Nazi’s used it as a marching place. We are there, with red lights, consciously appropriating their aesthetics. At first, I wondered if it was okay to do it here, and then I realized it's necessary to do it here.
Artúr: It’s necessary to do it.
Tomás: To not allow the fascism, to not give them the city. Just because they used it doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Before them, someone else used it. It's not just their city. History doesn’t stop with them.
Shailoh: It's reclaiming history.
Tomás: Perhaps it’s not the right word, but, in a way, the Nazi’s ‘colonized’ the space and memory and we let them do it. So removing this idea that it is only for fascists, and re-using the space, recovering it. That is powerful. And that is what is important too, as Kunst.
Artúr: Here in Dresden, with this art project in the form of a cultural event about inclusivity, we will force the authorities to take a position. Because the Nazi History of the Konigsüfer, and how it’s PEGIDA’s favorite place in the city. The stairs are built in National Socialist times, and it’s really designed for parades and assemblies. We re-appropriate this place, and force it so that the authorities must decide whether or not to allow us this place. However, this tactic did not even work in Dresden, as they said, “we don’t have a formal commission to evaluate what space you use, but you cannot use the stairs.”
Shailoh: What’s the reason they give?
Artúr: They say that if we allow you to use the stairs, then we must allow other groups to use them, etc… But it’s weird, because PEGIDA is all the time there. There is a documentary about PEGIDA, where the opening scene is them singing Christmas songs on these stairs. They also held rallies here. So you notice that the city’s public space is already appropriated by right-wing groups. In reality, the city is nervous about what the response might be.
So today, our intention is that at the end, we come together at the stairs, we will make a big “we” sign. A reference to ’89, “Wir sind das Volk” (we are the people), asking who are “we” now in 2019.
Shailoh: So we talk about anti-fascism as such. What I find very interesting about working with Tools for Action, is that there is a strategy of appropriation and mimicry, in terms of places and aesthetics, and assemblies. Reclaiming space, but done with a certain gentleness and care, which is not reactionary. It’s a different affective domain. It’s out of love and radical inclusivity.
I was wondering about the concerns about the mood and tone of our assemblies - how is it different from the fascist marches?
Artúr: Or an anti-fascist march, a black block, for example?
Editors: This is also a question of aesthetics; how did you take care to get a different affect, a different Stimmung?
Artúr: What I notice and appreciate about Tommi's sensitivity is a radical inclusivity. Basically, when we did the Montag’s Café workshops - a space usually given to shared meals between refugees and others living in Dresden, we did it to make connections with foreigners, newly arrived people, and also to talk about difficult things in German history, to have the ability to include these immigrants, to let them know that we are interested in their take on history. It is their history too. And they were interested to participate..
Tomás: It is also different because of the process we have. We build a different connection with these people. Sharing food. Give them a voice. We didn’t have a full action plan, we didn’t say, “we want to do that, that, that and that.” We said, “we want to test some ideas, and if you want to do something, please share your ideas with us. And take into account what we want to do.” So everyone can identify, find their place, and collaborate. It’s not that the artist says, “I am not interested in what you have to say.” Rather, participants feel, “I am part of this.”
Going into the abstract forms that we bring, with the lights and backpacks. That helps, too.
You can project into it. You can laugh about it, humor is really important when you are doing these sort of things. Humor takes what you are doing into a very different aesthetic area.
In difference to many other radical projects, it's important that we are not doing a manifestation against something, rather, we are getting together and trying to make something. I don’t know what, but we are not here yelling, “Fuck This”. Because I believe that this is not the way. We on the left have done this for years and years and years and this has not moved anything.
I say this, also, regarding the political situation in my country, Colombia. We did this project in Bogotá, to try to give these kinds of tools to another kind of fight, but one with solidarity to this. It was working really well because it was something different, and it was more affective. It is not everyone screaming in the streets, but rather, building communities, ideas and relations where things can shift.
Artúr: When we were in this gallery space, we were preparing for a walk through the city with David Adam, an artist with personal memories of the city. He was a photographer here in ’89 during the period when the wall came down. He was photographing the occupation at the Dresden train station. He was talking before we left, when suddenly this woman in a wheelchair came in. We gave her soup. She was a bit irritated by all these lights, these objects. “What is this, what is this?” She had such a strong response to these objects, I was not sure how to involve her,
That is, until Tomás found a way to include her: he put the object in the back of her wheelchair. And then suddenly, everything changed. She was happy. And she was this lightning bug with a fast-forward wheelchair zooming through the city. Ever since then, we have been in touch. This is what I mean by radical inclusivity. She has very different political views, but she is very reflective about exclusionary mechanisms. She votes AFD. She goes to PEGIDA, and still, she is also very happy in our space. Why? She was just so happy to be a part of the group.
The objects, the group feeling. The light, it gives you some intimacy. They claim space. They give a sense of agency.
Editors: Getting back to the performance, the moment, the event. I’m thinking about this as a lively project and what goes on in a lively project, what makes it a lively project.
Artur talks about “the sign”, Tommi responds very differently, saying, “no, not the sign. It’s about the being.” So I’m thinking about the political moment. You put a light on something you don’t want to talk about, that the state has somehow hidden- literally and figuratively. It’s an ambiguous moment that you put a light on, with and without words so that it stays ambiguous but also becomes very clear. I’m wondering about what is uncovered, and that moment of the event- what is the role of what escapes from the event and what escapes afterwards from it, in terms of what is just flashed upon. This, in terms of politics and the street.
There’s the political moment. I’m trying to talk about the fact that we need another form of politics, and everyone knows that and it’s a part of the everyday life and common sense of the street and the fact that the event and the way that it is held formally, and differently in the informal are mediated. Both Artur and Tommi have sensing and feeling ways into the object and performance, both approaching politics different ways, and construct the magic of the event and the possibility of meaningful things to occur and escape and continue or be freed from there.
Artúr: For politics to be performed, the body needs to be present. We are creating extra bodies with these inflatables. I don’t see a contrast between my and Tommi’s approaches. They are complimentary. Our politics are on a physical level, claiming space.
Shailoh: I also see our work as a probe, a test. We make things reveal themselves. We make the law reveal itself. We make what is hidden in people’s desires for new, or different or unspoken and yet unknown politics come to the surface- or better we probe below.
Artúr: We have the even strategy, the coming together and the reclaiming of the public space. And we create a memory of resistance, but also the intervention as the way of dealing with power relations in certain situations. And as a way of experimental knowledge production.
As a long-term policy of Tools for Action, it has been good to see how public space is regulated, to see the rights to assembly, to see the underlying experience and practice of it.
The first moment when this became really important to us was the protest at the Paris 2015 Climate Conference. A state of emergency had been declared, one that overlapped with the timing for the conference, and protest was forbidden. This happened so quickly. Knowing that the right to assembly is always under tension, it´s always under threat.
Tomás: Think about it in Chile, where today (2019) there is a State of Emergency, but people don’t care about it anymore. You know, it is such a situation that the state has militarized but the people are ignoring it and they don’t want to go home. They continue in the streets fighting for their rights.
Shailoh: And in Lebanon as well.
Editors: So, then, in your work, but also in all these actually live protest assemblies- we are talking about assembly towards what? Shailoh was asking about the aesthetic character of the tools you are probing with. If we can suggest that maybe your assemblages are suggesting a probe that raises care and the common- what is the assembly towards?
It’s a question of politics I’m asking- if this is an anti-fascist artwork that is suggesting another way of being political, what is the characteristics for the politics you hope to help bring into being? One constituted by memory and feelings- what is this assembly towards?
Tomás: I never thought to do something anti-fascist, I need to say. My ideas also need to include someone from the right- if they want to participate, they are allowed to. We are going to give them the space to talk about it, but without aggression. All the institutions we work with were speechless when I mentioned this, “What!” But I was like you are talking about integration- but I hate that word because when you integrate, something is excluded- likely that thing that has held back the ability to come together. You have to integrate into what has been established. But with inclusion, you cannot avoid that. You can start to shift things with inclusion. It’s like what happened when we were talking with Johanna Kalex and she told us about when she was talking to a neo-Nazi for two hours and he started to shift, because she was able to say, “hello, this is not this way.”
At this point, we cannot speak. We wanted to make this project that is not in the Kunsthaus, not in Hellerau, not even in the Montagscafe, we wanted to create a space to reach that other possibility. If you are AFD, like Regina in the wheelchair- we can still meet and talk to you and reach some possibility.
It was nice to have her telling about the AFD, and Abdul from Syria, me Nina from Iran. It’s nice, and nobody gets annoyed. And then she came and heard the talk about transgendered people from Bogota, and she was like, “hhhh!” but then we talked about it, and I think that is the idea.
A couple came and said, “I was born in ’38. And I heard about and lived through ’45” and the firebombing of Dresden. And without them, we would have not this or any other personal information.
Shailoh: I see it as though we are claiming space without completely owning it. Assembly can be understood as a place where time shrinks, a space for encounters, space for discourse. Space for being dissonant in different ways with our bodies. Usually, we have taboo spaces, spaces where you have to constrain yourself you are not allowed to hear, where we aren’t allowed to come together in our social dissonance. But by insisting on inclusion, you expand space itself. There’s room for difference, but it’s a different thing than saying you can only say this, and you can only say this.
So for me, from a research perspective, I am interested in looking at how the process and the event can spark that sort of imagination and desire in people to be inspire in people to think beyond the presence and simple facts of our bodies. It brings in ambiguity, complexity, something that is non-representational, but still brings people together. It creates the possibility of doing something that’s slightly adjacent to what’s there. By doing that, it expands. It’s something that can also be practiced on a daily basis, and I hope it’s kind of infectious.
Artúr: Yesterday, when we did our live test of the performance, is a very good example. We were standing around in a circle, and some guys from the outside were disturbing the performers, but also playing with us. There was one girl with us who wanted them to move because she almost got an elbow in her face, saying “they are sexist. They are chasing the girls.” But actually, they started then to become part of the group after some back-and-forth. It was interesting, because we did a word-association play and this girl said, “resistance against fascism.” I don’t know, the practice of inclusivity is very different in practice than in theory. And this is a new thing that I am trying to practice. But what is it, this anti-fascist strategy is the unsettling of identity through art, the unfixing of identity. Unsettling is a continuous thing, you need to continue in practice.
Shailoh: You need to repeat, it’s a practice. All these practices can only be brought back into the present when they are practiced.
Artúr: You were talking about the street. You can feel it, but you can’t quite see it. The street talks about the reality. Nowadays, when there is new migration to Germany, the street starts to be a kind of meeting or common place. In a protest, you cannot have this feeling of the street, with this kind of time to make and become in gentle ways. You cannot touch in this way, you don’t have this time of communication…
Editors: I have one other question, and it relates to violence in the street- violence is a part of the street. People have to give themselves into the performance because of some greater political goal but the space we have defined as a space of radical inclusivity comes at a cost of violence. What is happening in Chile, for example, is also a space of violence, and that girl did experience some violence. But I’m curious, about the radical probe as a violent probe into the machine of the state, too- we are going to ask you these questions that you don’t want to answer because they make you look dumb, they make you look compliant to racist forces, so, in what ways is this project not only a request for a radical inclusivity, but also a demand for radical inclusivity. We don’t have to use the word violent, but it is forcefully projecting itself.
This woman, yesterday, this woman felt violated a little bit… and then she capitulated to a larger political performance. The act of making this opening is encountering violence nevertheless. I’m interested in how this project encounters and excerpts force.
Shailoh: By being together with these objects, they serve as a bumper to protect us from the violence. When you attack these objects, they exhale. They are buffers.
And being there, our assertion is a negotiation. Being there, as a participant or a viewer, there’s no fixed script. It’s not an army or a war. If someone doesn’t feel safe, we can protect each other, we can step aside, step out. There is no force that is keeping us in any way, as such.
Tomás: The objects are a de-escalating thing. And the people feel secure, because you have a light. It is not an act for resisting, I don’t see the performance not as a way of resisting or insisting, rather, but one of asking. And that is important.
I don’t think Chile is resisting anymore. They are now asking.
It’s interesting to think: why does asking turn violent? Because of repression, because of fear. A movement about asking is a movement in a time, in the city, with a body, within a community.
Note:
Signals 3.0 was Tomás and Artúr’s last collaboration for now. In February 2020, a documentation of Signals 3.0 was shown in Kunsthaus Dresden at the exhibition Requiem about memory cultures in the context of the bombing of Dresden 75 years ago. Shailoh and Artúr now collaborate under the governance of a newly formed non-profit foundation in the Netherlands. Currently they are working on an updated series of modular inflatable light- and sound sculptures that improve the 'stacking function' aspect. The sculptures can be used to build architectural formations (bridges, domes, shelters, floats on water) and allow the experimentation with new forms of assemblies. Key concepts in their thinking are scale, emergence and intersectionality.