The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit and the Limits of Activism

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During the past 15 years, the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (ZPS) has established itself as a provocative voice in German cultural politics. It has blurred the boundary between theatre, activism and state-level provocation. This presentation analyzes the ZPS’s work through the lens of “artivism,” defined by Duncombe and Lambert as the strategic fusion of aesthetic affect and political organizing, in order to evaluate the collective’s attempts to reconfigure the German democratic public sphere.

The ZPS has rendered the abstract violence of borders and historical revisionism into unavoidable material reality by physically transporting the bodies of deceased migrants to Berlin (The Dead are Coming, 2015) and constructing a replica Holocaust memorial outside a far-right politician's home (The Memorial, 2017). These actions are the epitome of artivism: bypassing rational debate in favour of "productive confusion" and moral shock with a view to disrupting the apathy of the German electorate.

This presentation will also investigate the critical limitations of such artivism. Do the group’s provocations generate sustained political agency, or do they trap audiences in ineffective moral outrage? A critical assessment of this case study on artivism in Germany today offers an opportunity to answer that question.