HISTORICAL CHILDREN: LULLABIES FROM WOUNDS TO WONDER
A brief pause to breathe, to gather, to let out the vomit, the tears, the rage, to turn grimaces into gestures of solidarity and shouts into revolutionary perreo
Learning about the cuts and the government’s (un)vision for a (non)future for the city of Berlin has hit us hard. After years of exhausting survival and in an increasingly dangerous political climate for many communities, it is shocking to see how many cultural, social, educational spaces of inclusion, diversity and anti-discrimination will have to close already next year. Among them, centers for children & youth in marginalized neighborhoods are disproportionately affected. These cuts will impact us all and for a long time coming.
We spent the last months preparing an exhibition in collaboration with children and youth initiatives, inviting their perspectives, visions and voices. The young people we work with often come from marginalized communities and they already navigate precarious conditions due to a lack of structural and financial support. We are shaken to the core by the state’s decision to withdraw even more funding from initiatives that provide essential physical, emotional and spiritual care to them.
We have decided to postpone the opening by one day to be able to give space to the shock and grief as well as to be able to join the protests on Friday, our initial opening day, fighting for equitable funding and support for the spaces that nurture the diversity of our communities in the city. The postponed opening takes place now on 30.11.2024 at 16:00. The opening is not a celebration but a space to be together, form alliances, strategize for the future and also to show these beautiful kids that they matter. We want to learn together from and with them about their rights and agencies.
This moment calls for collective reflection, strength, and action. It is crucial that we raise our voices and stand together to ensure the future of spaces remains open, inclusive, and accessible to all. We warmly invite you to come together in this time of resistance to cultivate spaces we so deeply need – spaces that are endangered but vital for nurturing connection, creativity, and solidarity. Join us in transformando nuestros gritos en perreo revolucionario, turning our shouts into revolutionary perreo.
RESEARCH, EXHIBITION AND INTERGENERATIONAL Participatory PROJECT
EXHIBITION CHAPTER
OPENING 30.11.2024 16:00
With a DJ-Set by Radiovampiro at 18:00
ON VIEW 01.12.2024–24.01.2025 Thursday–Sunday 14:00–19:00
WITH works of kids & teens participating in the workshops and works by the artists Adel Abidin • Saadia Batool • Tentative Collective • Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo • Irene Fernández Arcas with Werkstatt für interkulturelle Medienarbeit WIM e.V. • Laura Fong Prosper • Mariana Garcia Mejia and Company • JUMU in collaboration with Arthur Sohoian • Sara Khan • Mizi Lee • Gulnur Mukazhanova • COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS (Vivian Ngozi Aghamelu, Rosemary Esinam Damalie, CTPC Productions) • Duy Nguyen • Sina Seifee • an archive selection from ProNATs e. V. and The Concerned for Working Children
COLLABORATION INITIATIVES Orta Okul • Werkstatt für interkulturelle Medienarbeit WIM e.V. • Eltern von besonderen Kindern (EvbK) • RomaMoMA Nomadic Library – a collaboration with the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) • &&
WORKSHOPS WITH Venuca Evanán • Valentina Karga • Dudù Kouate • Leila Boukarim & Asaf Luzon • Mizi Lee with Y-Thanh Võ, Julius Nägele • &&
FREE ENTRY Donations welcome
ACCESS Our space is accessible by wheelchair
EVENTS & WORKSHOPS
14.12. 2024 15:00–18:00
WORKSHOP [TBC]
11.01.2025 11:00–14:00
The Symphony of Abandoned Objects INSTRUMENT MAKING WORKSHOP
With Dudù Kouate
26.–25.01.2025
INVOCATIONS
With Ballhaus Prinzenallee, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Mizi Lee, &&
SAVVY TOURS IN SAVVY TONGUES
01.12.2024 15:00 English With Hajra Haider Karrar
15.12.2024 16:00 English With Lili Somogyi
04.01.2025 16:00 English With Lili Somogyi
09.01.2025 15:00 Polish With Ola Zielińska
11.01.2025 15:00 Spanglish With Manuela García Aldana
12.01.2025 15:00 Urdu With Hajra Haider Karrar
24.01.2024 17:00 Spanish With Daniellis Hernandez Calderon
&& tours in Romani, German, and more will be added for January
Invitation for young people
We warmly invite you to SAVVY for an exhibition and project about childhood. We believe that it is important for children and young people to use their imagination and creativity without fear. When kids feel free to express themselves, they can share their unique stories and ideas. We understand that growing up can be different depending on your background, where you live, and the challenges your family may face in moving to a new country. Through this exhibition project for children and young adults, we hope to understand how kids experience their worlds and we are interested in how kids remember their past, think about their communities, and imagine where they belong.
This project is a way to support young people in telling their stories, and to listen to and learn from them, to celebrate their creativity, their political and social protagonism and giving them the space to explore important ideas in ways that are meaningful to them. Through fun and interactive activities like drawing, storytelling, photography, karaoke, music, and theater, children and teens have the chance to express themselves and explore their histories and dreams. We want this to be a space where kids can share their joy, imagination, and creativity as a way to highlight their unique perspectives and create a space for solidarity, respect, care and relations between different generations.
Long before the opening of the exhibition, we have been working with young people to create pieces that are displayed in the exhibition. We will continue to host workshops with different groups of kids who can keep creating new things, which will also be added to the show. Come all, join us!
CONCEPT
How do we envision the future of a society that struggles to decolonize itself? How will the past be remembered, the present understood? How can we nurture the aspirations and imaginations of the present and upcoming generations for a desired future?
SAVVY Contemporary’s yearlong TRANSITIONS programme takes colonial heritage and decolonisation as facts and points us towards practices of transition. The fourth exhibition and the last segment is HISTORICAL CHILDREN: LULLABIES FROM WOUNDS TO WONDER which takes a cue from the agency of children and the youth in imagining decolonization.
The project is a collaboration with children and youth initiatives. We think and work together with children and cultural practitioners, questioning the complex notion of childhood and recognizing it as a position shifting between dependency, interdependence, and being unassisted. By witnessing and experiencing childhood in varying degrees of adulthood and mothering, we acknowledge how each is dictated by racial, social, and political hierarchies resulting in generational traumas and the inculcation of fear and self-censorship. This collaboration is an attempt at activating capacities of the imagination and agencies of a young mind in the absence of inhibitions, where it can continue to freely respond and react to stimulus and be equipped with multiple forms of expression.
We think through the constructions of memory, remembrance, sense of community and Heimat that are perceived and imagined by a child or young adult. We focus especially on those who struggle to reconcile diaspora imaginaries, between the site of (ancestral) origin and the circumstantially chosen or imposed locality. In this process we expand towards the history of children’s resistance movements and their transnational resonances and connections as well as the existing practices and strategies of storytelling in reclaiming, retelling narratives, and the power of joy as a tool of resistance in nurturing new imaginaries.
There is a rich heritage of traditions and cultures that consistently invest in sustaining narratives and legacies through linguistic, sonic, literary, and performative rituals especially of marginalized and oppressed communities. We are also interested in the sounds and songs of resistance that have emerged from youth movements in their struggle to establish their rights. These practices are devised to counter historical and ongoing erasures including the experience of displacement, racism, and xenophobia, and to bear the burden of intergenerational trauma that is transmitted through generations.
With this project, we ask ourselves: How is the ethical and political agency of children and young adults situated in the current moment? What are the ideas being generated, what is being learned? And what is never learned? Engaging in interactive and participatory actions through visual arts and crafts, the written word, oral testimonies, sonic and instrumental traditions, new media formats of film and photography, theater and other embodied practices of individual and collective storytelling, we stage HISTORICAL CHILDREN: LULLABIES FROM WOUNDS TO WONDER. It is an exhibition and a series of children and young adult commissions where creativity and conviviality become a methodology of transmitting narratives allowing children to highlight their politics. Before the opening of the exhibition, we began to work with young people whose creations are included in the exhibition. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, this creative endeavour continues and the works produced by different groups of children and young adults will be included continuously in the exhibition display.
We give thanks to
Projektraum Galerie M for providing space and support to host the workshop with Irene Fernández Arcas and Werkstatt für interkulturelle Medienarbeit WIM e.V.
Najib Abidi for facilitating and supporting Arthur Sohoian’s participation in mural painting with JUMU
&& to all the participating kids for their trust, creativity, generosity, and very detailed snack lists!
Team
ARTISTIC DIRECTION Renan Laru-an
Concept Hajra Haider Karrar, Daniellis Hernandez Calderon, Lili Somogyi
CURATION Hajra Haider Karrar, Daniellis Hernandez Calderon
Programme Curation Manuela Garcia Aldana, Lili Somogyi
Project CoordinatiOn Matthew Hansen
PRODUCTION LEAD & SCENOGRAPHY Ola Zielinska
Production Team Jessie Omamogho, Dušan Rodić, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Gabriela Guarnizo, &&
PROJECT MANAGEMENT Grace Baggott, Anna Fasolato
GENERAL MANAGEMENT Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Lema Sikod
COMMUNICATIONS Anna Jäger
GRAPHIC DESIGN Juan Pablo García Sossa
EDITING & TRANSLATION Anna Jäger
VIDEO & SOUND Bert Günther
LIGHT Emilio Cordero
SAVVY.DOC Sagal Farah
COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Matthew Hansen
INTERNSHIP Srotoswini Sinha
FUNDING The project takes place in the framework of the 15-months-long programme TRANSITIONS, funded by Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.
