Le Guess Who?, a festival beginning this week in Utrecht, Netherlands, put together a model of inclusion and diversity. And then that vision ran straight into a visa system often designed to keep people out – when it worked at all. But this festival decided to do something differently: share their experience.
Le Guess Who? is really doing diversity and inclusion in the way you’d want – not only adding to a lineup in a tokenized or exoticized way but led by a diverse curatorial team, including Arooj Aftab and a ton of external curators. That includes British-Egyptian historian Hannah Elsisi presenting the 13-hour Chromesthesia, mixing Afro-diasporic artists from Rio to Cairo, Miami to Campala. There’s the Palestinian-led project Sounds of Places (of which I was a resident), the COSMOS project (spanning South Korea to Vilnius to Nairobi and Marrakech), Raziyah Heath presenting “Questions of Home,” and curation by DARKSIDE, Arooj Aftab, Bo Ningen, maybe Fratti, and more.
As diverse as many of Europe’s experimental festivals are, you often see whiteness at the curatorial level. That’s not that there isn’t a place for those folks to curate people who may not look like them – that’s great. But it’s more than overdue to diversify lineups and leadership alike.
And that brings us to the problem: we might embrace diversity and inclusion and anti-racist work in the music scene, but we have to contend with our governments. Even without the obvious victories of right-wing, anti-immigrant leadership, western governments have set up restrictive visa systems that presume people are trying to immigrate illegally even when there’s no evidence for that. And very often, these systems suffer from neglect and racism in equal measure.
The whole piece from last week is worth a full read:
A behind-the-scenes look into visa processes for Le Guess Who? 2024
In short: having to travel to neighboring countries because they couldn’t reach a visa office in their own, random denials for unspecified missing paperwork, forms that break when you don’t have a Western name/surname format, requirements for local phone numbers (even though that makes no sense) – the usual. Official invitation letters from the city often still faced denials.
And yes, there’s racism behind many of these decisions.
It is impossible not to observe the places these artists are coming from, which are being denied entry into The Netherlands. Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine, Morocco…
Shamefully, even Aftab Sr. – father of Grammy winner and Le Guess Who? curator Arooj Aftab – was rejected on the grounds that his scheduled performance at LGW with his daughter did not illustrate clear enough grounds for entering the country. Imagine the cultural loss of everyone who would have seen this unique and historical performance.
The loss, to be certain, is ours.
This is a growing crisis for the entire Western cultural scene – not only in obvious places like the United States of America, where Trump is promising to gut immigration infrastructure and seal the borders. It’s everywhere. And I’d argue these countries are reaching the wrong answer to growing displacement from war. That should be an opportunity to welcome artists from impacted regions and listen to their stories. (I’ve heard even Ukrainian colleagues tell me that they’re not getting booked if they identify as Ukrainian or talk about experience of war in many contexts.)
Now may seem a strange time to bring this up amidst the bleak future suggested by elections in the USA. But LGW is onto something – we can’t simply stay silent about these obstacles and wait for things to get better. It’s time to talk about what’s happening and be relentlessly critical. And if some western countries cut off the visa process for culture, there’s another easy prediction: that culture will simply move elsewhere. Countries at the margins can benefit from watching these meltdowns closely and even compete with these cities for talent.
Anyway, I’m grateful that LGW has managed to be relentless and get some of its invited artists in. I’ll report back on some of the program shortly.