Here + Now + Everyone is a collaborative artistic and civic performance dedicated to reactivating the monument Hier und Jetzt — a symbolically invisible and yet fascinating public artwork commemorating both the diversity of Hamburg’s population and the victims of the Nazi judicial system. On iron steles sit 90 pots full of various plants, full of plants that did not belong to each other, and yet were supposed to grow together: roses next to stinging nettles, medicinal herbs next to poisonous plants, migratory species next to the indigenous ones. The different genres were intended to symbolize different cultures, religions, social milieus and nations. In the meantime, over the years, and against the intention of the artist, the pots had been planted uniformly and the care and the special meaning of this space faded away.

Hier und Jetzt was inaugurated in 1997 by a French artist Gloria Friedmann, and commissioned by the judicial authority after years of demands by the judges' association in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Media Hamburg. It was created as one of the counter-monuments, critical public works meant to deny the presence of any authoritative social force in public spaces. Chto Delat, in a performance resulting from a workshop and a working process with the post-migrant population of Hamburg, is reactivating the site, inhabiting and connecting it to the contemporary questions of belonging and exclusion. The site-specific public performance is both a ceremonial intervention and a political statement reflecting on contemporary migration policies and their human impact. It is an attempt to reclaim the core values of this memorial through the performative and participatory practice, exploring non-human agency in public artworks — such as plants, insects, and weather and fostering the community-building, healing, and remembrance rituals.

The work was created in the frame of Counter-Monuments series of Stadtkuratorin Hamburg and in cooperation with the International Summer Festival Kampnagel.

• Site-specificity
• Performativity
• Nonhuman Species-Being