Daniela Ortiz is an artist and activist whose artistic work materialises anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle into a diverse range of media. The ABC of Racist Europe is an illustrated children’s book with the aim of serving as a pedagogical tool against the rise of fascism and racism within European colonial institutions.
"The ABC of Racist Europe" (2017) is an artist's book in which Daniela Ortiz employs the familiar format of a children's alphabet book to expose European immigration policies and racial discrimination. Ortiz combines hand-drawn illustrations with text to create 26 entries, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet and highlighting different aspects of institutional racism and border control. Her artistic method involves appropriating and subverting the innocent, educational style of children's literature – including simple drawings and straightforward text – to deliver pointed political criticism. The artist makes strategic use of alliteration throughout the work, mimicking the linguistic patterns common in children's books while repurposing them to emphasize systemic violence. The content which is typically censored and manipulated through children’s education is fully on view - connecting to the realities of migrant and racialised children who grow up in a school system that excludes their lived experience early-on by enforcing racist narratives and justifying binary ethics of right and wrong on the side of existing colonial legal systems. Ortiz intentionally uses a childlike aesthetic to create a stark contrast with the serious subject matter, effectively highlighting the absurdity and cruelty of discriminatory systems that are often normalized in European society.
Daniela Ortiz / The ABC of Racist Europe. 26 Fine Art Print on Hahnemüle paper.
In early 2023, Daniela Ortiz was invited to display The ABC of Racist Europe in a group exhibition in a German museum titled “Wer Wir Sind: Fragen an ein Einwanderungsland” (Who We Are: Reflecting a Country of Immigration) curated by Johanna Adam, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, and Dan Thy Nguyen. The exhibition took place at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, running from the 26th of May through the 8th of October of 2023. During the course of the exhibition, the politician Volker Beck from Germany’s Green Party and president of the German-Israeli Society1 accused Ortiz’s work of antisemitism.2 After this public accusation, two antisemitism experts, Nicole Dietelhoff (who was also responsible for the analysis of Taring Padi in Documenta Fifteen) and Meron Mendel (a former IDF soldier), were invited to analyse Ortiz’s work without consulting the artist. They wrote a contextualisation of their own findings that included a list of pages, singled out for their relation to Palestinian resistance. Events and talks were organised about the topic of anti-semitism in which Ortiz’s works were discussed without her inclusion or presence. This event serves to remind us that the German repression against anti-Zionist voices was entrenched long before the 7th of October and is evidence of Palestine’s singularity - the children’s book, which includes references to global struggles for emancipation all over the world is considered legitimate except for those relating to the Palestinian cause.
Without permission of the artist, the Bundeskunsthalle installed the written accusation of anti-semitism against Ortiz’s work without giving the artist a voice or rebuttal. The official German narrative was imposed through bureaucracy, mirroring the racist politics that the exhibition originally sought to counter.
