Who are we?
We are the Before Forgetting film collective. Though our members are scattered all over the world today, our collective was born four years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since Before Forgetting’s inception, we have been organising film screenings and discussions, focusing particularly on anti-colonial and anti-capitalist themes.
What did we do?
Before Forgetting was invited to produce a video installation and curate a film screening for the Young Danish Photography exhibition at the Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen last November. Working as a collective, we produced a film essay that spoke to the nature of resistance in the Global North today. Reflecting the urgency of such a question amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, our work examines how lifestyles in today’s northern metropolises are built on imperialist exploitation and the violent preservation of privilege under the guise of ‘global security’. In such a world, we ask: what might resistance look like?
How did it go?
On the 14th of October, two weeks before the exhibition opening, we were informed that the Fotografisk Center would require us to modify parts of our film. Specifically, a) a clip showing direct action at Terma, a Danish arms manufacturer deeply involved in arming the genocide, headquartered in Copenhagen, and b) a QR code at the end of the film, linking the viewer to a fundraiser for Palestine Action.
The justification for the request was rather strange. The Copenhagen city government sent out a missive, informing the Fotografisk Center that they, as a cultural space that receives support from Copenhagen municipality, were expected to restrict their political critique to domestic issues and to avoid difficult conversations about foreign politics. As it transpired, a large number of cultural spaces and artists in Copenhagen had been sent precisely this missive, best summarised as: don’t worry your pretty little heads about foreign policy; the grown-ups will take care of that.
This policy, if one might call it that, emerged in the context of escalations in protests and actions against the genocide in Gaza. No such missive was issued when Danish civil society was engaged in protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine—conversations about foreign politics become ‘difficult’ only when one calls into question Danish capital’s complicity in genocide.
Under Danish [federal] law, it would have been a lot harder to make a case for a blanket denial of funding or the outright cancellation of events, screenings, and exhibitions similar to ours. The outsourcing of this responsibility to the city of Copenhagen is the state’s workaround to this at a time when the complicity of Danish capital and industry in the genocide is more evident than ever. It accompanies other restrictions on protest, with raids on Palestinian activists’ homes, restrictions on cultural events, and arrests of protestors both at Maersk and at the University of Copenhagen.
What happened next?
Despite intense repression, Denmark also sees more pushback from civil society than Germany—particularly from cultural workers. Since the end of last year, workers in the cultural and art scenes have begun to organise a campaign against the municipality’s measures. A petition calling out the municipality and demanding the policy be revoked received broad support among over five hundred institutions and practitioners. This pressure and media coverage highlighting the move as being in violation of Danish law led the Copenhagen city council—where the largest party is presently the left-wing Enhedslisten—to take up the issue near the end of last month. There, a majority of parties opined that the municipality had been in the wrong and that it must reverse course and issue new guidelines that negate the previous letter.
These wins are worth celebrating. They are not, however, anywhere close to the end of the struggle. While art has some power to foster reflection, its ability to put an end to the complicity of Danish capital in the genocide is (unsurprisingly) minimal. The need of the hour is direct action, as we witnessed in Copenhagen last week when our comrades broke through police barricades to storm the very same perimeter of Maersk’s central office that appears in our film.
The fight continues in Denmark, Germany, and the rest of Europe. It is our task to take whatever optimism these small wins give us and channel it towards ever-larger and more meaningful action.
You can follow Before Forgetting on Instagram here.
