Starting from where we are

ALI(E/A)NSI began from a fairly simple shared feeling: the world is not okay.

Climate collapse, displacement, war, economic precarity, social polarization, ecological grief, housing pressure, rising nationalism and loneliness do not arrive as one coherent crisis. They arrive unevenly, in fragments, and they are experienced differently depending on where we stand, where we have come from, and what kinds of histories we carry.

An exhibition cannot contain all of this, nor should it pretend to. ALI(E/A)NSI does not try to represent a global polycrisis or gather artworks as illustrations of it. The project starts closer to where we are: with a particular house, a neighbourhood, a group of people whose paths have crossed there, and the different realities they bring with them.

This closeness matters. There is a desire here to engage again with lived experience, with the places we inhabit and the people around us, rather than allowing the scale of global crisis to remain abstract and overwhelming. What does coexistence actually look like at the scale of a neighbourhood, an artistic community, a shared building, a conversation? What kinds of relations are possible when people do not necessarily share the same histories, aesthetics, identities or political positions?

In this sense, ALI(E/A)NSI begins with fragments: fragments of memory, migration, artistic research, neighbourhood experience, ecological anxiety, disagreement, suspicion, friendship and hope. The exhibition asks what might happen when these fragments are allowed to encounter one another without being forced into a single story.

A place before a theme

The project did not begin with a list of artists selected to illustrate a curatorial theme. It emerged through relationships that have accumulated around NOVILLA over time.

My own relationship with the place began through a studio residency in 2023. Through NOVILLA I became connected with Moving Poets, its members, and a wider network of artists, neighbours and cultural practitioners in Schöneweide. At the same time, the house became one of the places through which the work of sōydivision could expand. Concerts, workshops, communal meals, listening sessions, exhibitions, radio broadcasts and other collective experiments took place there. Some were planned carefully; others emerged through proximity, availability, coincidence or the simple fact that people kept returning.

Over time, these activities made NOVILLA more than a venue. It became part of the artistic process itself: a place in which practices overlap with everyday life, where temporary collaborations can become longer relationships, and where questions around belonging, trust, migration and coexistence are not only discussed but continually negotiated.

This relationship also fed into TRUSTPICTION : Navigating Trust and Suspicion in Diasporic Realities, an ongoing curatorial framework concerned with the unstable movement between trust and distrust, belonging and estrangement, proximity and distance. ALI(E/A)NSI grows from this longer inquiry, but shifts its attention toward the relations that can emerge within conditions of fragmentation.

It also follows LANDSLIDE (2025), a project developed with Samuel Johnstone and Pisitakun Kuantalaeng. Where Landslide approached collapse, instability, ecological vulnerability and transformation, ALI(E/A)NSI asks what might be assembled within and after such instability. Not a solution to collapse, but ways of relating inside it.

The artists in ALI(E/A)NSI therefore form a constellation rather than a thematic selection. Their trajectories intersect through NOVILLA, Schöneweide, Moving Poets, sōydivision and other overlapping social and artistic relationships. Some have been connected to the house for years. Some arrived more recently. Some relationships are close, others incidental. The point is precisely that they do not form a homogeneous group.

What connects them is a relationship to a place.

Schöneweide as an active context

NOVILLA sits in Schöneweide, a neighbourhood marked by industrial history, migration, economic transformation and contested ideas of belonging. The area carries memories of industrial decline and social exclusion alongside continuing histories of right-wing violence. At the same time, it is a place of everyday neighbourhood life, cultural experimentation, new migration, artistic production and changing forms of community.

These realities are not background decoration for the exhibition. They complicate the very language of belonging, alienation and alliance. To make an exhibition here about coexistence means asking what coexistence actually demands in a place where different histories and political realities occupy the same streets.

ALI(E/A)NSI therefore treats the site not simply as an address but as an active participant. The works do not need to speak explicitly about Schöneweide. Yet their encounter here changes how they can be read. The neighbourhood, the house, its history, the people passing through it and the relationships accumulated within it become part of the constellation.

ALI(E/A)NSI

The title holds several words inside itself: alien, alienation, alliance, the Indonesian aliansi, and alienasi. Its awkward spelling is intentional. The word refuses to settle completely into one language or one meaning.

This instability reflects a tension at the centre of the exhibition. Contemporary life is saturated with forms of estrangement: from place, institutions, ecological systems, labour, community and sometimes from one another. At the same time, there remains a persistent desire to connect, cooperate and construct forms of solidarity.

ALI(E/A)NSI stays inside the distance between these conditions. It does not imagine alliance as the opposite of alienation, as though one could simply progress from isolation toward harmony. Nor does it assume that togetherness requires agreement. Instead, it asks how relations might be formed while difference, disagreement and unevenness remain present.

From this wordplay emerged five interconnected movements: ALIEN, ALIENATION, ALIGNMENT, ALLIANCE and AFFINITY. They became a way of thinking through the exhibition, but not as five categories into which artworks must fit. They are closer to five conditions, questions or atmospheres that repeatedly fold into one another.

ALIEN begins with the question of who or what is perceived as different. The alien can be the migrant, newcomer, minority, dissident or unfamiliar body, but it can also describe a more ordinary experience of not fitting comfortably within an established narrative. To call someone alien already implies a position from which belonging is being measured. The term therefore points not only toward difference, but toward the power to name difference.

ALIENATION shifts from the figure of the outsider toward the conditions that produce separation. Estrangement is not simply an individual emotion. It can be generated through borders, labour, housing, bureaucracy, racism, economic precarity, technological systems, ecological loss and inherited histories. Alienation asks us to notice the infrastructures that make distance feel natural or inevitable.

ALIGNMENT appears when separated positions begin to orient themselves toward one another. Alignment is not agreement. It can begin through listening, translation, negotiation, curiosity, friction or the recognition of an unexpected resonance. It is provisional and often uncomfortable. Different experiences do not become identical simply because they meet. Yet something becomes possible once they become legible to one another.

ALLIANCE asks what can be built from these encounters. Alliances may take the form of collaboration, solidarity, mutual support, friendship, shared infrastructure or simply a decision to remain in relation. They are never guaranteed. They require maintenance, and they contain asymmetries and disagreements of their own. An alliance worth considering is therefore not a finished state of unity, but a structure that must continually be negotiated.

AFFINITY is less deliberate. If alliance describes something that can be constructed, affinity describes a resonance that is sometimes discovered. It might emerge between practices, memories, gestures, materials or people who did not initially imagine themselves as connected. Affinity does not demand sameness or even permanent partnership. It asks what remains after an encounter, and whether temporary proximity can leave behind another possibility for relation.

Read in sequence, these five words might appear to describe a movement from alienation toward togetherness. But the exhibition does not propose such a clean progression. Affinity can exist between strangers. Alliances can produce new alienations. Alignment can fail. People can belong and feel alien at the same time. The five A’s are therefore better understood as a circulation than a timeline: conditions we repeatedly move into, out of and between.

Fragments becoming constellations

This is why the image of the constellation became useful to the curatorial process. A constellation connects separate points without pretending that the distance between them has disappeared. The lines are provisional. They depend on where we stand and on the relations we choose to perceive.

The exhibition similarly brings together artistic positions without asking them to become parts of a single argument. A work may carry a personal memory while another addresses structural violence; one may work through sound, another through material, performance, image, food, conversation or collective organisation. Their meanings do not need to resolve into consensus. What matters is what becomes visible, audible or thinkable in the space between them.

Curating, from this perspective, becomes less an act of arranging evidence for a thesis and more an attempt to create conditions for relation. This includes the physical placement of works, but also conversations, performances, workshops, meals, radio, informal encounters and the social life surrounding an exhibition. The exhibition is not only what is installed in the rooms. It is also what happens between people while it is being made and while it is being visited.

Radio became particularly important in this process. Through ASSOY Radio and the Retrospeculative conversations, speaking and listening became another curatorial space. Rather than asking artists simply to explain their works, conversations could move sideways: toward memories, histories, contradictions, songs, places and other practices. The five A’s became prompts for listening rather than subjects to be answered correctly.

This also allowed the exhibition to begin before the physical installation. Relations could form through conversation; unexpected connections could appear; assumptions could be revised. Radio in this sense is not documentation added after the exhibition. It is one of the places where the exhibition thinks aloud.

Remaining open

ALI(E/A)NSI does not offer alliance as an uncomplicated answer to alienation. In a period marked by war, ecological crisis, nationalism, displacement, economic pressure and political polarization, calls for togetherness can easily become empty language. Coexistence is difficult precisely because people arrive with different degrees of power, safety, mobility and recognition.

The project is interested in this difficulty. What would it mean to remain in relation without erasing those differences? How can a shared space hold disagreement without immediately turning disagreement into separation? When does hospitality become mutual transformation rather than simply an invitation into structures that remain unchanged? What forms of maintenance make collective spaces possible, and who performs that maintenance?

These questions are deliberately left unresolved. ALI(E/A)NSI is less interested in presenting a model of community than in observing how community is continuously composed, strained, repaired and reimagined.

Perhaps this is also why the exhibition needed to begin from a place rather than from an abstract theme. NOVILLA is already full of accumulated relations: artistic and domestic, local and transnational, temporary and long-term, harmonious and difficult. The exhibition enters this ecology rather than inventing one from scratch.

What emerges is temporary. Works arrive and leave. People travel. Collaborations change. An exhibition closes. But some encounters alter the conditions for what can happen next.

The question, then, is not where each work belongs within ALIEN, ALIENATION, ALIGNMENT, ALLIANCE or AFFINITY. The more interesting question is what becomes possible when these different practices, histories and people occupy the same place for a while.

What new affinities might become perceptible?