Forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
—Extract from ‘The Lord’s Prayer’

Then the mind
became a body
immersed
in the water blanket of monsoon
a deep daze of dislocation
from colour
and creed
and country

The vague ache
of memories
that interspersed
space time
like some lost children
in the forest
unworried by strange roads
because everything is unknown
unafraid of twilight
because all
is the long evening
wandering because
the unsure step onward
is the fate
function of limbs.

Yet terrified because
the forest is endless
and outside
through a pale patch
of the green darkness
the sun shines
like a chimera
that deepens the
global gloom.

Only one solace:
there have been
others too,
lingering in that twilight,
who shed
home and country
and at times
colour
who travelled the long way
and also never felt happy.

—Bahadur Tejani, ‘Leaving the Country’

Account of Transcendence I

After the Second World War, as Germany was struggling to come to terms with defeat and getting back on its feet again after the massive destruction incurred, and as the physically and psychologically injured and maimed soldiers came back home to find cities and homes in shambles and ruins, the Trümmerfrau (‘rubble women’) were there to roll up their sleeves, clear the debris, and pave the way for the reconstruction of the country. Even though the story of the rubble women has been mythologized over the years, it still plays an important role in the narrative of Germany’s reconstruction. After the clearing of the rubble, the country had to be rebuilt, but with industrial labour shortages, and in the construction, health, and sanitation sectors, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) government was obliged to recruit workers from Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Turkey), as well as South Korea. Although these foreign workers had been recruited before, it was the German-Italian recruitment agreement (Anwerbeabkommen) of 1955 that formalized the recruitment of what was to become ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter) on a larger scale. This included the 1961 bilateral contract with Turkey—which provoked an influx of migrant workers from Turkey—and with South Korea in 1963 to recruit miners in the coal industry. These migrants were not only crucial in the physical rebuilding of the FRG, but also played an important role in boosting production for its rejuvenating and booming economy to make possible the so-called Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle].

Despite the significant roles played by guest workers, their lives as migrants in Germany as well as the lives of their children and great grandchildren—most of whom were born in Germany—have been shaped by institutionalized and social forms of othering, they were relegated to the margins of society, and were subjected to xenophobia and dehumanization. The state of being of a so-called guest worker was succinctly captured in the lyrics of two musicians of Turkish origin. In Ozan Ata Canani’s ‘Deutsche Freunde (Arbeitskräfte wurde gerufen)’, he sings: 

Arbeitskräfte wurde gerufen
Unsere deutsche Freunde
Aber Menschen sind gekommen
Unsere deutsche Freunde
Nicht Maschinen sondern Menschen
Aber Menschen sind gekommen
Unsere deutsche Freunde, Freunde, Freunde
Sie haben am Leben Freude
Aus Türkei, aus Italien
aus Portugal, Spanien
Griechenland, Jugoslawien
Kamen die Menschen hierher
Unsere deutsche Freunde
Kommen die Menschen hierher
Unsere deutsche Freunde, Freunde, Freunde
Sie haben am Leben Freude
Als Schweißer, als Hilfsarbeiter
Als Drecks- und Müllarbeiter
Stahlbau und Bandarbeiter
Sie nennen uns Gastarbeiter
Unsere deutsche Freunde
Sie nennen uns Gastarbeiter
Unsere deutsche Freunde, Freunde, Freunde
Sie haben am Leben Freude
Und die Kinder dieser Menschen
Sind geteilt ins zwei Welten
Ich bin Ata und frage euch
Wo wir jetzt hingehören Unsere deutsche Freunde
Ich bin Ata und frage euch
Wo wir jetzt hingehören
Unsere deutsche Freunde, Freunde, Freunde,
Sie haben am Leben Freude

In another very pertinent song that tells of the lives and conditions of guest workers by musician Cem Karaca titled ‘Es kamen Menschen an’ (1984) he sings: 

Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen
doch es kamen Menschen an
Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen
doch es kamen Menschen an

Man brauchte unsere Arbeitskraft
die Kraft die was am Fließband schafft
Wir Menschen waren nicht interessant
darum blieben wir euch unbekannt

[Chorus:] Ramaramaramaramadah
Gastarbeiter
Ramaramaramaramadah
Gastarbeiter
Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen
doch es kamen Menschen an
Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen
doch es kamen Menschen an

Solange es viel Arbeit gab
gab man die Drecksarbeit uns ab
doch dann als die große Krise kam
sagte man, wir sind Schuld daran

[Chorus]

Ihr wollt nicht unsere Kultur
nicht mit uns sein – Ihr wollt uns nur als Fremde sehn so bleiben wir
Unbekannte dort wie hier

[Chorus]

Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen
doch es kamen Menschen an
Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen

What both songs have in common—besides the eloquently, painfully, and melodiously packaged history of dehumanization and mistreatment of guest workers—is the fact that despite their socioeconomic importance, these workers and their descendants were deemed to be nothing more than trespassers. They were invited as guests to effectuate labour but were hardly given the conditions to integrate themselves within German society; They were relegated to industrial areas of cities and towns, where even Italian-, Portuguese-, or Turkish- speaking physicians were brought in to attend to these communities. For the duration of their time in the FRG they encountered these and other constant reminders that their stays were merely temporary, solidifying this notion that they were trespassers. At a time when the public discourse in Germany is, once again, directed towards migrants being the cause of a plethora of problems—ranging from fireworks on New Year’s Eve to chaos in German cities, to difficulties in the educational sector or unemployment, and extending to concepts like ‘Nafri’ (Nordafrikanische Intensivtäter), or statements like ‘Nicht Kreuzberg ist Deutschland, Gillamoos ist Deutschland’—migrants, who to a large degree, contribute economically, socially, culturally, and politically to Germany’s prosperity, are treated as trespassers.

Account of Transcendence II

At the age of eleven, Kien went to a boarding school for secondary education after skipping one or two classes in primary school to stay ahead in the race of life. Now, with the benefits of hindsight, she sometimes asks herself: Why the rush? Where to and for whom? But her parents’ voices still echo in her inner ear, as they always reminded her that she shouldn’t be lagging behind while her peers were making history.

So she left her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends, and was bound to spend the next seven years of secondary and high school life in dormitories and classes, on sports fields and manual labour grounds—and especially between those spaces. These in-between spaces were and are crucial, as her class or dorm were the places meant to be occupied while the in-between space—mostly well kempt lawns with hedges and tidied lanes, perfect mimicries of the colonial imaginary—were neither meant to be trespassed nor understood as spaces to take up. But as she so well knew from her mathematics classes, the shortcut across any triangle is the hypotenuse, the route she was most attracted to.

Five to seven years prior, she had been conditioned to recite the Lord’s Prayer in chorus in Sunday school. To Kien, every word of the Lord’s Prayer carried its weight in gold. Every word sat exactly in its rightful place and existed within and beyond the realm of metaphors. ‘Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ With this, trespassing of any kind, even outside of the church, became associated and interpretable within the context of earth and heaven, temptation and evil. Her existence was no less conditioned by this notion of trespassing.

Account of Transcendence III

But we may as well go a few years back in time: Kien was born in Cameroon to parents from the Anglophone minority. Like the other Anglophones who made up 20% of Cameroon’s population, her parents were always given the impression by the majority 80% Francophones that they were trespassing in their own country. In what was to become a two-state country after the unification of West and East Cameroon in 1961, the Anglophone Cameroonians were robbed of their federal status, which was replaced in 1972 with a centralized unitary state called the United Republic of Cameroon and later the Republic of Cameroon. In the 1980s when television first came to Cameroon, 20% of airtime was given to the figure of the trespasser. The Anglophones were and still are derogatorily called les gauchers or les Biafrains The former was in relation to the practice of left hand traffic that although Anglophone Cameroonians in a united Cameroon were not allowed to undertake, was still used to associate them with their British colonizers, thereby marking them as the perpetual other by their fellow Francophone compatriots. The latter, meanwhile, was in relation to the Biafrans of Nigeria, who between 1967–70 declared their independence amid one of the fiercest wars the African continent has ever seen. In both cases, the Anglophones are called so in an effort to remind them that they are mere trespassers in their own native land. It is a reminder that they are Cameroonians, but apart. It is a reminder that within the land of the equal, some people are more equal than others.

Account of Transcendence IV

By the time Kien left secondary school in Cameroon and moved to the FRG to study, the notion of trespassing had become a familiar companion. When she arrived in Germany, she joined the lot of second- and third-generation Italians, Portuguese, and Turks, as well as other migrants known as perpetual trespassers. Whenever the frequently asked questions in Germany, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘When are you planning to return?’, were posed, she was neither shocked nor disheartened about the not-so-subtle reminder of the fact that she wasn’t part of the ‘here’ and had to move on—or better still, move back. But that persistent reminder was raised to an exponentially absurd level on two occasions that have stuck with her ever since.

The first incident was in class at university, where she and a friend drew the tutor’s attention for a question. The tutor walked majestically and seemingly generously towards both of them, two of the few people of colour in class, to listen to their question. With a strange combination of pity, misunderstanding, and sheer wariness, the tutor stared at them and then responded: ‘Ich kann euch das nicht wirklich erklären. Das ist für euch schwer zu verstehen, weil da wo ihr herkommt, gibt es kein technisches Denkvermögen. (I can’t really explain this to you. It is difficult for you to understand because where you are from, there is no capacity for technical thinking)’. Aged twenty-two then, Kien reckoned that it wasn’t really the audacity of the tutor that shocked her, but his conviction that what he had said was gospel truth.

The second incident happened towards the end of her studies. Although she had more or less been very much apprised of the system and was cognizant of her almost permanent role as a trespasser, she couldn’t fully buffer or absorb the comment made by another tutor. It was one of those beautiful Berlin summer afternoons. It was graduation year and every examination grade mattered. In class with other students, Kien was approached by her tutor who pulled out her assignment from a bunch and asked her: ‘Who wrote this assignment for you?’ Kien was dumbfounded and appalled. When Kien asked why she would ask such a question, the tutor, in a calm voice and with a half-smile as if it was painted on her face, responded: ‘In my many years of working as a tutor in this university, I know that foreign students do not write German as well as this.’ The only response that found its way through the cracks of Kien’s lips was: ‘Not only do I write like this in German, but in five other languages.’

These two moments exemplify a shift from the passivity of trespassing to the activity of trespassing. With that response, Kien embodied her trespassiveness. She employed it as a resistance towards the violence of being placed in the savage slot of the perpetual trespasser. With that response she acquired chutzpah, taking the hypotenuse as an act of resilience.

Account of Transcendence V

The resilience Kien displayed was nothing in comparison to the force that a young man who was interviewed on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Senegal displayed on TV just in February 2024. His whole village was in a state of mourning and despair. The TV camera zoomed closely onto the faces of women, men, and children weeping bitterly, while the reporter narrated the tale of a boat that had left the village just a week ago. Almost every family in that village had scraped some money together to pay for a son or daughter to get on the boat that was supposed to bring them to Europe. News had gotten back to the village a few days later that the vessel was one of the many capsized boats they had seen on TV. Pain was in the air and it was very tangible. When the reporter approached the young man on the shore with the microphone, he spoke of mourning his brothers and sisters, those he had fished alongside of for decades, whose livelihoods were now gravely threatened by the usurpation of local stocks by international fishing operations. Against this backdrop, risking his own life at sea seemed almost preferable to enduring his current conditions. 

On 15 September 2023, CNN’s Barbie Latza Nadeau, Chris Liakos, Claudia Colliva, and Sharon Braithwaite reported that 7,000 people had just landed on the Italian island Lampedusa, which has a capacity of circa 6,000. The mayor of Lampedusa, Filippo Mannino, with some empathy stated that, ‘Now we have reached a point of no return where the role played by this small rock in the middle of the Mediterranean has been put into crisis by the dramatic nature of this phenomenon’, while Italy’s Minister of Infrastructure Matteo Salvini stated that the migrant’s arrival was ‘an act of war’.

This collective act of trespassing came after Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the President of the EU Ursula von der Leyen signed a deal with Tunisia in July promising to invest 105 million euros if Tunisia stopped smugglers from bringing Africans to Europe. This money invested to stop trespassers into European territory does nothing to stop the environmental damages going on in various African countries; does nothing to stop the political crises across the whole Sahel area of Africa that has erupted due to France’s neocolonial exploitative relations with its former colonies; does nothing to stop the Spanish ships fishing off the West African coast; does nothing to stop the exploitation of uranium in Niger, coltan in Congo, diamond in Sierra Leone, and other resources across the African continent for which people have to work for less than a hunger-wage; does nothing to stop the dictators in Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Chad, and many other countries that still entertain political and economic ties with Europe; does nothing to stop European companies from dumping their toxic wastes in different African countries; does nothing to stop the European oil companies that extract oil and destroy the environment in Angola, Cameroon, Gabon, and Nigeria, among many others.

Maybe the young man on TV was one of the 7,000 people who made it to Lampedusa. From the comfortable space of rationality it is too easy to criticize these trespassers. But if you are on the fiftieth floor of a burning building, you do not jump out of the window because you rationally think that you have a chance to survive. It is not the brain that mediates decisions in such cases, but a reflex that demands of you to do whatever is possible to save your life and the lives of your dear ones. Trespassing as reflex? Reflex as resistance?

Account of Transcendence VI

Kien’s secondary school was a conservative catholic school run by nuns and priests who had dedicated their lives to chastity and serving nothing but the Holy Trinity. The day started with a church service and ended with a condensed mass. The Lord’s Prayer was always the order of the day and it was drilled into everyone to avoid sins or trespasses of any kind. The regular confessions on Sundays allowed for students to encounter the priests and reveal all the sins they had committed and to ask for forgiveness. Students would recite those prayers and trust that God would forgive whatever sins they had committed.

While the students asked for forgiveness of their trespasses, it was rumoured that some of the priests that had sworn to chastity were involved in relationships with women within and outside of their diocese, and some were said to have families unbeknownst to the school. One could at the very least wave away these events as interactions between adults framed by consent, however much they still qualify as sins in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But there were also rumours of students being sexually abused by priests. While in Kien’s school context it stayed within the realm of rumour, the Catholic Church across the globe has been bombarded with accusations of priests abusing children in their congregations. The accusations are said to have been covered up by the Catholic Church over decades. These cases of molestation are far from being mere trespasses, but are rather violent, destructive, and predatory behaviours that have destroyed the lives of people sometimes under the watchful eyes of the church. The same clerics that have been accused of pedophilia and other violent predatory acts are some of the loudest—together with their colleagues from the Evangelical churches—to condemn same-sex relations as being against the will of God. Some of the evangelical pastors go on crusades across the African continent, the Americas, Asia, and beyond to convert people from the ‘sin of homosexuality’. How does one reconcile a world in which two adults of the same sex that consensually come together are condemned by people who abuse minors and cover up for others who have done alike?

Account of Transcendence VII

In his seminal 1957 record release The Clown, the legendary Charles Mingus takes us on a compelling search of the somber shades of the human soul in the eponymous title track. The piece, which features a narration by Jean Shepard, tells of a rather happy, colourful clown that tries all he can to please his spectators with his performances. In the process he discovers that whenever his jokes willingly or unwillingly provoked pain and suffering of the performer, his audience would laugh even more fervently. In what was to become the clown’s last performance: 

…a rope broke
Down came the backdrop, right on the back of the neck
And he went flat
And something broke
This was it
It hurt way down deep inside
He tried to get up
He looked out at the audience
And you should’ve, man you should’ve, you should’ve seen that
crowd
They was rolling in the aisle
…Man he really knew now!
But it was too late
And all he wanted was to make this crowd laugh
Well, they were laughing
But now he knew
That was the end of the clown
And you should have seen the bookings coming in
Man, his agent was on the phone for twenty-four hours

The tendency to take delight in the pain of others is a revealing fact about humanity.

The effort to take the 90° angle in order to please his audience ultimately cost the clown his life. Trespassing then becomes the possibility of swimming against the tide, taking the route of the hypotenuse despite being aware of the frictions of the current.

Transcending…

The project Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld—Of (Un)Real Frontiers, Of (Im)Moralities, and Other Transcendences invites artists, scholars, activists, and others to deliberate on religious, social, class, national, sexual, disciplinary, and other forms of trespassing. It is a research and exhibition project that puts at the fore the question of normativity and by and for whom the demands of normativity are made. The project employs varying narratives of trespassing as a means of resistance—without asking for forgiveness, for one doesn’t need to ask for forgiveness for being a ‘Gastarbeiter’ or a descendant of one; one doesn’t need to be apologetic about seeking refuge especially if the rights of refugees are supposed to be covered by UNHCR conventions; one doesn’t need to ask for forgiveness for not believing in someone else’s God or for believing in one’s own Gods and ancestors; one doesn’t need to be apologetic about being queer; one does not need to ask for forgiveness for advocating for a better environment and future by occupying and thereby reclaiming Indigenous lands, however counterproductive to capitalist endeavours of extraction that claim to be normative.

The project Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld—Of (Un)Real Frontiers, Of (Im)Moralities, and Other Transcendences thinks of real and metaphorical dimensions of trespassing as a tool for asserting one’s rights, humanity, and community, trespassing as a means of epistemic disobedience, as a means of subversion within heteronormative patriarchal and white supremacist structures that propagate gender, racial, sexual, and class inequalities.

Trespassing as a possibility of bringing together a multitude of voices, of bodies, of positions —physically, mentally, and spiritually—to think about the constructions of real and unreal frontiers, the constructs of what is moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, correct or incorrect, just or unjust. By putting our bodies on the line performatively, the project also invites us to cogitate on psychosomatic interferences within certain spaces reserved for ‘normative’ bodies. Artists are thus invited to trespass HKW— to resignify its spaces, occupy the lawns, create new common grounds, and make them inhabitable by other trespassers.

The project asks the question: if the norm has been inherently exclusive, is there a possibility that the abnormal would be inclusive and more accommodating, and what role can artists play in the imagination of the abnormal as a method? An abnormal that isn’t concerned with undoing, but that must be more concerned with giving space for a multiplicity of ways of existing and co-existing side-by-side and even intertwined. As trespassers we choose to take the route of the hypotenuse, but we acknowledge that there is space for everyone else who might wish to take the other way via the 90° angle.

To put it in other words, the project Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld—Of (Un)Real Frontiers, Of (Im)Moralities, and Other Transcendences is about queering all that claims normativity. It is about making crooked, about going down the winding paths of life, it is about getting lost and finding oneself again, it is about errantry as a method.

In the beginning of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes:

QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. … Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.

Thus this project is about exploring the future’s domain, and imagining and queering that future, by looking and activating ways of imagining and enacting futurities of the then and there. Ways of dreaming new and better pleasures, and enacting other ways of being in the world. Ways of propelling ourselves beyond romances of the negative and enable us to acknowledge that this world is not enough.

With this in mind, this project on trespassing takes as its starting point that which is said to be a sin, but which is in fact the most profound form of rebellion one could possibly enact.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung