- Venue
- Wooloo
- Location
- Germany
1.
On the 1st of June a public workshop was held to introduce Flash Job Campaign, a participatory project to be delivered as part of the New Life Berlin festival. The workshop was given by the project developer Per Traasdahl, a painter from Denmark and Berlin resident.
The object of Flash Job Campaign, explained Per, was for artists to find jobs for teenagers in Neukölln, purportedly Berlin’s most rundown and unemployed district. This was to be done by exploring the area on foot, securing a potential employer then finding a teenager willing to do the job. Per had run variants of the project before, working “top-down” with power structures and distributing information, but it was this direct method they were to use in Flash Job Campaign. The criterium of a “Flash Job”, we were told, are that it is a maximum 3 hours long, a one-off event rather than a routine, and that the employee must be paid, but not tipped or fed. How the participants, or what Per called the “catalysts” might go about their tasks, and how to introduce the project to a suspicious teenager, was not prescribed.
The exact purpose of the project, and what made it art, was also uncertain. Per offered the intention that “teenagers would consider what work is, that it can be fun as well as for money”, that it might “break down the divisions between learning, working and playing”. On a practical level it might introduce the teenager to the world of work and create unexpected interactions (between employer and employed) in the process, whilst improving the unfairly grim image of the district. As to its status as an artwork, Per talked about “role-play” and how the project has its own “visual language”. He encouraged the participants to think of themselves as “brokers” and the process as a “game” where they “made deals”. He wanted them to wonder “how you can control people in a fair way.”
The volunteers taking part were introduced: artists from Germany, Poland, Italy and the States, with backgrounds in teaching, social care, even nursing. They were then equipped with maps of Neukölln and branded Flash Job Campaign satchels, and set out on their first mission.
I left with a lot of questions. What model of behaviour was it promoting for the participants? One with an awareness of West Berlin’s history of gastarbeiten? Or one that endorsed a flexible and deregulated labour market? Moreover, was it one that made the participants artists or social workers, or something else? The intention seemed to be for them to work through these questions as they worked their way through the project. As the next meeting would prove, sorting between ethical and aesthetic values and their accompanying responsibilities, whilst engaging directly with a real public, is not without its difficulties.
2.
By the next meeting they were one catalyst down. He had apparently not wanted to do this “work” for free, and left the project. The remainder reported back on their first sorties. One described finding few businesses and fewer teenagers. Another gave an account of wandering at length from shop to shop – a creative "drift" across the city of which Per approved – before finding a car repair centre and a potential employer, but was left with an uncertainty as to “why do [the project] at all”. For one American catalyst a lack of German language had stymied communication with shop owners and prospective employees. Per proposed interaction by portrait-making, as a form of “moneyless communication” – in contradiction to his initial dictum that payment was essential to the Flash Job Campaign concept – and the catalyst acquiesced.
Thus the participants seemed to divide between those who could “go with the flow” and improvise, and those who wanted more clarity as to the direction and purpose of the project. The sense that the project encouraged “manipulation” and gave “false hope” to the potential employees was aired, and after an uncomfortably personal confrontation, the speaker dismissed herself from the project. The discontent seemed to be connected to the catalysts having been living together in basic accommodation provided by New Life Berlin, in some cases a long way from home, and were not being paid. All this seemed to emphasise the importance of transparency in the pretences under which people are recruited to such a project, as individual artists and particularly as volunteers. Unless this happens, the group’s motivations – a nexus of altruistic concern, ideological conviction and personal gain – can become the most significant, if not critical, element.
3.
Things had improved by the time of the next meeting on the 5th. We heard that a catalyst, through some canny negotiating and without speaking German, had placed a 19-year old woman with a jeweller, helping them set up and set down a market stall. Then another two participants, working in an English and German partnership, gave their report. Though not successful in the campaign’s terms, their day had become more of a sociological investigation.
They had met a general refusal in their job search. Business owners had said they had family to help, often adding that the local teenagers were disrespectful and could not be trusted. One shop keeper told them how he had taken on a teenager for an afternoon, left the shop front for a moment and when he’d come back the kid had disappeared with his lap-top. There were other stories like this; people were keen to complain.
The two catalysts had wandered further and come across a film crew. They started talking. It was an Italian company making a gangster film about Turkish immigrants. Asked whether such a film unhelpfully furthered stereotypes of the area, the director had replied “It could be any Turkish neighbourhood in Berlin.” The film crew, reported the catalyst, had body guards. For the catalysts, it was an interesting encounter: two parties, charged (admittedly or not) with representing an area, one concerned to undermine its image, the other keen to exploit it. The day’s experiences seemed to concretise the catalyst’s perception of their role and the image of the people they wanted to engage with.
This was the last meeting I attended, while the project continued for another week. However it pans out, I was consistently impressed by the organisers and participants, not least by their bravery: going into work places, discussing the project, recruiting teenagers, in a second language, if any, takes some balls.
The question remained, though, of why that should be done by artists, as opposed to social workers. The given answer – that they are using language and gesture to shape a situation (employment) as they might shape an object – does not include reference to their responsibilities as individuals intervening in the lives of others. Just as the small businessmen of Neukölln needed to be able to trust the teenage “dropouts”, so did the catalysts need to be trusted not to abuse the social privileges afforded cultural work, to be trusted that personal and individual interests are balanced by collective ones.
And after that, what will the video documentation of the project show? Some international artists swooping in on a deprived neighbourhood to perform a critique of the neo-liberal labour market, with the unwitting locals as extras? Or some volunteers, who happen to be artists, earnestly trying to understand a foreign situation and improve relations between people? As much as the project needed to be framed by the participants, it is the viewer who will need to frame it the more.
Matthew MacKisack 2008
This writing was produced as part of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin, a participatory writing project run by Open Dialogues. www.opendialogues.com
