Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll: Archives seem to have an authority to host and a power to exclude. Therein lies my fascination with being hosted by and hosting subversive archives in my artistic research. The vast contents of paperwork in the Iraqi Embassy was abandoned when the mission closed in a hurry. I found reports during my Homebase V residency in 2010, citing the misuse of the building as the base for organizing assassinations of dissidents, building bombs, etc. Once the wall came down, Iraq abandoned the building and left all of this bureaucratic material inside. As part of my process in preparing the HKW show in 2014, I interviewed an Iraqi dissident who’s been in political exile, as many have, in Berlin for a long time. He talked to me about assassination attempts made on him and many others in visits to the embassy that citizens were forced to make by Saddam Hussain to renew their papers. So, while many of the documents are quite banal, once I pieced together all of the everyday circumstances around what was going on there, it becomes a story about extraterritoriality and power.

In contrast, the Stasi and Australian national documents I use in Embassy Embassy had to be applied for; enough time had just passed for the Australian ones to have to be released by law, and, likewise, the Stasi archive is now open to researchers. So, there were very different statuses of archives, depending on the history of the state and how it controls them. As an activist, researcher and artist, I use all sorts of means. Often, saying you’re an artist is a good way to get access, because authorities think you’re not going to do anything analytical, or political, with the material. But in this case, it took a lot of time, collaboration with the organizer of Ex-Embassy, Sonja Hornung, and the mantle of my work as historian to get past the gatekeepers.

KvZC: Translation always has an element of interpretation. I was interested in political translation, in which much power is vested in the person who can understand both languages and acts as mediator in sites of conflict, i.e. where someone needs to interpret the needs of two parties. I translated the archives that were in Arabic and German for myself during the research process, and then for the performances I would use some of those documents to replay characters – such as ambassadors and PhD students (who were funded by the embassy, their papers were among what I collected from the Iraqi Embassy). I also used the mode of speculative fabulation – as Donna Haraway calls it – because there are massive gaps in all of these archives. In that sense, I use fabulation, speculation or fiction in order to recreate the atmosphere of a place so that people can sense, for example, the effect of constant and pervasive surveillance. In that narrative, there’s another layer that brings a space so palpably loaded with history to life.

KvZC: The title of the performance is The Gift, and it’s a play on poison (Gift in German). As I serve tea, I translate the story of the Iraqi dissident, who talks about how, being invited for drinks, one could never trust what one was being given – as poison played a large role in trying to remove dissidents. I paralleled that with stories from Australia. There was a whole part of the Ex-Embassy exhibition that addressed Australian indigenous rights, so – in connection with the murals in the foyer of the building – I brought in a story told by novelist Deborah Dank about how the water in Australia was poisoned in order to either poison the Aboriginal people, or to make sure they couldn’t drink.

In these stories, there’s this notion of a complete loss of trust in the dissolution of a relationship. And, in the case of being invited to tea at the embassy, there’s a feeling of becoming more hostage than guest. Part of my project Dissident Domesticity (at Savvy with Jesse Shipley, 2014 and recently published in Social Text) was also on diplomatic asylum, and so I had visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London; he’s a guest and being hosted by the embassy in order to avoid arrest, but at the same time, he’s actually a hostage because he can’t leave. The conditions of that stay constantly change, as well – for instance, he doesn’t have access to internet anymore. So, it’s quite an example of what power the host has over the guest.

There were always performances within the larger Embassy Embassy project (2010-2018), which are site-specific. They usually bring the audience into the sites (also in London), sometimes alone; but, in this 2018 iteration, it was in the foyer of the ex-Australian Embassy to East Germany in Pankow. I performed a script I wrote using citations from the archives, partly interpreting them physically – working with the space and my body, as well as the projections, which were my set. I unfolded the building as a protagonist, which was telling these episodes in its own history. The performance starts with the audience being welcomed to tea – casting viewers as guests to a party at the actual embassy, which had always held cocktail, tea parties and similar events. It all seems very social and mundane, but that’s really when a lot of political manoeuvring takes place. For me, the embassy is a site to reflect upon how power is enacted and through what historical and material relationships.

KvZC: Architecture inhabits a central point of view in the detention center project, Men in Waiting, as the building saw and housed everything that happened inside it. When the building becomes a character, it also takes away the problematic aspects of speaking for other people. In the way that I use the building, at least with regard to the embassies and detention centers, it’s a protagonist that can speak many voices, and in its detail and fabric, it holds all of these histories. In the case of the detention centers, they’re so highly guarded that I built model architecture and then work with that on stage. But with the embassy project, it was possible to use the building itself as the set, and I think that’s even more powerful, as it already gives an uncanny feeling of the past. I used to do tours through the Iraqi Embassy, but since it’s so heavily locked down now, it’s no longer possible. I had the keys to it, which I would give out to people so that they could let themselves in. That was a very uncanny experience for people, as they felt they had been locked out of a place – a sovereign, diplomatic territory – but then were almost trespassing in the past, which has its own memory key. It was confusing, quite titillating and also thought provoking, especially for local people visiting those sites for the first time.

Then there’s the fact that, usually, embassies are made in a particular, nationalistic way, but these buildings are generic, which completely undermines this nation-state nonsense of using signature artworks and iconic images that are meant to make you feel at home when hosted by your embassy. Instead, the murals in the GDR embassies are abstract and minimal. In working with these buildings, it’s about amplifying those existing architectures, which have so much social philosophy expressed within them.

KvZC: Performance, for me, is a form of research in itself. A lot is found in the actual process of performing that I don’t think you can find when you just do research. The two symbiotically feed each other. It’s a mode of having an audience, doing something live and being a storyteller, rather than a historian. Though my departure points are historical non-fiction. In the processional performance piece I’m working on at present, there’s a character – Tupaia – that we know lived 250 years ago; we know that he was on this voyage of an infamous ship, the Endeavour. This voyage, headed by James Cook, is incredibly well documented, but Tupaia is hardly in the archive because he was an indigenous translator, navigator and priest. There are only fragments of him documenting the way that he translated for Captain Cook when they were in New Zealand. So my project is to read against the grain, or behind the archive, to show that this person that’s in the shadows is actually very important to the survival of that crew and to redressing this indexical moment of colonization. All of the reasons are already there, but they’re not visible; it’s that invisibility and silence around minority voices that interests me. Meanwhile, there’s this dominant character that becomes a colonial hero – Captain James Cook – who is supposed to be celebrated for making the “First Voyage” to the Pacific. So, it’s a subversion of the celebration of that discovery, which instead becomes about looking at this shadow character. This work, which is a performance down to the rivers Thames and Tamar is titled Cook’s New Clothes, and is part of a new Biennale project in the UK called The Atlantic.

KvZC: A lot of the art world, in its white cube mode, is not that open to lived processes of activation and, what happens as a result, is that a lot of things don’t get seen. There’s a power that hosting institutions and galleries have over artists. They may give space and a voice, but often under very strict conditions, and opportunistically, in a way that serves their own agenda, while forcing the work to conform. In my experience, in order to really provoke thought, to change these moribund institutions, move our way of seeing forward and do something that isn’t safe and predictable, it’s productive to create alternative viewing spaces – or spaces in which art is not expected to be the only set of references. Meta-museums, such as Kranich Museum – which we built up from scratch in the north of Berlin – take the terms of the traditional art museum to deconstruct its implicit hegemony. When an artist creates a museum, it’s very different from when it’s created by a donation of old masters. The artist can fabulate the terms of the collection, viewership, and interpretation of the objects. Thereby, what I’m most recently thinking about as a form of Museopiracy also critiques the conditions by which art is circulated globally. Even so, my work is about the ways those are contested and subverted in local, spatial encounters. The idea of Meta-museums and Museopiracy relates to institutional critique and postcolonial interventions in museums, which my books Art in the Time of Colony, Botanical Drift, and The Importance of Being Anachronistic explore through related artistic practises. Working on a parallel, meta-layer allows me to parasitically set myself up in relation to these huge structures that maintain an authoritarian control over their ownership and interpretation of their collection. What is at stake in my practise is a critical expansion within new spaces of representation.