Holding Space for Politicized Artistic Practice: A Conversation between Filipa César and Sylvia Schedelbauer on Katharina Sieverding’s Influence at the Berlin University of the Arts
Filipa César: We joined the Sieverding class nearly at the same time, although I think you were already there when I enrolled in 2002. I had been a guest student of Olaf Metzel in Munich the year before. When I came to Berlin, I couldn’t officially be accepted to the Sieverding class, so I participated as a visiting student. I even went through the interview process, but because I had already completed a Diploma in Fine Arts in Portugal, they wouldn’t grant me a second course of study. Then I applied for the master’s program Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK). I needed a formal academic structure to apply for grants. I also wanted to continue attending the Sieverding class.
Sylvia Schedelbauer: Most people came to the class sideways, or attended as a guest student, sometimes for several semesters. Others dropped by for a short period or could only visit once, but they came because they had heard about it—the class had a reputation. There were also a good number of students who were enrolled in other master classes but who came to our class forum because they were interested in the discourse.
Filipa: I was only acquainted with Katharina’s work but not really aware of what she represented politically in the German context. The feeling I had from the beginning was that Katharina was making space for us—holding space for us. She was inhabiting that room, very focused, very quiet; I sometimes felt that she didn’t even say a word during a whole session, but she was attentive and very present. We always had two- or three-day sessions, normally weekends, from morning to late at night—very intense. With some austerity, as if she were our guardian, she emitted a force just by being there. It was very powerful to sense her in the space. I had a lot of respect for her.
Sylvia: The presence of Katharina was twofold. On the one hand, she represented the powerful authority of a matriarch. And on the other hand, she opened up a horizontal antiauthoritarian space in which students engaged with one another on an equal footing. The dynamics within the class developed idiosyncratically contingent on the students that made up the group. She didn’t intervene in the direction that conversations would go.
She would observe silently, keeping herself on the margins of discussions, but all the while it felt like she was right in the middle of the space because of her powerfully enigmatic presence. In a way, her teaching style reflected her artwork. So often her work employs self-portraiture, using herself both as a politicized female body and a field of projection, multinodal and with multiple directions. Her art offers a profound critique, often without saying it outright; the observer has to put in the work to locate or create meaning. In a similar way, her presence as a professor created a highly politicized space, and the students had to put in the work to engage in critical discourse.
Katharina’s mere presence and, most importantly, her gaze, her observations, would set off a dynamism among the students that could become very intense and existential, even cathartic for some. The degree to which students were susceptible to evolution depended on their own openness to that momentum. Many students who were in the class first came there with a feeling of dissatisfaction with existing social systems, and many of us had Othered experiences.
Katharina certainly held a space open for Otherness. Her gaze was not only symbolic and politicized, but also literal; she would sometimes approach a student, place her hand on their shoulder or arm—usually after they had achieved something, made a new work, or arrived at a new stage in their trajectory—and she would look the student in the eye, quite intensely, but also with care, not unlike the way a proud mother would. All that said, of course she would also speak, but sparingly, only concisely, and in precise moments.
Filipa: And with her Leica, always with a little Leica.
Sylvia: Yes! Katharina observed not just with her eyes—sometimes from a distance, sometimes close-up—but also with her pocket camera, taking photos during in-class critique sessions. Her snapping pictures felt very deliberate, like she was documenting an important moment in the students’ evolution. I think this sense of seeing and of being seen definitely activated an agency within the students to (look and) find our voices.
Take my friend Ayana V. Jackson––she’s African American and had studied sociology at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. Spending time in Katharina’s class triggered a trajectory in which she ultimately found her artistic voice. Ayana now predominantly creates large-scale self-portraits, something she has credited as having been Katharina’s direct influence. I am referring to recent conversations between us. That’s one way I look back on the Sieverding legacy, that Katharina opened up a space that triggered multidimensional processes—artistic, personal, as well as political.
Filipa: Of course, one thing is the space that she held, but another thing is also the women who she invited to teach seminars and develop topics of discussion. I mostly attended courses by Katja Diefenbach and Madeleine Bernstorff during that period. For me, the courses with Katja and Madeleine were extremely important, informative, and transformative. It was with Madeleine that I had my first contact with the experimental film culture of Joyce Wieland, Yvonne Rainer, Maya Deren, Michael Snow, and so on, and also with German political filmmakers, such as Alexander Kluge. Till then, I only knew Harun Farocki, who I encountered through the video art world. I worked with video in Portugal, where I mostly only had access to male Anglo-Saxon video artists as references. The seminars in the Sieverding forum combined looking at films, reading critical texts, and discussion, so I attended these seminars as long as I could. Madeleine opened the Oberhausen context of experimental film to us; this was mind-blowing for me. How ignorant I was as a young artist working with video art from a fine arts perspective, very unaware of past experimental filmmaking to which I couldn’t have access without a point of entry.
In Portugal, I was a young artist, starting to participate in exhibitions and being nominated for young artists awards. However, I was very disenchanted with the art world as a social phenomenon; I was bored and mistrusted its sociopolitical dimension. I couldn’t articulate the feeling then but looking back retrospectively, it was an extremely patriarchal and misogynistic context, still quite blind to its colonial preconditions. I felt more comfortable in a more critical and discursive environment than with the social power game of gatekeeping. So my experience in the Sieverding class, and with Katja and Madeleine, was integral to my journey.
Sylvia: Each of the lecturers and guest professors that Katharina integrated, directly or indirectly, into her forum opened up avenues for students to explore, whether that was photography, performance, conceptual art, experimental film, or video art. Through exposure to various discourses, we were inspired to carve out a path for ourselves, which seems self-evident, but at the time, it actually wasn’t. Katharina’s forum was very radical. The Faculty of Fine Arts in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s was still very much comprised of old school artists: the overwhelming majority consisted of white male painters, some sculptors, and a couple of installation artists.
The Sieverding students experimented with photography, conceptual, intangible, performative, as well as time-based arts, while being constantly exposed to critical theory, philosophy, feminism, queer, gender, and postcolonial studies. Reading theoretical and other texts while concurrently developing art definitely became an integral part of our practice. Many students thought that Katharina’s forum was like a miniature school within a school. In fact, Katharina herself called it Visual Culture Studies, and it was like an unofficial department within the Faculty of Fine Arts. It encompassed an applied, practical, and theoretical approach.
The Sieverding forum was informally connected to a publishing collective in Berlin-Kreuzberg called b_books, which specializes in political philosophy, art and film, queer feminist and postcolonial theory. Sabeth Buchmann and Katja Diefenbach were part of the founding group of b_books and also worked as lecturers within Katharina’s forum for several years. A lot of the works that were published by b_books were made accessible to students through Sabeth and Katja’s classes. We would attend b_books events, and some regulars of the b_books community attended courses offered through Katharina’s forum.
The majority of students in the class presented as cisgendered women and we definitely had the highest number of queer individuals in our class. Cisgendered heterosexual male students were in the minority. We sometimes joked that Katharina’s class was a catch basin of outsiders—marginalized and Othered people who wouldn’t feel comfortable or safe in other master classes, certainly not in a vertical top-down patriarchal class, which was still quite common at the time. Katharina’s was a forum in which queer students found a safe space. A lot has changed in the past twenty years since we were students, for the positive, for sure. Perhaps it’s quite hard to picture that it was a big deal at the time that Katja, for example, featured queer feminist and gender theory front and center in some of her seminars. She taught post-Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism, but not exclusively. We read Empire by Michael Negri and Antonio Hardt, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault, and Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida. She held a seminar on biopolitics in late capitalism and discussed the political figure of the cyborg. Katja introduced us to Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado, and many others.
This complemented really well with Sabeth’s courses, who taught about the histories of video, feminist, and postcolonial art. We learned about the performance art of Andrea Fraser, which had us thinking critically about the politics of the art world and the female artist in it. We watched early feminist video art such as Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler, early works by Joan Jonas, and Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman by Dara Birnbaum. Sabeth introduced us to the notion that the meaning of art is created in the minds of the observer. By way of the objet trouvé—beyond Marcel Duchamp—we discussed some of Stan Douglas’s films. We saw Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, through which we were introduced to Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. The list goes on and on. Astrid Proll offered a course on war photography, while discussing Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Nanna Heidenreich taught a course on the theme of migration in contemporary experimental and essay film. You already mentioned Madeleine Bernstorff’s courses—she also introduced us to autoethnography, found footage, themes of precarity, film as labor and collective work, feminist films, the female gaze in film. Hito Steyerl first taught at UdK as a guest professor in 2004/2005—years before she would be appointed as a tenured professor with her own master class. She discussed Trinh T. Minh-ha’s films and texts, and many political art and documentary films. Almost all these teaching positions were made possible through the Berlin Senate’s initiative to promote gender equality in academia.
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who studied with Katharina a few years before we did, frequently visited our class. She discussed the ethics of corporate money in the art world, participated in crit sessions, and talked about her conceptual art and the various projects she was working on. Once we collectively visited one of her exhibitions and discussed her work on-site. Within the class context, we read Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes collectively—like a ginormous book club consisting of fifty or sixty art students. There were so many ideas that were constantly thrown at us, it was intense but also intensely rich and inspiring. Feminism was not otherwise taught in the Faculty of Fine Arts; and through the varied female teachers we had, we were transmitted the idea that feminism was not one homogeneous thing, but that there were varied contexts and histories. This was long before the concept of intersectionality arrived in German academia. If Katharina were teaching today, her students would likely be learning about intersectionality.
Filipa: Yes, and the Melodrama Fassbinder Seminar offered by Katja. Over four semesters, we watched most of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films, read related texts, and watched related films. I remember conducting an experiment in one session, projecting two films at the same time but only with the sound of Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons together with the images of Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti—both films’ opening scenes are set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, and both films are melodramatic reflections on tragic homosexual love. We dug deeply into Fassbinder.
Sylvia: That’s the seminar in which we watched all fourteen episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz, a television miniseries Fassbinder made. With Katja, we focused on the fact that Fassbinder was queer, and the additional films and texts we discussed were related to that.
Filipa: I felt like a sponge, absorbing everything around me, becoming very confused yet very inspired at the same time by the outspokenness and the articulation of problems within the classroom setting. Portugal had a fifty-year dictatorship that officially ended when I was born, but it lived on in our bodies. To not speak up, or speak out, to not question, to not share, to not articulate, and the fear associated with that was an impediment even to our way of thinking and imagining. I inherited some of that fear. You don’t speak, and because of self-censorship, you don’t even articulate what’s happening within yourself. So, my time in the Sieverding forum was crucial in giving me tools. To witness you all in discussion, and you especially, Sylvia, were one of the people most able to put things into words, about what was happening to each of us, but also to yourself. I remember how the silence following a presentation was often broken by the statement, “This is very problematic…” It was a sign: now we’re going to talk about it and tear it apart.
Sylvia: Katharina studied with Joseph Beuys and has credited her educational concept as being inspired by his approach, the kind of open, communal collective space—a space anyone could join, not just the enrolled students. Of course, Katharina adapted, expanded, and updated the teaching style in her own feminist way. And this concept of the open space meant that there literally was a minimum of fifty or sixty students—more than twice the permitted average of fifteen to twenty-five students per master class. For many stretches, we had over one hundred students and visitors; we could barely fit into the classroom! And this notion that the university classroom was open to outside visitors and guests was singular and unique. I didn’t know of any other master classes at UdK that offered this to a comparable degree.
In general, master classes were quite exclusive, and the classrooms were used as atelier spaces where students would set up their easels, pedestals, or other workshop-like arrangements. We didn’t work in any of the two rooms allotted to the Sieverding class; they were kept as empty spaces. We could test projections, try out installations or performances there; and, of course, we presented our work in the classrooms. With most people working with photography or time-based media anyway, we were usually out, shooting something elsewhere and editing at home, or processing in one of the dark rooms, and then bringing the work to the in-class critique sessions. It made sense that nothing permanent was set up in the classroom.
Filipa: The fridge was the only permanent installation in the space, filled with beer.
Sylvia: Back to the politics of the gaze—I think the way Katharina cast her gaze upon the individual student triggered a process in some of us. Whether that resulted from feeling seen for who we are, who we present ourselves to be, or whether we developed a new version of ourselves, there was always a sense that she was observing our trajectory, how we were evolving (or not). A lot of students started working with a more personal approach, whether that meant making work about your identity, subjectivity, experience, or whether you used your body as a political site for critical inquiry—the self was often a point of departure. This was an obvious influence from Katharina’s artwork.
Filipa: Some of the students did performance art and then either documented it or narrativized it, like Sabine Reinfeld or Veronika Gerhard. JP Raether wasn’t enrolled in our class, but they frequently visited courses in our forum, and I think their work is reflective of that.
Sylvia: Others took autobiography as a point of departure, like Azin Feizabadi, Ezgi Kılınçaslan, and me—we made our first films while in the Sieverding class. I already mentioned Ayana, whose work reflects Katharina’s influence most obviously. But there are others, where that’s perhaps less obvious, like Jorinde Voigt, who is renowned for large-scale abstract and conceptual drawings. She was enrolled in the Sieverding class and used to make video work. I distinctly remember the first time she presented her drawings. It was such a leap from what she was making before—I think it was the moment she began to come into her own. Her first musical drawings were conceptualizations of her memories from her trip to Indonesia. I remember how she discussed her drawings, that her personal experience of architectural and cultural space was at the core of her artistic translation. So whether it was a more direct and obvious influence like in Ayana’s case or a more implicit and indirect influence like in Jorinde’s case, using the self as a point of departure was a common approach. Not everyone did that, by far, but I think it happened often enough to pinpoint it as Katharina’s strongest influence.
Filipa: Going back to the empty room, which was actually a studio yet was not used as such, but was rather a place of assembly and not a place of production; production happened elsewhere in our lives. But I also remember the generosity of Katharina in donating all her old equipment for large-scale color analog photography to UdK. She was changing the equipment in her studio in Düsseldorf and offered all her old equipment to the school. I worked with that equipment, actually. It is noteworthy that she was not only holding space, but also sharing her own resources with her students.
Sylvia: At UdK, the early 2000s were a time when political photography was still contested as an art form, especially documentary photography. It was a time when aesthetic quality as a quantifiable value was considered more important than any form of political or critical art. Documentary film or experimental video completely fell from the faculty’s purview at the time; they weren’t considered a fine art form. It was also a time when the work of women was routinely devalued and discredited by the white male faculty in the majority. Seen from today’s perspective, it may seem insane, but that was the reality within the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Over the course of Katharina’s tenure, both the black-and-white and color photo labs were always under attack and threatened with having their funding cut. She constantly had to fight, not just to keep the labs open, but to defend the practice of conceptual, documentary, political photography and film, and to broaden the space for women to teach, on every level. Everything was part of an effort to cultivate the forum we are speaking of.
Katharina never imposed expectations on anyone, not in the sense that you had to work in any given way. You could choose to do whatever you wanted, and many students did completely abstract, conceptual, or collective work. Almost all students made political work. Katharina demonstrated in so many ways that everything—even the things that may seem mundane or, perhaps especially self-evident things, like women’s work, the raising of a family, or a clan, many referred to the class as a clan—is political. For us students, it came down to bringing into focus what has been invisibilized, exploited, suppressed, while also learning articulation, contextualization, and discourse. I wasn’t the only one who became aware, not just through the feminist teachings, that the personal is political.
Filipa: Two things come to mind. One that also relates to my own practice today is the awareness of a certain kind of colonial condition of ourselves in the world. This was also the time I became aware of that condition, which before was a rather sticky point of discomfort: the Portuguese imperial narrative, the discoveries, this big ethos of Portuguese historical myths focusing on the brave navigators “discovering” the world, and now having lost everything and being poor and the victim of history’s advance. I remember having a conversation with someone at the time who confronted me directly with my own responsibility as an heir—what about your past in the slave trade, of imperialism, and your colonies? It was so good to receive that slap. I had made some comment about Nazi Germany and had this ricochet—What about your past? It had such a strong impact. It felt like a strike from a Zen keisaku, something falling down into awareness. The discomfort was always in the background, in my body, unarticulated. Colonialism in Portugal is over in a certain form but thrives materially and immaterially in daily life, and at that time, you didn’t really discuss it. So you needed tools to bring these troubles into the sphere of awareness. And for me, that was the moment when these things started to happen. The other thought unfolds from what you said: it’s political that Katharina brought her own equipment into the school. This “resourcing” beyond protocol is something that became part of my own filmmaking practice, too. I work with film collectives within the Mediateca Onshore in Guinea-Bissau, in long-term collaborations following paths of cinema engagé and anti-colonial, socially engaged, and militant filmmaking. And we have been reflecting a lot on the poetic, political, and economic doings of this practice. We do not only produce films as filmmakers but also produce conditions of labor and nuanced environments for sharing resources. We create productive spaces, reflect and politicize the distribution and management of the privileges we have access to. It is a sort of laboratory for more horizontal, more collective, more relational practices, simultaneously also convening a lot of contradiction and conflict.
Sylvia: When we joined the Sieverding class, it was just over a decade after the end of apartheid in South Africa and a few years after Homi Bhabha wrote The Location of Culture (a book Katja and Sabeth also discussed in their seminars). It was very progressive at the time to offer postcolonial studies since the Faculty of Fine Arts was mostly preoccupied with the history and theory of white Western aesthetics. Theoretical courses on political themes and Visual Culture Studies were otherwise nonexistent in our department. Today, the courses in Katharina’s forum would likely include an anti-colonial discourse and many other pertinent contemporary issues.
Many of us carried forth things that we learned in her forum—not least the importance of collectivizing, mobilizing agency, and persevering. Some of us learned to fiercely fight for diversity, gender equality, and the women’s cause. A lot of students found their voices and came into their own because of the experience in that politicized space. The formation and development of artists went hand in hand with our evolution and growth as human beings. It was such a powerfully impactful time!
Katharina introduced so much to the Faculty of Fine Arts at UdK, often against all odds and a hostile administration and faculty. A lot of the things she fought for have become common place now. She introduced the kind of political discursive forum that has been carried forth by many succeeding artists, at UdK and beyond.
Filipa: Yeah, at that time it was radically new.
Sylvia: In many ways, Katharina was ahead of her time, a trailblazer.
