Deep Dive: Cultural Work in the Diaspora

Tobias Rohe: Hello and welcome back to Die Kulturmittler:innen Deep Dive, experts on international cultural relations. My name is Tobias Rohe. It's a pleasure to have you with us again. Artists around the world are forced to leave their home countries. The reasons for this are, amongst others, restriction of freedom of expression, censorship, and the resulting threat to the artists livelihoods.

Many of them seek protection in Germany. Where there are support programs for artists at risk. However, what needs should such programs cover? How can affected artists be supported sustainably and can these programs learn from experiences at hand? The experiences of diaspora communities, for example. With our guests today, Dr. Lisa Bogerts and Serap Yılmaz- Dreger, we want to talk about their latest research findings. They will publish a study on the topic, and they will do so within the ifa research program Culture and Foreign Policy. It is entitled Learning from the Diaspora, Shaping New Beginnings in Art and Culture Sustainably and Collaboratively.

Dr. Bogerts, you work as a protest and conflict researcher in Berlin, a warm welcome to you.

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: Hello, thank you for the invitation.

Tobias Rohe: And Mrs. Yılmaz-Dreger , you are a counseling and practical sociologist and you're based in Dusseldorf. It's a pleasure to have you here with me.

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: Thank you very much.

Tobias Rohe: Now, let's move on to today's topic.

Artists, depending not only on the extent of the threat they face, but also on their artistic discipline, have a range of needs. These span from basic needs and securing legal status to counseling services and language support. What is the best way to prepare artists at risk for the upcoming move to another country and to make their arrival as easy as possible?

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: Yeah, so most of these artists are in really difficult situations. Many have experienced repression, censorship, or even violence. So they want a relocation that is free from these negative experiences as best as possible, which requires safety, of course physical safety, but also emotional safety and relief, and also some kind of economic and legal safety by providing them with a scholarship grant, for instance.

But also with a reliable legal status, at least for the limited time of the stay here in Germany. So therefore the right visa is key to such a move to be able to stay for a while and to keep creating art and culture. And for the visa, the duration matters, of course, the longer it's valid, the less pressure and psychological stress artists have, and the more creative they can also be. And also the specific kind of visa matters too. So best is if they are allowed to work and to have their own income and access to social security, for instance, insurance, and to be able to become independent from state support and make a living as soon as possible.

Because many of the relocated artists want to keep working, and during their relocation, they want to keep creating and presenting their work and exchanging with other people in the cultural field. And therefore, in our study, what resulted to be most important for artists to arrive well and sustainably was not only to have a perspective that goes, beyond the very short term relocation stay and support they have here.

But it was also to be connected with other artists, with cultural institutions in their artistic discipline, and also with organizations that can help them live and work here in Germany, which includes language courses, psychosocial counseling, legal support, security trainings, but also information of how to apply for funds.

How to do a tax declaration and such things. What's really important as well to prepare artists for their stay here in Germany is actually expectation management because the existing support mechanisms can be very helpful for a limited period of let's say maximum a year, maybe even a couple of months, sometimes in some limited cases also for two years, but that's often not enough time for artists to be able to return to their home country in a safe way, neither to be able to professionally establish themselves here in Germany.

So these support mechanisms cannot prevent artists from negative experience such as cultural shocks, feeling isolated or overwhelmed with, German bureaucracy or even to be confronted with racism or other forms of discrimination. So it's crucial that these artists are aware of these challenges when they decide to move to another country such as Germany.

Tobias Rohe: And you've been mentioning the contact to other artists. artists, expats in Germany. So networking and knowledge sharing is a particularly important thing to have at the beginning for those people. Where do endangered artists get information from?

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: What we found out in the study and in general is that of course networks are really crucial when it comes to information sharing and knowledge sharing.

And we found that also informal networks are needed as well as formal ones and social ones. And we really have to consider that the people who come to Germany are really under specific forms of danger. So it's also really important to have clear and reliable information and also information givers that are trusted for the whole process.

And what is also important is that we found out that it's really crucial to diversify the information sources. So that individuals can also contact different sources for different reasons without having existing dependencies as a hurdle, for example. And we have to think about that artists and cultural workers usually work by themselves.

So the networks are also really important when we look at the sector. Here, which also means that these people need information, not only as a person who is migrating to Germany. For example, you mentioned the word expat, expats usually have a company, for example, in their back. So these people don't have this.

And We really have to look at the people working in the arts and cultures. So we need networks that have expertise in the working area, so in the sector. And we also need networks that are sensitive, as Lisa said, to marginalized experiences in Germany that can help to generate a sense of belonging, for example, or have really more realistic information on Germany and with more targeted support that could look like buddy programs, for example, that are located regionally at the communities or with mentorships from, for example, diaspora communities in Germany or in the targeted country, or also tandems with people who are alumni of relocation programs already.

Tobias Rohe: So what you mentioned just now, is that what you would say are options how to provide more precisely targeted support and better networks amongst exiled artists?

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: I would say so because we really have to look on the needs and the needs can vary from being individual needs and collective needs and we have to look at what people who come here as Lisa said not only in the arrival process but also throughout the cycle what they really need in these moments and then to help maybe with also experiences from people who did the exact same thing who are maybe different people but maybe they can identify with them even better.

Tobias Rohe: Artists at risk can apply for various relocation programs that guarantee them a safe stay in another country and freedom of art and expression. Who can apply for these programs? What are the selection criteria?

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: So international relocation programs that you just mentioned differ in their target group. There are programs for professional artists from several disciplines, including visual arts, music, performing arts and theater literature, multimedia artists, et cetera. And there are programs that focus on certain disciplines such as writers or musicians, for instance. And most programs are for artists who actually create artwork, but also for cultural professionals who don't create art themselves, but who work for presenting or for perceiving or distributing art, such as gallerists or film festival producers, art managers, people who write about art, people who do research about art, et cetera.

So it's a little bit of more broad target group than just artists themselves. And some programs are open to applicants from certain countries. Commonly, for instance, in Germany, the programs exclude people from EU member countries and from the US. Many applicants come from countries of the global South, but also from Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe.

And there are various mobility or residency programs for artists and cultural workers in general. So there's a lot of choice for people like a broad range of applicants, while the specific tool of a relocation program usually focuses on artists from restricted political or social backgrounds. And that means that they are designed specifically for those whose work and life have been restricted by authoritarian governments or by violent conflicts.

And in some selection procedures, the applicants have to explain to which extent their artistic freedom has been restricted, and in others that's not so necessary. They only have to be professional artists. And the situation of repression is also why some programs are only open to applicants who are still inside their country.

Whether face the repression or have only left their country recently, because these temporary relocation programs were originally designed as some kind of last resort for people who urgently need to leave their country because they are still in the context of threat. This is why they are not so suitable for artists who have been abroad for a longer time already because they've already managed to migrate.

Tobias Rohe: Is there a source where people like artists around the world or threatened artists can look up all the possible programs that are there?

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: We are not aware of one website or one source where artists can look up this information. Usually there are some websites with overviews of different programs specifically after the war in Ukraine started there have been a lot of endeavors from organizations to list support programs, but there's not like this one source of overview where artists can look up this information.

Tobias Rohe: Coming back to those programs where do you see the limits?

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: So as mentioned before the term temporary relocation program already suggests that there have been not designed to be sustainable and to guarantee legal or economic safety for a period that exceeds a couple of months or maximum one or two years.

So they are only one of many different possible support measures and opportunities for artists that are needed for them to stay and to work here until they can either go back to their home country if they want to, or until they can actually make a living here by means of their artwork. So they are still limited first of all in their duration of support but also in their ability to really connect artists and culture professionals with the right people.

As Serap mentioned earlier before, it's still necessary to have more expertise, more artistic expertise from the sector combined with a strength of relocation programs who are sometimes designed mainly like to guarantee safety, for instance. So combining the safety aspect with the artistic work and community aspect, this is still a challenge these programs have to overcome.

Tobias Rohe: Now, your research project looks at diaspora communities and the benefits of taking their experiences into account when designing needs based support for artists at risk. But before we go into this in more detail, I would first like to talk about the term diaspora itself. Why it seems to be controversial, why is it controversial and what definition or choice of term do you propose?

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: So as you mentioned it really is a coin that has two sides. It is a controversial definition and a term in general, but as researchers of course we need to know what we're talking about so other people also know what we're talking about.

But the term itself is controversial because it's a quite old term. And it has also notions of essentialism, for example, or even nationalistic definitions in it. And we also found that the term is generally used not for an overall community, but for specific communities throughout history, because at this point we see and we also found out in our interviews that not everyone identifies with term diaspora and so people sometimes also criticize it for being a term that is more used in the scientific papers, for example, that is not as common in general as we think it is in the outside world, outside of academia.

So we had the challenge that we had to still focus on the term and see if there's any crucial aspect to it that helps us to understand still the social phenomenon. And we decided that we don't want to see it as a definition, but more as a concept that grows and changes also over time, also based on the interviews that we did.

We decided in the end to use the term more based on its concept and to look at diaspora or diasporic communities because it helps us to grasp and also appreciate the societies that we live in today that are, for example, in Germany in a state of super diversity and this term really helps to understand this and the concept focuses this more on the collective experience, unlike the term exile, for example. So it functions also for us as an umbrella concept for people from different places with different backgrounds, but maybe similar or connecting experiences. And this was for us the most crucial aspect, because in its notion, the concept itself is really focusing on the position one is in the diaspora.

So from that position, where they can speak and also make societal or political claims. So we also in our study coined a new term, we called it the lieu of the diaspora, like the place of the diaspora, that helps also to foster solidarity, agency and empowerment.

Tobias Rohe: So let's get back to the core of today's topic, if you will. Let's talk about what funding programs can learn from diaspora communities, especially when it comes to improving their services. Could you give us some insight into how such communities can minimize barriers for newly arrived artists and also on how they could get involved more intensely or extensively in the whole process?

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: So as we mentioned earlier, when we look at diaspora communities, we can see that they in Germany, for example, have gained and work hard on really distinct resources they have now, sometimes for years or even decades. So we see that there is expertise and experience in dealing with discriminatory structures in Germany, and how to still stay active and advocate for each other, also in stressful times.

And when we look at governmental structures, these diaspora communities, or as well also individuals from these communities, they can work for example, in form of being consultants, or they can become decision making members, they can become creators also for new forms of concepts that are more inclusive in the programs.

And when we look at the communities, they tend not to only know the forms of marginalization, as I mentioned, but they also know administrative parts when working in the cultural and arts fields themselves, for example, when it comes to barriers, when we see how you have to apply for funded projects, for example.

And diaspora communities who move within these fields of arts and culture have other fields of expertise as other diaspora communities. Some of them, for example, also specialize on mental health and being, as Lisa mentioned. And all of these different needs can then be tackled by adding diaspora communities, for example, to networking lists, and they can function for us as another pillar for a more sustainable arrival.

So also here we can diversify the support structures, but also we really have to think also their work through. The way and along the way. For instance, after people are not supported anymore through the relocation program when they end, and also the trusted advisors are not the primary contact anymore, there's still valid questions and supports that are needed for these people.

So we can here really see that diaspora communities can step in here, but we really plead for not only to include them or have the communities more involved in general in the processes, but to make changes that diasporic communities really participate in the whole life cycle, be an active role at eye level in this program.

Tobias Rohe: And can the government be of any help, provide any help here, any support?

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: Yes, definitely. There's a lot we can learn from diasporic communities and also governments can. Indeed it's not diasporic community's responsibility to guarantee artistic freedom and the artist's safety and continuation of their work, it's still the government's obligation to guarantee human rights and to stop discrimination of artists because of their work or of their personal identity.

So in our research, we identified several ways in which governments can fulfill these jobs, which includes, of course, international cooperation within organizations such as the UNESCO or the European Union. For instance, there is a UNESCO plan for action to guarantee the work of journalists at risk already.

And there needs to be such a plan for action for artists and cultural professionals as well. Also in May, 2023 as a reaction to the war in Ukraine, the European Union has issued a non binding paper, non binding on unfortunately, but it emphasizes that more support is necessary for artists to flee their home country and that we need more cities of refuge, for instance, and the EU member countries should be reminded that more work needs to be done to fulfill this endeavor.

And that also includes give more money. To equip programs with the necessary resources, including human resources, right? Because a lot of these programs that already exist and organizations are really overwhelmed with bureaucracy, for instance, and with a huge request that exists because worldwide, there are a lot of artists who require this support.

And this also includes easier and more flexible ways to get a visa that permits working as an artist and have an own income. And apart from relocation programs, scholarships, grants, et cetera, specific programs can be financed.

Serap already mentioned like buddy programs or tandem programs or programs to connect artists with those who are already established leadership programs for artists and cultural professionals, for people from diasporic communities that need to be in decision making positions when it comes to artistic freedom and art production, because they carry a lot of experience in both migration and art and culture. So they can be of great support, but they also need to be equipped for this huge amount of work. And most importantly, governments and people who work in state organizations as well Serap already mentioned should take the experience and the expertise of diaspora communities seriously and enable them to do the important work in a free and in a sustainable way that could also help artists at risk to arrive well and to continue their important work.

Tobias Rohe: Mrs. Yilmaz-Dreger, Mrs. Borgerts, thank you very much for these insights and for your time. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

Serap Yılmaz-Dreger: Thank you as well.

Dr. Lisa Bogerts: Yeah, thank you.

Tobias Rohe: And if you, our valued listeners, want to read the study Learning from the Diaspora by Lisa Bogerts and Serap Yilmaz-Dreger yourself, just take a quick look at the show notes. You will find a link there, as well as information on the Martin Roth Initiative. A previous fellow of the Martin Roth Initiative, the Myanmar born human rights activist and exiled writer Ma Thida, was invited to one of our earlier episodes. Don't hesitate to go back and have a listen to this episode, where Ma Thida talks about the revolution in Myanmar and the role of political icons.

You can find this and all other episodes of Die Kulturmittler:innen, including our deep dive episodes, on our website ifa.de. And, of course, wherever good podcasts are available, be it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer or any other platform. And while you're there, make sure to subscribe to Die Kulturmittler:innen.

You will never miss out on any future episode then. For all other information on the Forum for International Cultural Relations, visit our website at culturalrelations.ifa.de. That's all from my side. I say thank you for listening. My name is Tobias Rohe. See you next time.