What happens when someone who is subaltern, or seen as inferior or disadvantaged, makes art? Can their work be considered art or even perceived as such? The title is a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s well-known essay “Can the Subaltern speak?” (1988). In it, Spivak analyses how discourse has the power to shape the colonial subject as ‘the other’. In this vein, the essay highlights the existence of a hierarchy of knowledge production, whereby certain forms of knowledge and self-representation are dismissed and the dominant forms of knowledge are reproduced.

This analysis will be presented along with a presentation on the question of whether migrants/refugees can make art. At the same time, processes of exclusion will be examined, along with structural experiences of being made to remain unintelligible, and of being excluded from forms of self-representation. Topics such as the cooperation of privileged creators of culture/art together with the underprivileged (such as refugees) in society will be discussed, with the aim of addressing the following questions: “Can the subaltern make art?” And if they can, is the art they make really subaltern?

Niştiman Erdede (*1979, Silvan, Turkey) is a decolonialist artist, curator, freelance radio journalist and text-writer. He came to Zurich, Switzerland in 2008 as a political migrant and has lived and worked in Zurich ever since. He used to work as a medical laboratory analyst in the city clinic of Diyarbakir, in Turkey. Nistiman Erdede supported several NGOs in the domain of human rights as an organiser and interpreter in south east Anatolia. His political activities lead to his first pretrial detention, in the aftermath of which he faced the decision of becoming either a political prisoner or leaving his country. After fleeing in 2008, it took six years before his asylum application was processed and he could begin a new, active life as a recognised refugee. Between 2010 and 2014 he was active in a collective organisation founded by refugees. Still an asylum seeker at the time, he applied to study at the Zurich University of the Arts, was accepted, and studied from 2013 to 2016 in the Art and Media department. Even at this early point in time he was beginning to question the connection between history, memory and emancipatory action in the context of involuntary emigration movement. His understanding of this work is also an investigation into the ways in which his own and collective experiences of imprisonment can be overcome, be it through writing or the expression/practice of decolonialist art.

© Olaf Brachem