In the weekend of 18th-20th July, our University is putting on the spectacle of Rundgang, portraying this school as an inclusive progressive art institution, standing up against budget cuts, meanwhile they are deeply complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine not only with its ties to Institutions that support war crimes, but also by artwashing a genocide and silencing anyone daring to speak up.
On Saturday, 19th July, we held a public performance, which took place in the garden of Hardenbergstraße 33, the main building of UdK for around 2 hours. As a group of autonomous students and visitors, who joined the performance spontaneously, we perform together to remind the university of its failure to stand on the right side of history in its past and in its present.
At the point in time as we sat in the garden Israel has bombarded every single Palestinian university in the Gaza strip. Not one Israeli or German university administraton has called on the Israeli government to cease the bombing of Palestinian universities.
While concentration camps are planned in Palestine, death tolls rise, refugee camps are bombarded, people destroyed in unimaginable ways, we watch it all, live streamed on our phones. Apathy surrounds us and echoes through the white walls of this university.
The administration has flat out ignored the demands of their students for the last two years, students who come together in solidarity as well as students, who are directly affected by the most current Genocide in Palestine. They have failed to act on the very principles of humanitarianism, decolonization and progressive thinking you advertise yourselves with. We understand that the ground we stand on is genocidal, so the responsibility you bear should be heavier to oppose such acts from happening anywhere else.
While art universities especially are supposed to give space to political discussion and foster debating, UdK is on the contrary going from restricting all places of dialogue around Palestine towards fostering racism while harassing students at the doors and intimidating any form of dissent. UdK is weaponising Anti-Semitism to manufacture consent for genocide at school and therefore in the next artist generation, fostering racism at school and within the german society, while refusing to listen to the Jewish community in the university. As well as denying Jewish students their Jewish identity. About all this you can read about in following articles:
- A message from the UdK Jewish Solidarity Collective
- Interview with a Jewish Staff Member at the Berlin University of the Arts
- “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” Fear is a methodology of fascism
We refuse our art to be used to normalise genocide, war and devastation from Palestine to Congo, to Sudan, to Kurdistan and Ukraine and across all oppressed people.
We demand our school to act now, according to our demands, which we appreciate to be acknowledged by the media:
1) Acknowledge the genocide, call for an arms embargo and distance yourself from the Staatsräson.
2) Cut ties with complicit Israeli Universities: no knowledge exchange with war criminals.
UdK holds exchange to the Israeli universities Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Tel Aviv; which is directly located where once the habor city Yafa was, as well as to Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.
Bezalel Academy for example has direct connections to Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapon supplier and the world’s leading manufacturers of military drones. Among other universities, Bezalel Acadeemy mobilized their students to sew uniforms, including grenade holsters, for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
3) Foster and not only build but allow student autonomous spaces for dialogue about colonialism and genocide. Stop criminalizing your students, throw the surveillance structures out and use the funds that go into it to support affected students.
With increasing demonization and a hate campaign by German institutions against opposers of the Genocide: We are faced with its normalization as well as repression tactics. The university legitimize shipments of weapons that kill starved civilians which is just one of the war crimes amongst many committed by Israel on the daily.
We encourage personal talks on our own terms outside of this art performance with the administration to push understanding of their students as well as material change hand in hand with our demands at school. Amongst the performers were people who rely on student visa, who rely on student financing and who rely on the university to manage their future. The moment our performance took place, the university closed down the doors for security reasons, intimidating students that were outside and needed to get in for their stuff, who were escorted personally by security through the building and out of the building.
We want the university to be able to hold space for dissent, and protect our right to speak out. We want to be listened, but the university rather shuts down the whole Rundgang than listening to our demands, which they should be pretty familiar with by now.
We spoke yesterday and will speak in the future out loud in our deep compassion with our peers at school and in the art field, who are faced with the violence and pain of colonialism, everyday lived racism and Nazi-culture in Germany.
Sincerly,
united students, which will never be defeated (Autonomous student group)
