Chapter published in VOICES OTHERWISE (2025), the second book about the Open Air Museum of Decoloniality in Alexanderplatz, Berlin (DE) by de_coloniallanguage collective.
In his essay Rethinking intervention, Ben Parry talks about the difficulty for artistic interventions in public spaces to enter the arts discourses or the “canon of art history” (Parry 2011, 14). He also talks about how their impact is localised and the debates around their significance as an art work is limited to the people who witnessed it or the story that was created around it. The work that was done with the iteration of the exhibition Are we Nature?1 as part of the The Open Air Museum of Decoloniality in Berlin organised by the Decolonial Language collective2 is no different. It exists through the work that was done by the artists, the curators, the collectives, the people who put up the posters which are often the same, the passerby who interacted with it, the impact and communications with people in the community, social media posts3, the conference4 reflecting on and sharing the work and this very same publication being produced.
So, how do we choose to retell the story of this intervention? At the time of the collaboration with the collective, I wasn’t such an active agent of the project anymore, as we had designed the exhibition to be “self-propagating”5 and while I was offered to participate in the location decision making process in Berlin and for a variety of reasons not relevant for the purpose of this paper, I didn’t take this opportunity. When Anita contacted me to reflect on our experience taking this exhibition to the streets and the specificity of the research residency in Berlin – I was in a quite unique position of being associated with a project but having let go of a certain form of agency and now being asked to reflect both on the process and its consequences. If we’re to have conversations about what decoloniality in practice means then it is only fair that we examine our own processes and the implication of our decisions as well as our positions within those.
“What is the place we built for ourselves in our cities?”
We started our curatorial text6 with this question as it has been guiding our process, so this is only logical that it reappears here. Before I attempt to reflect and untangle the Berlin iteration of this exhibition, I have to take a step back to how it came to be. Anita Araújo had organised Festival en mi balcón in Buenos Aires in 2021 with the goal of doing interventions in the city during the quarantine, using the balcony space – private, public neither and all of the above – to make micro performances which the passerby can see that something is happening but is unsure what exactly (Araújo 2025). The projections of video art and photos, micro performances and small actions aimed to change the relation to the city and open up new possibilities and imaginaries on how we can connect with the space differently. The festival from its very beginning was positioning itself as an intervention into and onto the city where non-determined participants were treated to a live experience of the artist or curator’s intervention blurring distinctions and categorisation (Parry 2011, 5)
Anita had been using this intervention as a starting point in her research7, and invited me to co-curate an exhibition with the artists’ works that had been shown then. The questions asked by her research on the tensions of the public/private and inside/outside resonated with my own research interests in making different perspectives cohabitating, different time and place overlapping. I was also intrigued by the (pro)position of being a guest in someone else’s project. The opportunity to exhibit what we had been working on as part of the institution which connected us8 arose and we took it. We were not trying to recreate the moment that Festival en mi balcón was, because repositioning the works in a gallery context already reframed their identity as ‘art’ for the public (Parry 2011, 19) – moving away from the blurred line between art and non-art. However, it was imperative for us to keep a relationship with the passerby – which is why we had chosen to exhibit through the Street Gallery9, a series of huge windows on a facade. One might say the exhibition spun from the festival was co-curated in an unremarkable way: we had conversations about which artist, which work we were to chose, we had many back-and-forth about our curatorial approach and how we would make sense of the time of the festival and the moment we were going to make the exhibition. It was unfortunately cancelled a few days before we were supposed to open it, as were all independent student exhibitions10.
Getting to write this is an opportunity to bring to center stage a process that is often hidden, “buried by the relationship between contemporary art and capitalism, which glosses over the mechanisms, the incidents and accidents of the often mysterious and magical parts of the creative process.” (Parry 2011, 17). It is the unforeseen cancellation of the exhibition that drove us with time invested, now working “outside public and private authorities” (ibid.) and tickets to Gothenburg booked before the cancellation, to look for the encounter between everyday life and intervention. Anita suggested printing smaller versions of the exhibition than what we had planned for the windows (A3 instead of A1), while I noticed, sitting on a bench in Gothenburg, a specific public display for posters had been covered and recovered 4 times in the span of 15 minutes. Having been working already with posters on city walls in another project of mine11 and Anita’s research framing the festival as a permanent performance, we decided to take the exhibition to the streets, circling back to the core idea of our research, considering the city as a ground and tool for unsanctioned art (Parry 2011, 5). Where by going to the street, walking the city with posters in hands the curator becomes the performer intervening in the public space. The person is a curator but the action is a performance art piece. Following the work we did in Gothenburg, Anita has started a new strand of her research exploring the proposition of curatorship as performance in the public space, which she has continued to explore during the research residency with the collective.
This intention to consistently operate in the public realm and use creative actions to provoke moments put this exhibition in the tradition of cultural hijack which breaks the rules of conventional encounters with art (Parry 2011, 5). Putting a whole exhibition in the public space instead of one art piece created a dialogue between the artists but also the space and the passerby (Araújo 2025). While putting up the posters, we’ve also acted as mediators, initiators or recipients as people interacted with us or the posters. We explained the exhibition and its concept to a municipality worker on his break, and were able to watch him show it around to his coworker who was just further up the street. To both Anita and I’s surprise the following approximation is a conversation we’ve had several times: “Is it for an exhibition?” / “Yes, here it is!” / “Which museum or gallery is it going to be at?” / “No, the whole exhibition is just there” / “Ah…”, distractingly looks at the posters and walks away. We’ve had art students from HDK-Valand come up to us while putting up some on a poster display by the art academy telling us how empowered they felt they could “just put up an exhibition”. While walking in between displays, we’ve been called out to by someone who turned out to be a curator who had seen the fresh posters from a window and went out to follow our trail to find out who was exhibiting Latin-American artists. These encounters and the engagement of people made them participants, and, often, unwittingly, as active collaborators or co-producers of this cultural intervention (Parry 2011, 6).
The inner public as accomplices: trust, consent and communication
Having gotten really generative encounters and interactions with passerby in Gothenburg, we decided to distribute posters to people from our network – friends, artists, curators and peers – so that they could put it up in the cities they live in, around the world. This is how the research residency collaboration took place between Anita’s ongoing research, the exhibition we co-curated and the Open Air museum of Decoloniality. Alexanderplatz, Berlin was chosen by the Collective as an interesting ground for research because it is the intersection of several sites of power: named after the Russian emperor, the Berlin conference of 1884 and right now a construction site for a high rise building built by the Covivio Real estate company (Decolonial Language collective 2025). They have been working with a 200m fence surrounding the building construction site, which was already being worked on by a curator and funded by the developer12. My understanding is that the artists whose murals were intervened on and the curator are against it and contacted the collective about their right to exhibit there as a reaction to their intervention. The collective disagrees, and operates under the paradigm that this temporary privately owned fence is a public space and does not belong to one owner or curator and their commissioned artists (Decolonial Language collective 2025). I am not going to engage further here with who the owner of the fence is and what kind of site of power they occupy beyond the fact that this is also the commissioner of the murals because as far as I am aware, they were not the ones reacting to the intervention nor contacting the collective or Anita about it and the position they hold is addressed by other texts in this publication.
Cultural Hijacking is not only a spatial process but also a relational process, one that does not necessarily ask for consent before taking over a wall or a fence, but one that extends “questions of collaboration to the people who witness the act or moment of intervention” (Parry 2011, 17). The artist or in this case the artist-curator-performer has to negotiate those stages and relationships as the intentions and receptions don’t always match, nor their intentions are transparent or the reactions the ones that were expected. And the people we – as in the people behind the exhibition’s participation in the collective long-term intervention – interacted with were the artist whose mural was the site of the postering and the curator of the whole project.
As stated in the introduction, my name is still attached to the exhibition via the curatorial text and I have consented to it being part of The Open Air Museum of Decoloniality. So even if from this point on, I have not anymore been making executive decisions, I have been offered the possibility to be part of the decision making process of the localisation of the intervention for example which I declined. I do want to make clear here that I do see my own position to this intervention not as a bystander or an ally but as an accomplice. I use accomplice in this case over ally especially because of its definition13 and its refusal to place distance to action. One of the critiques, by the indigenous action collective among others, of the word “ally” is that it has become an identity disconnected from mutual understanding of support and therefore ineffective (Indigenous Action 2014, 2). But this is not a new idea, it positions itself in the tradition of decolonial thinkers and activists like bell hooks14 or Lilla Watson15 who emphasised working together as a condition for lasting change and distanciation from colonial perspectives.
This is also echoed in the Feminist Spatial Practices collective’s core value statement16 that I carry in my curatorial and artistic practices: centring around the notion of care, equity and co-creation of spatial practices, an emphasis on developing trust and relationship building. Cultivating participatory and reciprocal practices in the organisational process and with the community I would be interacting with as well. Which, while these were very much present throughout the development of the Are we Nature? exhibition, by not being an active agent of the Berlin intervention, I have not carried these out in the same way. As a guest curator invited by Anita, I had no direct connection or communication with the artists whose work we were reframing. They all went through Anita, the curator, peer and in many cases friend, with whom they had developed a relationship of trust. They trusted Anita’s judgement and opinion to bring in someone they hadn’t met – me – and trusted her to change the format within which their works were exhibited, both between the festival and our first proposal with the window gallery, but also in our reactive proposal to the cancellation of the exhibition and the new poster format. The exhibition in poster format was sent to them and even put up by some of the artists back to the cities they are working from.17
To further untangle the reception of the intervention, it is useful to engage with the notion of “inner public” as developed by Krzysztof Wodiczko (2015) in order to make sense of the relational processes that happen in his work. One cannot only talk about the “public” or the “audience” and their response or impact because then they would miss out on the projects’ focus on the participants as project collaborators (Wodiczko 2015, 28). In defining who this inner public is, he includes people participating in the initial meeting that may take part in a project (Wodiczko 2015, 29), those involved during and who inform the process of making, generating and ultimately producing. It is significant to our understanding of ‘the experience of art’ and other possible moments of reception (Parry 2011, 17). I want to argue here that there is a missed opportunity in the process of this intervention to activate the artist whose mural was “hijacked” and the curator of A-fence as part of the ‘inner public’ of this intervention. As of now, they are an audience engaged by the work unwittingly and unwillingly. Their role as participant in our process is one that is passive – and then reactive – which goes against what Wodiczko defines as active agents “who take the project to heart and contribute to it by putting themselves on the line” (Wodiczko 2015, 30).
The fence’s curatorial project worked in phases throughout the years of which this last one is called “Metamorphose”18. This embodies all the layers that this fence has been representing: a wall in a public space that is privately owned and temporary at the same time. This theme was in many ways very much echoed both narratively and aesthetically in the exhibition we had curated. The artists’ works used relations with nature, blowing dandelions and the visual vocabulary of the transforming body19 all of which were echoed similarly in the artist’s mural20. While the exhibition in itself engaged with the notion of metamorphosis in a more abstract way, by creating a moment with temporary intervention onto city walls, questioning specific moments in time and the evolution of our relationship to the city and the imaginary that we allow ourselves to create around it. While the collective has been using the images and the collages as tools to work together in protesting private property or that the temporary intervention was intended as a poetic dialogue to make people do a double take to an artwork that had been part of the landscape (Araújo, Decolonial Language collective 2025), the intervention was received as a disrespect and a cover up21. As I see it, the lack of open-communication prior to the intervention, put the artists and the curator in a position where they feel attacked and therefore rightfully defensive.
Failings and discussion
By not opening a line of communication prior to the intervention and failing to consider them as part of this ‘inner public’ defined earlier, and building a relationship of trust and mutual respect, the communication was broken before it even started, so when he was contacted with a link to the conference that was going to talk about this intervention he said that he’s honestly not interested in the conference and that it would have been better to talk before going ahead and “destroy[ing] the work of other artists”22. In his message to Anita following the intervention and comments to the instagram post that followed it, he accuses us of “pretending to decolonise something while they use the same pattern of colonialism, patriarchy and non democratic social behaviour.”23 While I don’t agree that the intervention of postering temporary art work onto a mural trying (even if failing) to start a conversation around public space ownership is destroying the work of said artist I do agree to an extent with his point about method and process. And this is an opportunity to reflect critically on an attempt where intention and reception greatly differ and what navigating those relationships means now. And part of having a decolonial practice is to be willing to stop, reflect and reassess our positions as we’re doing the work. As it has been highlighted by other works on the subject of development of allies and accomplices, the relational processes are messy and often painful but open up for rewards and challenges for personal transformation and potentials for contributing to social justice change (Suyemoto et al., 2020:2). I wonder what would have come of this intervention if a relationship of trust and care had been fostered and grown prior to it, with consent and open communication about what the intervention is trying to do. Maybe, the position of the artist and the curator would have still been the same and they would have refused it and in that case we would have pivoted again, the same way we did when the exhibition was cancelled. But maybe we would have been able to create a complicitous relationship.
Conclusion
It felt empowering to take the streets in Gothenburg. I was an active agent of its decision making process and the one physically in the streets doing it. And I don’t know that the hijacking at Alexanderplatz, Berlin feels empowering to me, maybe because I wasn’t an active agent but an unwitting “accomplice”. This is the risk that one takes when taking different positions within self-initiated, self-operated self-directed projects that operate and survive in margin of the art world, in the gaps between disciplines (Parry 2011, 6) because then we will often find ourselves in those margins, the spaces in-between, sometimes in the un-comfortableness of disjuncture and contradiction. And taking the time to reflect on these positions is often where most preconceived thinkings are changed and interesting ideas are found. The other difference between these two interventions is that the social contract of the space we were operating in, in Gothenburg was very clear and impersonal24 while in street art there are unwritten rules about what can cover what25 and that a mural, like in this case, is more likely to have a clear artist authoring the work and being commissioned, and therefore is a personal social contract. And while I can see the interest of not asking for consent as a method to uncover the power relation of a place (Araújo 2025), this is not the one I use in my practice and it is interesting to get the opportunity to reflect on these lenses. It made me part of this localised struggle of power relationships between a critique of the institutional level of property ownership and the use of art to cover it up and individual relations and tensions between artists and collectives that feel entitled to the use of the same public space without me being an active agent of it. If one considers the act of putting up art in the streets as a performance intervening in the public space, then putting up posters or a mural is a performance regardless of whether it was commissioned or authorised. What I think interventions such as those do though, is that they strip down the concept of sole creator, “revealing the backstage highlights the ethical weakness and major conceptual error in the way the art world presents by ‘omission’ the artist as sole creator of the work” (Parry 2011, 17). We can and should move away from the framing of the artist as the only name in the production of the work and we cannot advance the relational processes in the retelling of the work but omit the relational aspect inherent to the creative process itself or the exhibition making process.
Bibliography:
Araújo, Anita. Decolonial Language Collective. 2025. “Fence Choreographies: Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art, University of Gothenburg/University of the Basque Country.” Spoken presentation with Q&A at MA Symposium Catalyst, Berlin, Germany. Video, 25 min. Accessed July 25, 2025. https://catalyst-berlin.com/student-life/ma-symposium, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ord1BZj6hGA.
Araújo, Anita. Patrouix, Lou. 2025. “Are We Nature?” exhibition catalogue. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://somosnaturaleza.my.canva.site/are-we-nature.
Indigenous Action. 2014. “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex, An Indigenous Perspective” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-industrial-complex/.
Parry, Ben. 2011. “Preface”. In Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Interventions, edited by Ben Parry, Sally Medlyn and Myriam Tahir. Liverpool University Press.
Parry, Ben. 2011. “Rethinking interventions”. In Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Interventions, edited by Ben Parry, Sally Medlyn and Myriam Tahir. Liverpool University Press.
Suyemoto, K. L. Hochman, A. L. Donovan, R. A. Roemer, L. 2020. BECOMING AND FOSTERING ALLIES AND ACCOMPLICES THROUGH AUTHENTIC RELATIONSHIPS: CHOOSING JUSTICE OVER COMFORT. Research in Human Development, 18(1–2): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2020.1825905
Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 2015. “The Inner Public.” FIELD journal 1 (spring): 27–52. field-journal.com/issue-1/wodiczko.
1 See the catalogue at: https://somosnaturaleza.my.canva.site/are-we-nature
2 Decolonial Language Collective is a collective of artists, researchers and curators working for the last 30 years with Russian and Soviet colonialism and the colonial space it occupied from central asia, Caucasus, North Asia to Eastern Europe https://www.instagram.com/de_colonialanguage/
3 the reel documenting the intervention: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKjSljGCNZX/
4 Conference Fences Choreographies at Catalyst Berlin MA Symposium by Anita Araujo and de_colonialanguage https://catalyst-berlin.com/student-life/ma-symposium
5 As an exhibition that can be shipped to someone, or printed from a pdf and put up in any city in the form of A3 posters.
6 See page 2 of the catalogue of the exhibition.
7 See ESTIVAL NA MINHA SACADA: REDES E AFETOS NA PRODUÇÃO CULTURAL EM ESPAÇOS URBANOS NÃO CONVENCIONAIS by Anita ARAÚJO 2024. available at: https://www.even3.com.br/anais/epa-ufu-encontro-de-pesquisas-em-andamento-2024-478671/936318-FESTIVAL-NA-MINHA-SACADA–REDES-E-AFETOS-NA-PRODUCAO-CULTURAL-EM-ESPACOS-URBANOS-NAO-CONVENCIONAIS .Accessed on 04/08/2025
8 We met in 2024 through the course Commissioning and curating contemporary public art by HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University.
9 Which is part of several student-lead galleries on the HDK-Valand campus: https://m.ontor.se/
10 See the following link for a complete explanation of the decision: https://studentportal.gu.se/en/news/street-gallery-gallery-tripp-and-gallery-trapp-will-temporary-pause
11See some of it at https://www.instagram.com/collectors.manifesto/
12 The project is curated by Dr. Diana Marossek: https://www.a-fence.eu/en/
13 As defined in Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex by indigenousaction.org
ac·com·plice
noun: accomplice; plural noun: accomplices
a person who helps another commit a crime.
14 “Those of us who know the joy of being with folks from all walks of life, from all races, who are fundamentally anti-racist in their habits of being, need to give public testimony. We need to share not only what we have experienced but the conditions of change that made such an experience possible.” (Hooks, 1995:271) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15427609.2020.1825905#
15 “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
She is often credited with the quote, because she delivered it at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women conference in Nairobi but she is not comfortable being identified as the sole author because it came up during works by an Aboriginal Rights group in Queensland in the 1970s. https://unnecessaryevils.blogspot.com/2008/11/attributing-words.html
16 Feminist Spatial practices is a participatory space to highlight, promote, and share feminist practices in art, design, architecture, and activism. https://feministspatialpractices.com/about
17 Unfortunately as of right now it was only posted as stories (temporary posts) on Instagram so I can’t reference here the iteration in Colombia
18 As stated on their website: https://www.a-fence.eu/en/galerie/
19 See the catalogue of Are we Nature?
20 The artist is Nicholas Ganz https://www.nicholasganz.de/en/Home/
21 As stated in a public comment to the reel published after the intervention: “Colonialism means to go over someone else’s culture and having no respect towards the creation of another human. It has the intention, that the own creation is superior to the other. With your poster campaign you repeat this habit and put your posters over someone else’s art. In this case mine. While there was a blank space for your posters right next to it. This means, you avoid communication with fellow humans or artists and act in an undemocratic, selfish way. This means you repeat colonial, [patriarchal], disrespectful actions that have been discussed a few months ago. This mean, the language you speak is similar to colonial behavior and ego-driven in the belief to support your own ideas. This creates no progress, but a step backward.”
22 After an invitation to the conference on May 28th, 2025 and the following day: “I honestly do not interested in the conference to talk. It would have been cooler to talk before you destroy other people work and having no respect” / “And when you would honestly be interested to talk. You would reply to my message.”
23 In a direct message to Anita following the intervention: “It’s so funny to see that so many people don’t realise what they actually do. Pretending to decolonise something while they use the exact same patterns of colonialism, patriarchy and non democratic social behavior. This lets me come to the conclusion, the human arrogance of religion and belief to feel superior over others will never end and humans make no progress. Therefore good intentions turn to zero value and copy the behavior they actually criticize this finds no new ways and these people walk the same path as humans always. And they believe the do something positive. Like Christian missionaries in South America” / “Before you do something – think: is it necessary, do you respect others, is it helpful, do you harm others and so on.”
24 One may put “1 poster for an association and cultural happening of max A2, per page on the notice board. The material must not be offensive or offensive. Posters advertising restaurants, shops and products are not allowed. The posters are cleaned at the beginning of each week.” https://goteborg.se/wps/portal/start/trafik-och-resor/torg-och-allmanna-platser/tillstand-och-regler/affischering/?view=map
25 See “Just writing your name?” An analysis of the spatial behaviour of graffiti writers in Amsterdam by Jannes van Loon (2014) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288165807_Just_writing_your_name_An_analysis_of_the_spatial_behaviour_of_graffiti_writers_in_Amsterdam