Musafiri

In the organizer's words:

Musafiri

Of travelers and guests

Exhibition and research project

The Arabic word Musafir sounds with an astonishing phonetic coherence in different languages and cultural areas. From Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh and Uyghur, the area of its occurrence covers an impressively wide geographical area. While the word in its original meaning and in most of these languages refers to the traveler, in Turkish and Romanian it describes the guest, i.e. the special position of being highly welcome. In Romanian in particular, musafir resonates with the privilege of the domestic sphere. It is a word reserved for those who are received in one's own home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests is rooted in the effort to create a world in which travelers can arrive and be received as guests. It follows worlds of fearless travelers, individuals and communities involuntarily displaced in the past, and the increasingly dramatic migration movements in the here and now. The exhibition traverses the worlds that open up when one leaves the confines of familiar surroundings and traces the many artistic encounters that have resulted.

Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests speaks from the position of the present, focusing on the current manifestations of much older tensions that revolve around the question of who is welcome and who is not, whose perspectives are welcome and whose perspectives are not welcome, and who decides on these border areas. The public discourse and politics of our time (and Germany is one of the most obvious examples) is in many ways characterized by anxieties stemming from perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world that are rooted in local perspectives. As such, the exhibition is an urgent plea for the recognition and affirmation of the polyphonic worlds of all those who have detached themselves from the places of their origin and set out on their journey.

To get to this point, the exhibition has to take some detours (a familiar experience for many travelers), but these are through time rather than geographical space. Traveling and searching were fundamental components of notions of personal development, as many of the long-standing stories and corresponding debates in the field of narratology show us. But while embarking on a peripatetic quest can be crucial to the formation of the self, it can also be crucial to the formation of a coherent worldview. One of these detours leads via the long tradition of the idea of universality, which was developed outside the European Enlightenment. This detour reveals how such ideas have emerged from the perspectives of people who have left their worlds of origin. It would be difficult not to consider the case made by Lourenço da Silva Mendonças against slavery in the Vatican in 1684 in such a discussion. As a prince from the royal house of Ndongo (now Angola), he was a remarkable traveler and universalist. The truly historic dimension of his case, however, lies in the arguments that Mendonça put forward in his plea. His argument was based on a notion of rights that should be granted to all people, "Jews, Gentiles or Christians in any region of the world" - a century before the white abolitionist movement, and preceding the political upheavals of the late 18th century.Given this, what path should one take to challenge ideas previously attributed to the European Enlightenment (including the justifiably criticized idea of 'human rights', which was often criminally instrumentalized under the cover of a US consensus) - knowing that these ideas were first voiced by a prince from Ndongo in 1684, speaking for all humanity?

Against the backdrop of global history, Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests deals with regional narratives. Many of the works focus on individuals who have embarked on world travels or realized projects in which they gather encyclopedic knowledge from a wide variety of cultural contexts and perspectives. The exhibition looks at times and individuals that existed before or outside the modern colonial epochs (as much as they have been overshadowed by Eurocentric historiography, the liberal myth of the heroic individual and the ethics of the traveler as a world eater). By considering the aforementioned pre-modern universalities, the exhibition takes up the challenge of developing a set of tools to do historical justice to the vast majority of anonymous travelers who, through their toil and labor, built and sustained the world of global capital. These travelers are the enslaved of the Middle Passage and the forced laborers from India, China, and Indonesia who came to the Americas and also crossed the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These travelers are the immigrants of today; not only those who are still migrating towards the imperial centers, but also those who arrived on paths created by changing economic geographies; from South Asia towards the Gulf region, from Southeast Asia to East Asia, from the countries of the African continent (and Southern Europe) to South Africa, from the Andes to Brazil, and from Venezuela towards the entire Latin American hemisphere.

Many Musafiri communities have been strengthened and further connected by the spread of shared pop cultural references. The exhibition points to some of these references, in addition to a series of historical lines of connection: from the current wave of K-Pop that is changing musical tastes, identity, ideals of beauty or notions of race in Asia and other continents, to an earlier manifestation of global interconnections, such as those formed around the Lambada fever of the 1990s, which in turn followed on the heels of cultural and sonic universes born on both sides of the Black Atlantic and fundamentally reshaped the idea of global pop culture. The exhibition is also interested in other spaces around which diasporic communities have formed, communal spaces of identification - where travelers feel like guests, even if only to each other - the geographical spaces of arrival of many Musafiri. Often interwoven with, yet separate from, the spaces for tourists (those other travelers of the modern era) are the markets, the nail salons, the hair salons and cafes - spaces where communities of mutual support thrive and tell their own stories.

Cultures and ideas traveled far and wide long before the spread of pop culture, transforming the routes along which they circulated. Even if the early awakenings stemmed from the desire for goods and commodities, knowledge, beliefs and aesthetic forms were their constant companions. Textiles can be seen as an example of these processes, interweaving historical layers, social relations and economic structures, giving value to their production and thus fueling the demand for their production and distribution. The pluricontinental and often murky histories of the colors indigo or carmine reflect this history as well as the aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual systems that have made them objects to be read and understood, to be looked at in awe or with delight - all while reflecting the subjective and unique voices of their creators.

However, it may be difficult to surpass the movements and expansions set in motion by religions. It is within the framework of belief systems that most ideas of universalism have been developed. Accordingly, many of the travelers included in the exhibition follow routes based on religious affinity and use religious systems of meaning to understand the world. In the process, many of them have developed these systems further or even left them behind after being confronted with the real complexities of the world along the way. The works shown in the exhibition trace some of these themes, for example, they refer to the journeys of wandering Sufi saints.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests creates attention for the narratives that disappear invisibly on the 'underside' of globalization; namely the stories of migrant workers - the anonymous workforce on the construction sites of infrastructure projects, transport workers and temporary workers, or the 'systemically relevant forces' (to use a phrase from recent pandemic times) - who either live in distant cities in their own countries (like the tens of millions of internal migrant workers leaving rural areas for the Chinese metropolises) or are on the newly emerged regional migration axes or along the established historical imperial routes. The works in the exhibition also give voice to the stories of the people who ensure the flow of these migratory movements, such as the Filipino migrant workers who make up the largest group among the crews of ships on the world's oceans. Finally, the exhibition traces the journeys of those who had to leave their homeland due to brutal forced recruitment or living conditions in order to take up arms in distant places and under foreign flags. This includes the millions of people who fought for the colonial states in the world wars and extends to the Nepalese currently enlisted by Russia to fight in Ukraine.

But the global, capitalist distribution of labour, with its exploitation of "racialized" bodies and its network of infrastructures that drives the movements of migrant workers and incorporates them into the global, capitalist machinery of production and trade, also marginalizes individuals and groups whose ability to travel is massively restricted by numerous types of borders. On this global map, composed of the imaginations of those subject to the steering mechanisms of these labor flows - caught between endless shift work, chronic unemployment, or the often permanent state in between - another world appears, aspired to by those who have never left their villages, but whose hands and dreams keep global commerce going (a dynamic also evident in Europe).

These questions ultimately lead to the one question that is perhaps the most important and touches on many of the search movements and efforts. Namely, whether we can still cherish the hope that the Musafiri will one day encounter a world somewhere in which the power of the hosts to determine who must remain a Musafir forever has been shattered and belongs only to the chronicle of a bygone era.

With contributions by:
Ulf Aminde, Alibay Bapanov, Sonia E. Barrett, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Musquiqui Chihying, Narcisa Chindoy, Julien Creuzet, Ena de Silva, Roy Dib, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Aboubakar Fofana, Simryn Gill, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Yun-Fei Ji, Choy Ka Fai, Sachiko Koshikoku & Akinori Nakatani & Massao Okinaka & Yuji Tamaki (conceived and compiled by Yudi Rafael), Lawrence Lemaoana, Idas Losin, Ana Lupas, Gail Mabo, Maria Madeira, Mohammad Din Mohammad, Carlos 'Marilyn' Monroy, Diane Severin Nguyen, Haji Noor Din, Jimmy Ong, Anne Samat, Citra Sasmita, Joar Songcuya, Simon Soon, Nádia Taquary, Robel Temesgen, Ryan Villamael, Ocean Vuong, Madame Zo (Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo)

Musafiri

Of Travelers and Guests

Exhibition and Research Project

The Arabic word musafir resonates with stunning phonetic consistency across languages and within strikingly different cultural spaces, from Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, and Uygur, among others, in a vast, uninterrupted geography. While the original meaning and in most of these languages the word denotes that of a 'traveler', in Turkish and Romanian it has come to designate a 'guest', a position that is special and most welcomed. In Romanian, in particular, musafir resonates with the privilege of the domestic realm, a word mostly reserved for those who are received into one's home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests is thus rooted in efforts to make possible a world where travelers arrive and are received as guests. It follows worlds as they have been braided by intrepid travelers and unwillingly displaced individuals and communities in history, to the intensifying migratory movements of today. The exhibition traverses the worlds that open when one leaves the familiar confines of their corner of the world, and the many artistic conversations that are born on the cusps of these encounters.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests speaks from the present moment, taking into account current manifestations of much older tensions around who is welcomed and who is not, which perspectives are welcomed and which are not, and who decides on these limits. Public conversations and contemporary politics in many contexts, with Germany among the strongest examples, have become increasingly filled with anxiety over perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world from those respective local contexts. As such, the exhibition constitutes an urgent plea to acknowledge and assert the polyphonic worlds brought together by the experience of those who have moved past their points of origin.

To get there, the exhibition needs to make a few detours (an experience familiar to many travelers)-through time rather than geography. Journeys and quests have been fundamental in the imagination of personal becoming, as many enduring stories as well as debates in the field of narratology point out to. But while embarking on a wandering quest might be decisive for the composition of one's sense of self, so it might also be for developing a coherent imagination of the world. One such detour is through the long tradition of imagining a universality developed outside the project of the European Enlightenment. This detour looks to how exactly this appeared through the perspectives of people who have left their worlds of origin. It would be difficult for such a conversation not to take into account one of the most significant historical moments in this regard, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça's 1684 winning case against slavery presented at the Vatican. A prince from the royal house of Ndongo (in present-day Angola), he was a remarkable traveler and universalist. But the truly historic dimension of his case lies in the arguments formulated by Mendonça in his plea, which relied on a notion of rights shared by all human beings, 'Jews, pagans, or Christians on every land in the world'-a century prior to the white abolitionist movement and predicting the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century. With this knowledge established, what route should be taken in the questioning of notions previously attributed to the European Enlightenment, including the rightfully challenged notion of 'human rights', often criminally instrumentalized under the US-American consensus, knowing that it was first uttered by a prince from Ndongo in 1684, when he spoke on behalf of all humanity?

With macro histories ever present as a backdrop, Musafiri: Travellers and Guests primarily concerns itself with micro stories, with many works focusing on individuals who have embarked on travels across the world or realized projects that gather encyclopaedic knowledge from across cultural contexts and perspectives. The exhibition considers periods and individuals that predate or fall outside of modern colonial eras, overshadowed as they have been by Eurocentric historiography and the liberal myth of the heroic individual and the ethos of the traveler as a devourer of worlds. In considering the aforementioned examples of pre-modern universalities, the challenge of devising an apparatus able to do historical justice to the majority of anonymous travellers who, through their toil and labor, have built and sustain the world of global capital, is taken up. These travellers are the enslaved individuals of the Great Crossing, indentured laborers from India, China, Indonesia who went to the Americas, as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These travelers are the migrants of today; not just those still moving towards imperial cores, but also those set on trajectories opened up by changing economic geographies, from South Asia towards the Gulf region, from South East Asia towards East Asia, from across the African continent (and Southern Europe) towards Southern Africa, from the Andes to Brazil, and from Venezuela towards the rest of Latin America.

Many communities of musafiri have been re-enforced and further bound together by the circulation of shared references of popular culture. Some of these references, in addition to several historical tracings, are pointed at in the exhibition: from the current moment of K-pop, which is remaking taste, identification, beauty standards, or ideas of race across Asia and other continents, to the earlier moment of global entanglements that formed around the lambada craze of the 1990s, which in turn came on the heels of the cultural and sonic universes born on both sides of the Black Atlantic that have fundamentally reshaped the very idea of global pop culture. The exhibition is further interested in other spaces around which diasporas have been built, in communal spaces of identification-where travelers can feel like guests, even if just to each other-in the geographies of arrival for many musafiri. Often intertwined with but separate from spaces designed for tourists (those other travelers of the modern era), these are markets, nail and hair salons, and cafes-spaces where communities of support flourish and self-narrate.

Long before popular culture spread, culture and ideas still traveled widely, transforming the very routes they circulated upon. If the first voyages followed the pull of desire for commodities, knowledge, beliefs, and aesthetics accompanied them. An example of these processes can be seen in textiles, which weave together historical layers, social relations, and economic structures that assigned value to their making and fuelled demand for their production and circulation. The pluricontinental and often dark histories of indigo or cochineal dyes, for example, reflect these histories as well as the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual systems that made them objects to be read and understood, to be received in awe or delight-all while reflecting the subjective and unique voice of their makers.

It would be difficult, however, to surpass the movements and circulations that have been facilitated by religion. It is also within these systems that most visions of universalism have been assembled. Consequently, many of the individual travelers featured in the exhibition followed the routes afforded by religious kinship, while borrowing their systems of making sense of the world. In the process, many of them have shaped them further or even left them behind, as a result of encountering the complexities of the world as it actually appeared to them along the way. Works in the exhibition trace several such themes, for example allusions to the journeys made by itinerant Sufi saints.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests calls attention to those stories rendered invisible in the 'underside' of globalization, namely those of migrant workers-the anonymous builders of infrastructure, the logistics workers, and the 'essential workers' (to use recent pandemic verbiage), either in the far away cities of their own countries (such as the tens of millions of internal migrants who have left rural areas for the Chinese metropolises), in the newly developed regional axes of migration, or along the more historical imperial routes. The works in the exhibition similarly give voice to the stories of people who ensure these very flows, such as the Overseas Filipino Workers who form around a third of the total staff of the entire shipping world. Finally, the exhibition traces the journeys of those who have been forced, by sheer coercion or circumstances, to leave their homes and take up arms in faraway places under foreign flags, from the millions who fought for colonial empires in world wars, to the Nepalis currently engaged by Russia to fight in Ukraine.

But this global capitalist distribution of labour-with its exploitation of racialized bodies and networks of infrastructure that propel the movements of migrant labourers who are being integrated into its production machinery and trade-also excludes individuals and groups for whom borders of many kinds preclude journeys of many kinds. In this global map, drawn from the composite imagination of those under the management of flows of labor-who find themselves caught between endless shifts, chronic unemployment, or an often permanent state of in-between-there is another world aspired to by individuals who have never left their villages but have sustained the flow of global commerce through their hands and dreams (the dynamics of which are to be found in Europe as well).

Through all these questions, we might finally arrive at perhaps the most important one of all, which speaks of many quests and struggles, and that is whether we can still hope that the musafiri will one day, somewhere, encounter a world where the power of a host to decide who is a perpetual musafir is shattered and confined to a chronicle of times passed.

With contributions by:
Ulf Aminde, Alibay Bapanov, Sonia E. Barrett, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Musquiqui Chihying, Narcisa Chindoy, Julien Creuzet, Ena de Silva, Roy Dib, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Aboubakar Fofana, Simryn Gill, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Yun-Fei Ji, Choy Ka Fai, Sachiko Koshikoku & Akinori Nakatani & Massao Okinaka & Yuji Tamaki (conceived and assembled by Yudi Rafael), Lawrence Lemaoana, Idas Losin, Ana Lupas, Gail Mabo, Maria Madeira, Mohammad Din Mohammad, Carlos 'Marilyn' Monroy, Diane Severin Nguyen, Haji Noor Din, Jimmy Ong, Anne Samat, Citra Sasmita, Joar Songcuya, Simon Soon, Nádia Taquary, Robel Temesgen, Ryan Villamael, Ocean Vuong, Madame Zo (Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo)