Only Temporary. Structures in Flux

Projects by Botschaft e.V. (1990–1996)

Abstract

Botschaft e.V. was an association of up to fifteen people at a time, which in the six years of its existence in East Berlin, from 1990 to 1996, produced a multiplicity of spaces, discourses, media, personal constellations and fields of practice. In 1995, the group was invited to documenta X by its artistic director Catherine David, but refused to participate because in their view it would have narrowed them down as a group of artists. Their agenda, instead, was a wide range of exhibition projects, video and film productions, Internet platforms, self-organized seminars, clubs and political activism, which was constantly developed further through new projects. However, these project-based ways of working have entered into a complex and often complicit relationship with flexible and precarious work contexts that Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello characterized as part of a “new spirit of capitalism” (1999). This perspective overlooked and ignored the political dimension of a purely temporary structural fixation. This paper will describe a practice caught between the conflicting processes of institutionalizating and instituent practices as exemplified by Botschaft eV.. A nuanced presentation of their micropolitics shows how their ability to resist questions of representation and temporary power relations allowed them to create possibilities for action.