Guests

GUESTures: Awakening the Space of Precarious Knowledge by Branislava Kuburovic

2011-11-08T21:49:00.009Z

Margareta Kern's solo exhibition GUESTures is a series of carefully staged performative archival interventions, installed in its fullest and latest incarnation at the Gallery of the Student Centre in Zagreb in October 2011. The exhibition is part of the artist's long-term project GUESTs, envisioned as a 'travelling archive' which develops in a constant and complex dialogue with its audiences and with the 'subjects' of the artist's parallel historical and ethnographic research into the mass labour migration of the workers from the socialist Yugoslavia to West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Within this broader context of Kern’s research, GUESTs has always been a project dedicated above all to the marginalised histories of women migrants, whose presence in the mass waves of labour migration from the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia for temporary work abroad remains extremely poorly documented, although women formed large sections of the Yugoslav ‘gastarbeiters’, ‘gastarbajteri’ in a local spelling accompanied by a measure of condescension, or simply guest-workers, as the original German term translates. What remains the most significant underlying theme of the GUESTs project is this hidden history that shows how the untranslatable notion (in the masculine form) of ‘gastarbaiter’ in fact related also to a large number of young women who, most often entirely alone, barely more than eighteen or nineteen years old, and after undergoing extensive health-checks organised by German medical teams with an aim of recruiting only entirely healthy workers, left the socialist Yugoslavia for temporary work in the most developed countries of the Western Europe. Kern, whose grandparents were part of this wave of migration, follows this complex personal and social history through thorough archival research, and through a series of interviews, conducted initially with her grandmother, who today lives in Slavonski Brod in Croatia, and later with some fifteen women with whom the artist has been meeting over the last several years in Berlin, the city that has always been one of the centres of immigration in Germany and where the majority of these former ‘temporary’ emigrants still live.

As with the artist’s earlier projects, the link between the anthropological and the personal is key in the work. Kern creates an alternative archive of intimate life narratives, of the histories of women whose stories and whose visibility, as she would soon find out, ‘in the existing archives (both in Germany and the former Yugoslavia) were minimal or did not exist at all’. By documenting these invisible histories through the recollections of the women, recorded after almost forty years of them living in Germany, the artist has at the same time followed the history of her own family, as well as her personal story, the story of a new generation that left the by then already former Yugoslavia in the course of the wars of the 1990s:

Recognising my state of ‘temporariness’ and continuous planning (even if only subconsciously) of departure, I also recognised a similar state in which my grandparents spent twenty-two years of living and working in the West Germany. They left Yugoslavia in the late sixties as temporary ‘guest workers’ for “two years until we’d build a house, and then until we’d help your mother with the wedding, and then constantly there was a need for something else, a new car, carrying things to-and-fro, and so two years turned into twenty-two.”

The way in which these various thematic layers are linked in the project is far from obvious. The artist’s process of ‘awakening the archival material’ does not seem to hold any pretentions of becoming yet another, however alternative archive of (post)Yugoslav migration, evening-out what are after all some highly disparate experiences, as well as entirely personal life stories of the migrant women. Instead, in this encounter, the visitors are given an opportunity to themselves become guests on some imaginary migrant ground, perhaps made up most of all from a certain entirely novel sense of time, from an ongoing series of departures, a permanent slippage of time that nonetheless brings with it a certain sense of freedom and a possibility to live and create one’s life story outside of the dictates of prescribed identities and notions of belonging.

The central work in the exhibition in the Gallery SC is the video-installation titled GUESTures, created on the basis of the transcripts of the interviews. The work is an artistic intervention inspired by the principles of the verbatim plays and the political potential of this particular form of theatre. Recorded in the artist’s studio in London, GUESTures transposes the ‘authentic’ interviews into the frame of fiction, albeit through a highly faithful interpretation of the original texts in the work of the actress Adna Sablyich. The resulting work is both visually subtle and understated in terms of the acting. It both follows and subverts the impulse of the verbatim style to achieve a certain ‘ideal’ authenticity of expression through the use of documentary material. Kern does not hide the artificiality of the context she creates for these women’s stories and instead includes the process of creating the ‘fictional’ framework into her video installation, which consists of two equally sized rectangular screens on which we can simultaneously follow two complexly linked contents. One of the screens shows publicly very rarely seen and thus highly valuable archival material from German telecommunications factories in which these women most commonly worked, introducing the historical background of the interviews but also – through being edited together with the material shot in the artist’s studio as the documentation of her creating the frame of the other parallel screen – reminding us that there exists no such thing as an ‘objective view’ in the process of filming and editing, that we are always observing an image created from a highly particular angle and with a highly particular purpose. In the case of these documents, and from this temporal distance, the promotional and political purpose of this archival material is all too obvious. The parallel screen consists of a series of film portraits, entirely focused on the stories of the interviewed women; visually, the frame rests fully on the actress, who is seated on a simple, geometrically shaped white sofa, framed by a minimal ‘backdrop’ of a white wall and a black board on which each of the women is always represented by her name and a simple chalk drawing of an object which is both a simple marker and a subjective symbol of her specific character, recognised in the course of the time in which these interview slowly took shape.

Still from GUESTures | GOSTIkulacije, HD video, 33 minutes, 2011

The pared down nature of the expression of GUESTures is particularly effective in the work of the actress Adna Sablyich. Limited both by the concept of the verbatim theatre and by the bareness of the video frame, Sablych has developed the variety of her ‘roles’ by the most minimal acting means. Apart from the changing colours and forms of her work uniform/costume, the different women’s characters are revealed in the most discreet shifts in the actress’s body language, nuanced differences of her hand gestures, the manner in which she sits, small changes of her facial expressions, and the accents which are as faithful as possible to the manner of speech of the women who have been interviewed. The desired effect of the Brechtian ‘distancing’ of the narrative is additionally achieved through occasional subtle interventions by the artist herself, from significant pauses in the interpretation of the text, to the sudden inclusion of the artist’s voice replicating parts of the interview, now repeated in the context of a fictional redoing of the conversations but also in the very real space of the artist’s working space, of her art studio.

Still from GUESTures | GOSTIkulacije, HD video, 33 minutes, 2011

This constant switching between different spaces and temporalities in GUESTures is not accidental. It reflects the artist’s questioning of the notions of the document and of memory, and of the nature of art and politics the work is able to activate. Kern does not look for answers to what is above all a temporal and experiential paradox of the act of recollection by somehow striving to resolve the sheer variety of content in her work, which is a mixture of public and private documents, and of documentary and staged material. Neither does she make any attempt to give this variety of material in her exhibition any easily recognisable common denominator in its final form. GUESTures are by their very structure an open space of investigation that materialises what are often irresolvable versions of reality without necessarily attempting to offer a solution. The effect of the thus conceived ‘distancing’ of the very format of the exhibition emphasises the fragility of knowledge in which the relationship between document, memory and testimony is never a given. The political potential of the work is thus always a matter of the present moment in time in which we are all active participants in a dialogue with the material and thus at least partially responsible for possible interpretations of history.

Still from GUESTures | GOSTIkulacije, HD video, 33 minutes, 2011

GUESTures materialise this concept above in their interaction with us, their visitors and temporary archivists, and only to the degree to which each one of us is ready to engage with the material they consist of, that is often activated through a physical gesture, however small, we have to make in order to access the material. This brings the project closer to the performativity of the notion of the archive itself, which, as Jacques Derrida reminds us in his book Archive Fever, is ‘at once the commencement and the commandment’,[i] both a beginning and an order, both a place in which memory begins, and a patriarchal institution of memory in which some memories will be weaved into the fabric of the historical narrative, and others not. By activating the performative aspect of the archive, the artist also reminds us that the historical selectiveness is not simply the doing of some invisible authority outside our reach, but begins and ends with each one of us, with our individual gestures of acceptance and activating, or of refusal and forgetting, of some very simple human experiences that often change official histories and that are thus so often conveniently forgotten.

This questioning of the notions of memory and forgetting in the project is significant also in the context of the perhaps most painful problem people face in emigration, a feeling of being under a permanent threat of loss, from the simplest but often dramatic existential losses to the loss of their mother tongue, their country of origin, or simply their sense of identity in the new society in which they live and work. Hamid Naficy, US-based exiled Iranian film and media theorist, warns against two equally common and dangerous strategies among the exiles themselves resulting from a hastened desire to circumvent these threats.[ii] Under the pressure of the dominant population, and in an effort to avoid loss at all cost, immigrants reach for either a fetishisation of their past which – while as complex as their present – is from the temporal and spatial distance of exile experienced as a space of protected and simple belonging and identity; or for an ideal mimesis, for ‘fitting’ perfectly into their new environment. Naficy questions both of these mimetic gestures, both the holding on to a fixed notion of identity through the framework of a frozen image of the past, through a certain imitation of one’s ‘original’ self, and the apparent letting go of that past through an insistence on blending with the new environment, on shaping oneself in the image of the ‘host’. GUESTures help us recognise the extent to which both these strategies are based on the premise of identity understood as an act of adequation, as an ‘I’ which is always identical to itself, as a being without a ‘reminder’. By structuring its interpretation of memory and identity in the form of a visual and textual dialogue, by mixing historical documents with very personal recollections and stories, and by playfully experimenting with the different possibilities of the archival recording of the past, and its aesthetic and political activating in the present moment, the project opens the space of identity as simultaneous and multilayered, as a space in which the difference of the immigrants may be seen not as a problem to be resolved but as an occasion for developing a complex awareness about difference. It is only by accepting that there can be no identity without difference, and abandoning the idea of society and culture defined through the exclusion of the other as a precondition for a comfortable life inside the borders of a protected identity, that these invisible experiences can become part of our shared history.

Together with the invisible migration of women, which is the most significant forgotten experience the GUESTures project brings back into the public space of memory, there will also remain in the project the notion of the guest, with its double meaning of someone to whom utmost trust and respect is granted through the act of inviting them into one’s home, but also someone who is always already about to leave, who does not belong, or expects to ever become part of that most intimate space we consider inalienably our own. The twofold nature of the notion of a guest is reflected in the stories of these women, with all of the contradictions and double standards entailed in any attempt to curtail an economic programme of mass migration,[iii] through limitations of the rights and length of residence permits of those whose work is indispensible but whose presence in one’s culture and society is avoided at all costs, or at least limited to its very minimum. The temporal distance of this particular history should not deceive us, for what is at stake here is not an already somewhat anachronistic principle of national technocrats from the era of the so-called high modernism, but a very current political strategy. Just several months ago, British Immigration Minister Damian Green has stated that: ‘[w]e want the brightest and best workers to come to the UK, make a strong contribution to our economy while they are here, and then return home’.[iv]

What this political statement leaves out entirely deliberately is exactly the human and political context of migration which Kern’s artistic intervention brings back into public discourse. What is omitted in that seemingly straightforward statement is the political arrogance of an elite convinced that their only apparently clear economic calculation can justify gross disregard of the complexities of relations between work and migration, and of the inevitability of not just sharing the space of work, but sharing the entire complexity of the social and the political space with the migrants. GUESTures are, as the artists says, both ‘a portrait and an encouragement to experiment with the questions of voice and representation, of veracity, of authenticity, of document and of fiction’ in which these nameless and faceless ‘brightest and best workers’ become some entirely specific people whose life stories can easily becomes stories of each and every one of us. The aesthetic space also allows the artist to open up the question of class stereotyping of the ‘gastarbeiter’, pointing to the political background of the decisions through which a growing percentage of the global population is being kept in a long-term, and increasingly a permanent state of non-belonging, of an existence between two sovereign countries which both profit from keeping such large numbers of their ‘brightest and best workers’ constrained in the space of border identities, in the border spaces where the obligations of the state have always been minimal and the potential profits enormous.

The ethics of wit(h)nessing, through which theorist Bracha Ettinger emphasises the multilayered and intertwined nature of the notions of experience, community, witnessing and memory, is one possible reading of the specificity of the aesthetic and ethical space opened up by GUESTures as an active political space. Wit(h)nessing is a po/etic boundary concept through which Ettinger strengthens the political potential of such border identities, where community is an affective notion which does not belong to the past only but is always created anew in the present moment, in which memory becomes possible only inasmuch as it is open to being affected by others, so that each, however incompatible experience can become part of a shared space of memory. This is the radical potential of art as an archive and a reminder of all that is unsaid and unheard in the discourse of history. By opening the potential for wit(h)nessing, the aesthetic space enables us to always question the dominant historiography and history anew, shifting it from the space of conflict into an affected space of compassion and of precarious knowledge.

[i] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 1.

[ii] Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

[iii] Kaja Shonick speaks of a bilateral agreement between socialist Yugoslavia and Western Germany about organised temporary migration of over 500 000 Yugoslav workers between 1968 and 1973. See: Kaja Shonick, ‘Politics, Culture, and Economics: Reassessing the West German Guest Worker Agreement with Yugoslavia’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2009, 44(4): 719–736 (719).

[iv] See: Tamson Pietsch, ‘Don’t let immigration caps leave academics out in the cold’, sreda 22.06.2011, Guardian Professional:

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/jun/22/immigration-caps-academics-professionals> (last accessed 08.10.2011).

Branislava Kuburović, born in Prijepolje, Serbia, lives and works between Prague and London. She holds a PhD from the Department of Theatre and Performance at the University of Roehampton in London with the thesis ‘Performance of Wit(h)nessing: Trauma and Affect in Contemporary Live Art’. Her research has been presented at a number of international conferences, it has been published in the journals parallax and Performance Research, and will be part of two forthcoming edited books: Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Performance, published by Palgrave Macmillan, and Theater und Subjektkonstitution/Theatre and the Making of Subjects, published by Transcript, Bielefeld (2012).

Installation Photographs: Marcus Kern, 2011

GUESTure/GOSTIkulacija, performance lecture and discussion with curator Livia Paldi, Budapest

2011-05-13T14:08:00.004+01:00

Performance lecture: GOSTIkulacija/GUESTure by Margareta Kern followed by interview / talk ‘Archives as Memory Work’ with curator Lívia Páldi

Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem, Budapest, Tuesday 3rd May, 6 - 7.30pm.

Recently, I presented a performance lecture titled GUESTure, at the Academy of Art, in Budapest, through which I brought together a range of material I have collected to date including testimonies of the guestworker women I interviewed (in 2009 and 2011), photographs from their family albums from the 1970's, and short stories which I have written based on this material and my research, to explore the boundary between testimonial, memory and interpretation and to question ways in which to activate images, memories and archives for purposes of challenging dominant historiographies.

Performance was followed by a conversation with curator at Budapest Kunsthalle Livia Paldi titled 'Memory as Archive Work'. Livia and myself will be shaping this conversation into text in the coming months with the aim of publishing it during the first solo showing of the entire series of works in Zagreb, at SC Gallery in October 2011 - the exhibition will then tour to Berlin and UK.

In 2010, I exhibited the ongoing archive-installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Kunsthalle Budapest, as part of an exhibition ‘Over the Counter: The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art’. For more images of that installation please click here:

http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com/2010/10/guests-installation-at-museum-of.html

fragments of inspiration: John Gianvito

2011-04-15T13:19:00.005+01:00

An inspiring interview with John Gianvito by Michael Sicinski.

Berlin: spring news!

2011-04-01T13:30:00.004+01:00

Very pleased to announce that the project Guests has received support from the Arts Council England for the final phase of the work. More updates soon! Viele Grüsse aus Berlin!

'Guests' installation and collective reading at the group exhibition Exposures/Where Everything is Yet to Happen, Banja Luka, Nov 2010

2011-02-22T15:56:00.027Z

Installation 'Guests/Gosti' together with a collective reading/performance titled 'Guesture/Gostikulacija', took place as part of a group exhibition Exposures, the second chapter of the long-term, collaborative project Where Everything Is Yet to Happen. The entire project was curated by Antonia Majaca and Ivana Bago, curators of Miroslav Kraljevic gallery in Zagreb, and took place in Banja Luka, Mostar and Sarajevo in the form of an exhibition, a set of seminars, workshops, and new productions. For further information about the project Where Everything is Yet to Happen (WEIYTH) and SpaPort Biennial 2009/10, please click here.

The exhibition in Banja Luka, was installed within ex-offices of a telecommunications factory 'Cajavec', which was unfortunately facing an end to its nearly 40 years of production. My late uncle Jovo worked for Cajavec as an engineer his whole working life, so it was particularly sad seeing this company, which was a major employer during socialist Yugoslavia, crumble. At the same time, (and there is always something uncomfortable in admitting the beauty of such places) dusty corridors and musty offices with the 70's furniture certainly provided a poignant setting for the work.

During the exhibition I staged a collective reading of the material from the installation/archive, within the installation space, and being with a small group of people, created a sense of intimacy in which personal stories could be re-performed. Each person from the audience took turn in reading sections of a text - excerpts from interviews with 'guestworkers' - adding their own voice to it.

One of the women I met at the women's club in the Serbian centre, in Berlin, Zora, was on holiday in Banja Luka at the time, came for the talk, and spoke about her own experience of moving to Germany as a Gastarbeiter, and living and working there now for forty years. It was quite amazing to have her there, and a bit of a surprise - even though I told Zora about the exhibition when I was in Berlin, I didn't know that she will come to the talk. Having her there as part of the event, enabled a spontaneous dialogue and cross-generational exchange that in my experience, very rarely happens. It has left me wondering if such an event could be more directed, and even staged, and if so, how to create such atmosphere in which an exchange of experience and dialogue could take place... ?

...

While going through the folders that were left in the cupboards (in the space where I was setting up my work), I discovered small photographs that showed chemical reactions in the machines that were used in the Cajevac factory. The catalogue was in German, probably the machines used for producing televisions sets in Cajevac factory were the same as those that 'guestworker' women used in factories in Berlin. I was struck by how beautiful these images are, very abstract in shapes, and colour, almost like Malevich paintings and yet they were purely chemical tests - they revive and redraw links between photography, chemistry, machinery and the human, affective, and transcendent space, something I always thought was intruiging in photography...

...

While the exhibition was on, Angela Merkel gave her troubling speech about the failure of multiculturalism, specifically refering to this generation of guest workers saying: "At the start of the 60s we invited the guest-workers to Germany. We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn't stay, that one day they'd go home. That isn't what happened. And of course the tendency was to say: let's be 'multikulti' and live next to each other and enjoy being together, [but] this concept has failed, failed utterly."

Hearing her speech, and wondering if she suffered from a stroke of amnesia, highlighted to me even more how important it is that the personal stories of this generation of migrants do enter the public domain, to undermine this xenophobic and ultimately reductive reading of history that is taking hold not only in Germany, but in the UK, and across Europe. Though of course questions of critical context to the images and texts do remain...

And...was pleased to see this insightful article by Gary Younge on German's struggles with race: Germans still struggling to resolve issues of race

...

THE CATALOGUE of the show will be published shortly, please email me if you would like a copy info[at]margaretakern[dot]com

TO SEE IMAGES OF INSTALLATION FROM OTHER EXHIBITIONS in 2011, PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW:

- BERLIN

- BUDAPEST

- BUCHAREST (coming soon! including a dialogue with photographer and writer Anthony Luvera...)

Guests - Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest

2010-10-14T13:18:00.006+01:00

Over the Counter: The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art
18 June 2010 - 19 September 2010
Curators: Eszter Lázár and Zsolt Petrányi
Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest

The exhibition called Over the Counter has been inspired by the economic illusions, utopias, creativity and frustration that Central Europe has been home to recently, and is made relevant by the global economic crisis which began in 2008, and which can be looked upon as a negative critique of the process of adopting the capitalist order. Continue reading here.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue which was launched during the conference with the same title, further information can be found here.

Artists: Matei Bejenaru, Bukta Imre, Mircea Cantor, Olga Chernysheva, Anetta Chisa, & Lucia Tkácová, Erhardt Miklós, Andreas Fogarasi, Kristina Inciuraité, Interorient, Keserue Zsolt, Margareta Kern, Johanna Kandl, Yuri Leiderman, Kristina Leko, Anna Molska, Deimantas Narkevicius, Nemes Csaba, Lucia Nimcova, Uriel Orlow, Dan Perjovschi, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, R.E.P., Katerina Sedá, Société Réaliste, Mladen Stilinovic, Lukasz Skapski, Kamen Stojanov, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Clemens von Wedemeyer.

"Guests" installation at Journeys with No Return exhibition, Kurt-Kurt Gallery, Berlin, June 2010

2010-07-06T11:17:00.007+01:00

photographs by Marcus Kern.

Journeys with No Return
Kurt-Kurt Gallery, BERLIN
11 – 20 JUNE 2010
Exhibition Preview: Fri 11 June, 2010, 7pm
Talk 2-3pm Sat 12th June: Curators Alice Sharp and Peter Cross, with the exhibition artists Melanie Manchot and Margareta Kern.
Special opening 8-11pm 17th June: Inselgluck/Kulturtage

The Berlin exhibition of Journeys with No Return is planned to open at Kurt-Kurt and is organized in association with the Kunstverein Tiergarten, concurrently with the 6th Berlin Biennale which opens on 10th June 2010 and the weekend of the Moabiter Kulkurtage, 17-20 June.The exhibition will feature 12 artists: KIRAN KAUR BRAR / ERGIN CAVUSOGLU / ADAM CHODZKO / JÜRGEN EISENACHER / MARGARETA KERN / MELANIE MANCHOT / OLAF NICOLAI / DENIZHAN OZER / ZINEB SEDIRA / MAYA SCHWEIZER / NASAN TUR / CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER

www.kurt-kurt.de
http://www.journeyswithnoreturn.com/content/exhibitions/berlin.html

Project update, and the talk at the Tate Britain

2010-02-17T15:46:00.017Z

Preparing the talk for the 28th State symposia at the Tate Britain has been an extremely useful process, which has enabled me to focus and get to the core(s) of the project and sieve out questions which are important for me and my practice. It brought together the material from the residency in Berlin, consisting mostly of the photographs from the albums of the 'guest worker' women who arrived to West Berlin between 1968 and 1973, from Yugoslavia, and my photographs of Berlin (showing mostly memorial places, where the past and the present intersect), with my own personal documents of migration to UK - asylum application, identification card, and visas. I also included photographs from my grandparents' album, who migrated to Germany as ‘guest workers’, and whose life story has largely inspired this whole project.

Through the photographs and documents, I wanted to bring out a narrative which emerged for me having immersed myself deeply into the research and the life stories of the 'guest worker' women. I noticed a great tension in their stories, and that is a tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected (or rather ruled) by the ever-changing needs of the capitalist labour market. And that tension is still unresolved, amongst this particular generation of labour migrants, even after 40 years of living in Germany – for example most of them do not have German passport (though are allowed to stay indefinitely) and are now facing retirement and the same question which has haunted them since getting a year long visa and work permit in 1968: will they be going home? (Many have build houses 'back home', fully equiped with the best furniture, often these homes sit empty waiting for the final return...)

I am reminded here of Stuart Hall's quote: The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: ‘Why are you here?’ and ‘When are you going back home?’ No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one way trip. There is no home to go back to. There never was. (Hall 1987:44)

I also raised questions which have become more pertinent to me as an artist, who is working more and more in ways which draw on ethnographic and anthropological methods and processes. These processes, include going into the communities of people whom I don’t know, in order to photograph or film, quite often being privy to personal information about their lives, which call for questioning the ethical dilemmas involved in this process of art-making. (For an insightful essay on the ethics of artist as ethnographer see An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer by Anthony Downey, in the recent Third Text issue 23: 5, 593 — 603).

Another question, which intrigued me and I raised at the end of the talk, is that of Saskia Sassen’s proposition of the border as a capitalist strategy. She writes in her book ‘Women, Men and the International Division of Labor’ that "the enforcement of national borders contributes to the peripheralization of a part of the world and the designation of its workers as a labor reserve. Border enforcement emerges as a mechanism facilitating the extraction of surplus value by assigning a status of formal or informal powerlessness to foreign workers generally and criminality to illegal immigrants (Petras, 1980)."
What I found interesting about this proposition (which she outlines in 1984!) is that border is a strategy, and migration is not some out of control force, as it is often portrayed in the media, but highly regulated place, servicing the needs of the market.

Finally I wanted to vocalise more, the relationship between history and storytelling [hi(story)], memory-archive-photography, and artists’ own positioning within. (yes, my talk was 20 minutes, these were questions at the end to open up the debate :) This complex and fascinating relationship, is/will be the main framework for the continuing of the Berlin strand of the 'guest worker' project. Treading gently between these two polarities of being an intruder and at the same time a recorder of (hi)stories, I aim to continue collecting photographs from the personal albums of ‘guest workers’, with the intention to build a form of an alternative archive, offering a multiple and intimate readings of history. Alongside personal family album photographs, I have begun writing short 'fictional' stories, based on the interviews with the ‘guest workers’, my grandparents, and my own memories of growing up in a ‘guest worker’ household in Yugoslavia, in the 70s and 80s. It seems to me that I am inching towards a 'book' of some sort, let's see where this will all take me, and I will bravely publish here later, an excerpt from a short 'fictional' text I wrote... I am also looking into collaborating with other writers whose interests intersect with art/photography and text...

The videos of the whole symposia will be available shortly, on http://borderlineproject.org.uk/

From March until June 2o10, I will have a chance to explore further some of the questions I raised above by being an artist-in-residence, at the University of Bath's department of Social Science and the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts. The overarching framework/theme for the residency is labour and I will be engaging with the staff and students across the University. In this process of engagement, I am very keen to open up the performative aspect of my photographic practice (which has drawn on documentary portrature) and look at the dynamics of collaboration and participation. In order to scrutinise that process, I will be looking at ways in which sociologists deal with the double-bind of research-representation. Throughout this process I will be writing a Blog, and also posting documentation/notes/images in the gallery space which will serve as a workshop-production space. To follow the GUEST residency please see a-n Blog: http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/597679

Tate Britain Symposia - 28th Sate: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety

2009-10-01T12:17:00.011+01:00

I will be taking part in the forthcoming symposium at the Tate Britain.

28th State: European Borders in an Age of Anxiety
Tate Britain, Saturday 24 October 2009, 10.00–18.00

This symposium questions how artists and curators in Europe are currently engaging with ideas around borders, nationhood, social organisation and collaboration. What is role of art within this context, particularly in relation to the current state of European politics and increasing social unease within many rapidly changing populations? Invited international speakers include Shaheen Merali, Elvira Dyangani, and Margareta Kern.
Part of Borderline project, curated by Sonya Dyer.
Supported by Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art and Design and City Inn Westminster

image: Guestworkers at AEG Telefunken, c 1973.
From the personal album of the 'guestworker' who wished to remain anonymous, 2009

Margareta Kern: On being a guest (or when histories become stories and stories histories)

As part of my recent art residency in Berlin, I researched an organised mass labour migration from the socialist Yugoslavia to the capitalist West Germany, which took place in the late 1960s. The labour migrants were called ‘Gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’, alluding to their temporary stay. Many of these temporary workers never returned home. Through personal interviews with those who stayed in Berlin, and research into the specific historical and political contexts of the time, a narrative began to emerge, filled with tension between a yearning for home, an aspiration for material and social wellbeing and precarious immigration laws and policies, all connected by the ever-changing needs of the labour market. As well as drawing out this tension through images and narration, I also intend to explore the position of artist in re-creating and re-covering (hi)stories and memories (and in turn the relationship of those to contemporary collective historical and political narratives and myths).

Gastarbajteri nazaj doma - Migrant workers back home

2009-09-01T10:20:00.004+01:00

The documentary film “Gastarbajteri nazaj doma” (Migrant workers back home) is a poetic portrait of three former migrant workers who left Yugoslavia in the seventies to try their luck in Germany. The economic boom of post-war Europe produced an increased demand of labour. Hence so called ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest workers), mostly from Yugoslavia and Turkey, were invited to work in the car industry and custodial services. Whereas Germany became a new home for some of them, the protagonists of the film decided to return to their home country. However, being back home they had to realise that a lot of things had changed: not only people have changed, but also the political system – a new state was born. During insightful interviews, Malika, Jože and Marija speak about their experiences of leaving their families, living in a foreign country and returning home. A film by Stefan Kreuzer, Nino Leitner and Natasa Siencnik Produced by luksuz produkcija / Krsko, Slovenia (Youth in Action Workshop 2007).
Text from the website http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2736399417624166315#

The film was made during the 10 day workshop, organised by Luksuz production,who has been working on an international youth exchange programme involving film workshops at Trška gora in the vicinity of Krško since 2002. The films created at the workshop usually deal with current social themes (youth participation, cultural diversity, European identity, etc) and are available on DVD for festival distribution and also on the Internet. Some of these films have received international awards. In 2007 a 10-day workshop hosted 40 participants working on documentary films. Researches on cultural diversity were made in various countries and presented in the form of short films. Discussions and screenings were followed by work on documentaries under the tutorship of well-known film maker Želimir Žilnik.
http://www.drustvo-dzmp.si/festival/

ZELIMIR ZILNIK himself made a very powerful short film in 1975 called “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” where using a very simple setting of a tenement – mostly foreigners – come in as though walking down an outdoor staircase and introduce themselves and their life situations to the viewers.
"With this minimal setting, Z¡ilnik strips the administrative term "inventory," taking stock or a census, of its numerical and bureaucratic meaning. Although the position of the camera is fixed, as in a police situation, and each person identifies themselves by name, it is not the number of people that counts; indeed the line of people seems to be endless. This camera situation guarantees their individuality, because each person takes stock of their own situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. They decide for themselves how long they want to speak or what they want to say in front of the camera, also exhibiting embarrassment or pleasure in posing before the camera. All of them are performers of their own role. Z¡ilnik provides them with the framework they need for it.
Zilnik shot this short film in 1975 in Munich, which is only relevant to the extent that Metzstraße is in Germany. He lived in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1973–76, worked as a director and pursued the same goal with his films here as in Yugoslavia, (which he left after being banned from working) tracking abuses and becoming actively involved in discussions as a filmmaker. One of his films was then censored in the FRG as well. “Inventur – Metzstraße 11” is a film that, together with “Unter Denkmalschutz” (1975) paradigmatically shows property speculation in many large German cities. Formerly upper middle class residential areas are systematically turned into slums by being over-populated with guest worker families that usually pay highly inflated rents. Once the objects have been run down in this way, they can be sold – once the tenants have been given notice – as profitable office and condominium palaces."
Text from the website of a very interesting project PROJEKT MIGRATION

A seventh woman?

2009-05-24T13:31:00.002+01:00

Back to wonderful John Berger’s book ‘A seventh man’, its title stemming from a data that in 1973, in Germany and Britain every seventh manual worker was an immigrant. If any of you reading this can work out contemporary equivalent of women or men worker I’d be very grateful. I’ll try and gather the data too.

I've found this bit from Berger’s text inspiring:

“A friend came to see me in a dream. From far away. And I asked in the dream: ’Did you come by photograph or train’. All photographs are a form of transport and an expression of absence.”

With his words in mind I am looking at a photograph of one of the 'guest worker' women I interviewed and her friend, taken outside the dorm in Potsdamer Strasse, where they lived in the early 70’s (image above). Dorms were provided by their employers, a modest accommodation they shared with other women, sometimes up to seven women to a room (number seven again). They are leaning on the car, a beautiful Volkswagen Beatle, and I am trying to add colour in my mind to the black and white photograph. The Beatle looks white (or could it be yellow?) and new and shiny. Their dress could be green/blue/orange combination (on the left) and yellow (or white?) and dark blue on the right; the material was probably polyester or acrylic. I can imagine it making static electricity with each movement, so when they touched the car they got a small snap, a tiny bite to the top of their fingertips. I hear them laughing and then leaning on the car, hoping the owner won’t come too soon. I don’t imagine it to be their car. They would have arrived recently to West Berlin, and were saving all their money to send home. They probably felt a tinge of guilt for buying the beautiful dresses, maybe spending their second salary on it. The first one was sent home, with a message that they are fine, treated well, and that they are earning German marks now, their journey and separation from home justified.

Metaphorically, they arrived in this Beatle. Stories of wealth and new opportunities have certainly influenced and still have an impact on decisions to pack ones bag and set on a journey. They traveled in the back of the car, dreaming of a moment when they will be behind the steering wheel. And they arrived not only in 1970 but again in 2009, they came in the timeless Beatle into my own life, and into my own story of migration and travel. And now I see them looking at me, and images which are neither theirs nor mine are showing themselves to me. In this translation between their wor(l)ds and mine, a (hi)story is emerging and their absence from all these years is demanding presence. They are here, they have arrived.

A seventh man

2009-05-13T13:50:00.013+01:00

A good friend of mine Aidan Jolly (check out his work at Virtual Migrants) told me recently about a book by John Berger called ‘A Seventh Man’ - a book of images and text about the experience of Migrant workers in Europe. It’s a great book, combining photographs with words, text being a combination of factual data, Berger’s Marxist take on it, and his poetic descriptions of the migrant worker coming from Turkey, Portugal, Yugoslavia... to the cities of Western Europe . I’m not finished with reading it, but am finding that it is opening me up in thinking of ways to talk/represent the complexity of the issue such as the ‘guest workers’ or to use a more contemporary label ‘labour migrants’. Berger says in his introduction that this book is limited to the experience of male migrant worker, and to write of the female migrant workers' experience would require a whole book in itself. In 1975 he hoped it will be done.

In 2000 in the world there were 175 million migrants, out of whom 85.1 million are women. In 2002 the overall number of women migrants in Europe was 51% , so a significant number of women are migrating, and participating in the labour market of the receiving countries (data based on selected United Nations data, statistics of the outflow and inflow states and EU statistics, from Slany, Kristina. 2008. ‘Female migration from Central-Eastern Europe: demographic and sociological aspects’ In: Migration and mobility in an enlarged Europe: a gender perspective). ‘In the migration literature, migrant women and their experiences often remain invisible and get subsumed under those of men’, write Erdem and Mattes (Erdem, Esra and Mattes, Monika. 2003. ‘Gendered Policies – Gendered Patterns: Female Labour Migration from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s’. In: European Encounters: Migrants, migration and European societies since 1945) and this is echoed by Morokvašić who says that ‘mobility and migration have a specific significance for women due to being historically associated with immobility and passivity, regarded as dependents rather than migrants in their own right, their migration often tied to migration of men’ (Morokvašić, Mirjana. 2007. ‘Migration, Gender, Empowerment’. In: Gender Orders Unbound. Globalisation, Restructuring and Reciprocity. Also see Morokvasic: 'Settled in mobility': engendering post-wall migration in Europe ').

In 1973 in West Germany women made up 31.9 percent of the entire guest worker population with the Yugoslav women as the largest group amongst the female guest workers (Erdem and Mattes 2003; Dobrivojević, Ivana. 2007. ‘In Quest for Welfare: The Labour Migration of Yugoslav Citizens).

I will continue to expand on the relationship of gender to migration, as I am curious to unfold its complexity and to see what it means for the migrant women and men today. Even though my focus is on the migrant women, I am looking at gendered conceptions of both women and men, and also gendered policies of the receiving countries and their home countries, which often shape and affect their migrations and positions within societal and family structures. And even though I am researching the period of the late 60’s, its echoes are still present today and these echoes are growing louder with each headline speaking about the effects of globalised recession (it seems that finally word globalisation is loosing its aura of positivity) and the ‘collapse’ of capitalism.

zagreb - berlin 1968 / berlin - london 2009

2009-04-16T14:54:00.006+01:00

My time as a guest artist and (in a way) a guest worker in Berlin drew close too quickly. As it is often the case, things start unraveling as the time is getting tighter, perhaps this happens because of the knowledge that time is running out. And so it was that my last week of residency was filled with many meetings and interviews, which I have only now begun to process. As I listen over the recordings of interviews in my studio in London, I feel a great urge to turn these personal stories into histories and histories into stories…

I met Ana just a few days before my impending trip back to London, and she showed me a note she kept all these years: it was from the bureau of employment letting her know that she will travel (to Berlin) on the 12th July 1968, and to be in front of JAT’s building in Zagreb (Yugoslav Airline Company/Jugoslavenski Avio Transport) at 3pm.

As I process the material gathered in Berlin and further work on the project I will continue writing and posting in this transitional blogospheric space where thoughts move from the personal to the public. In this space, I hope to develop the blog as a resource, a reflection space and a form of an archive. And in the process of piecing the personal stories with the historical, political and social narratives of the time, I hope in some way to capture the place and the time, so that it can tell its stories...

personal archive...

2009-03-26T13:49:00.004Z

The photographs above are from the personal album of Gordana, who kindly lent me her album and allowed me to use her photographs. Gordana worked for Telefunken for 12 years, and lived in different Wohnheims/Dorms since arriving to Berlin in October 1968.

Piecing (hi)stories...

2009-03-22T21:47:00.006Z

Time is flying by too quickly, and capturing the past moments, stories, numerous conversations already seems like trying to catch a fish with bare hands: the past is slippery, memory unreliable, and yet what I am trying to catch is the very thing of the past, and memory.
Time: 1968 – 1973. Place: Berlin.
At the same time, I am surprised by the details of some of the things I’m being told by the women who came as ‘guestworkers’ from Yugoslavia.

On the life in the dorms, to which they were assigned upon their arrival in Berlin they said: “There was a woman selling pots and pans right outside our Haim” (short for German Whonheim meaning the dorm). “The women who were more free, less restrained, they went out, and they were the ones that got married”. “The women would cut their pleated long hair, and became more city like. They would wear short skirts and dangle their legs over the window fence, while outside a group of men would gather.” “There were seven of us in a room with only a small cupboard between the bed, and a table with four chairs.” “The room cost 70 DM (Deutche Marks) and I received 500DM after the taxes, so it was quite a lot to give just for the room”. “My mother had to hide my brother as he was not allowed in the dorm, but soon after we got a flat and the whole family could live together.” “I was the youngest in the dorm, so the older women would make me drink 10 egg-liquors before I went out”.

*the only image I have so far from the guestworker dorms is this one, and the image in the below blog post, all are from the exhibition catalogue "The journey - Yugoslavian women in Berlin", 1987. Note Tito picture, and more difficult to see is the AEG Telefunken's Mister Hit gramophone.

Each company which employed ‘guestworkers’ would recruit them in their country of origin, so for example they would advertise on the local radio stations, or a word would simply spread around, that ‘the Germans were looking for workers’ and people would register. They then had to go through the medical check up and several woman said that they took the healthy and the young ones. Majority of the women I spoke to so far, had come when they were 18, 19 years old. “They checked if the palms were sweaty”, one woman said, “and we kept washing our hands so they don’t look sweaty, because this company was making watches so your hands had to be dry.” They checked information about the family, and speaking a bit of German was desirable. After the check up, the travel was arranged and the new workers traveled together, in one case one bus of men and one bus of women left the place (and these are small towns or villages, which makes me wonder what the ongoing effect of this mass migration might have been and still is…) And pretty much everybody told me that they thought they will go for one year, nobody thought they would stay very long. One year was the length of the contract and after that period they could change their jobs, or go back. If they decided to change jobs before one year expired, they had to return the travel expenses, as the companies paid for their journey to Germany. Also, the companies hired the dorms, and took the money for them from the wages. For many, living in the dorm, was a bearable solution, as they wanted to spend as little as possible, in order to save money, send money home, and as the time went by, to build a house, buy a car, and so on…the list grew, and so did the time…it flew by too fast…

*image released by AEG celebrating 75 years of the Ausbildungswesen 'on the job training', in September 1988. (Kreuzberg Museum archive)

*front cover of the publication "Heimat in der Fremde" - "Home in Exile" (my translation), October 1980, also image below from the same catalogue.(Kreuzberg Museum archive)

days in the archive...

2009-03-19T09:29:00.004Z

Leben und Sterben in Berlin...

I've been to several archive places so far, excavating as much as I can about the guestworker women from Yugoslavia, about Flottenstr., about forced labour...I have to admit getting addictied to this detective process, where one document or image opens a whole new area of enquiry. Will post my findings, and stories I've been piecing together here very soon...I've also been on the search for the women who came to Berlin in 1968 onwards, and have been weaving a whole web of connections, people who know people, and last night I struck lucky with finding a woman who came in 1969, and worked for AEG Telefunken for 22 years, and lived in Flotten strasse. more, more soon...

how did I arrive in the Flotten strasse

2009-03-13T22:22:00.015Z

I interviewed a very interesting and inspiring woman, who came to Germany in 1968 from Croatia (at the time Yugoslavia) to work for the AEG Telefunken company, a radio and television company. She planned to stay and work for only a year in order to save money for the university, but as with so many ‘guestworkers’ her year has lasted a lot longer then intended. Bosiljka worked together with other women from Yugoslavia, producing Mister Hit gramophones. In the factory she was responsible for checking the gramophone needles, which were made of the diamonds and safire. She would spend all day intently looking and checking that there are no blemishes or faults with the diamonds. She told me of a reoccurring dream she kept having at the time, which was of a huge black hill, and everything was black, except the one dot, which was the diamond.

*image above - Mister Hit, AEG Telefunken, 1971

Having learnt German rather quickly, Bosiljka went to the University to study German language and literature in Berlin, but continued working closely with the guestworkers, assisting them with translations and advice.

Bosiljka told me that when she arrived in 1968, she and many other guestworker women lived in a dorm for women, which in the Second World War was used as a forced labour camp. This building, or rather a whole complex of buildings was in the Flotten Strasse, in the area of Berlin called Reinickendorf, in the northwest Berlin. She was showing me a photograph in the catalogue of the exhibition she organised in 1987 about the ‘guestworker’ women, titled ‘Der Weg – Jugoslawische Frauen in Berlin/The Journey - Yugoslavian women in Berlin’. In the photograph taken inside the dorm (which is shown below, a scan of the image from the catalogue) a woman is lying on a bed, with the metallic rim, and she is dressed in a shiny dress. Next to her are other beds, and it looks like it could be a hospital, but it is her festive clothing that suggest it is a different place (why is she holding a book, did she just come back from a dance, or going to the dance, or meeting someone special, or maybe she took the dress from the cupboard just for the photo...?). Bosiljka tells me that the beds they slept on, were the same beds, as from the hospital, which was there right after the war, when the labour camps were closed. (Were they the same beds as in the forced labour camp?)

She said: “We were the proud daughters of the partisans who fought against the Germans in the 2nd world war, and here we were, in Germany 23 years after the war. We all felt a sense of guilt that we were going to Germany and we saw so many traces of the World War II all around us, there was not a single building which didn’t have bullet holes from the bombardment, there were many older man without parts of their body, hands, eyes, legs; there were many older woman walking on their own, with their dogs on the leash. All of this has made us a lot more grounded, and made us realise that this is not what we saw in the partisan movies (films made in the socialistic Yugoslavia after the WW2) and that there are no SS soldiers. But, in our people there still stayed a need to prove themselves, to be better then the Germans, to serve as an honor to our partisans who have died in the battle. This led to that the Yugoslav guestworkers were the most recognised, but also that they have exhausted themselves through the hard work of proving they are better then the Germans and of course better then the Turks, as they were oppressing us for 400 years" (referring to the ottoman Empire, which occupied large parts of what was Yugoslavia from the 14th – early 20th century).

*images above: scan of the photograph from the catalogue, guestworker outside the Flotten strasse dorm, 1968; image below: Flotten strasse now (I tried to piece the images to work out where in the Flotten strasse was the dorm)

In an essay by Karolina Novinscak, titled ‘From ‘Yugoslav Gastarbeiter’ to ‘Diaspora-Croats’: Policies and Attitudes toward Emigration in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Croatia’ Novinscak gives the historical and the political context within which the policies of the Yugoslav government were shaped towards the labour migration from Yugoslavia at the time. She writes that “until 1962, the ruling Communist party under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito condemned labor migration as illegal. It was a point of honour for socialist policymakers to provide work in a society self-managed by the workers. In socialism, work was seen as a moral duty and being unemployed not only as a ‘moral scandal and personal shame’ but a criminal act. In the first decade after World war II, people who left SFR Yugoslavia for economic reasons were treated like enemies of the state.” (from the book Postwar Mediterranean Migration to Western Europe. Edited by Clelia Caruso, Jenny Pleinen, Lutz Raphael, 2008, p. 125-143.– with thanks to Monika Mattes for sending me the essay)
“A reassessment of the restrictive emigration policy actually occurred after several political and economic reforms in the 1950s that got Yugoslav nonalignment, the economic self-management and industrialization off the ground.”, writes Novinscak, “In socialist Yugoslavia this was the time of big changes. At the beginning of the 1960s, SFR Yugoslavia surprised the whole world again by opening its borders to unemployed citizens and legalizing migration to western industrial capitalist countries. It was the only socialist country to join the workers’ transfer from Southern to Western Europe and until the 1973 recruitment ban, Yugoslav manpower was highly requested in the West, especially by German employers.
In 2005 people from the former Yugoslavia formed the second largest foreign population in Germany, with 963 000 persons, most of them former labour migrants from the 1950s and 1960s."

“Labor migration from the former Yugoslavia to Germany wasn’t just based on adventurous individual decisions of young and unemployed people, but mostly consisted of an organised labor-force export, which was created in order to accomplish the economic interests of both the sending and the receiving state.” (p.130)

In our interview Bosiljka spoke of the guilt that many ‘guestworkers’ felt, a sense of a betrayal of the socialist dream, a sense of duty to be exemplary workers, to be the ambassadors of their country, the representatives. The guestworkers may have left their country but were only temporarily working abroad. The official title for the ‘guestworker’ was exactly that: ‘worker who is temporarily working abroad – radnik na privremenom radu u inostranstvu’, this official word was changed in the everyday speech into ‘gastarbajter’ taken from German ‘gastarbeiter’. Novinscak quotes a speech of an official to the crowd of labour migrants, taken from the documentary film “Special Trains” by Krsto Papic, which confirms the rhetoric at the time:
“I would like to greet you on the behalf of the Institute for Employment before you leave to work abroad. We are convinced that you all know that you are leaving for a foreign country and that, over there, each of you represents our country and that, by the behaviour of each of you, people will judge our country and nation.” (p.137)

the (hi)story of the Flotten strasse (so far...)

2009-03-11T20:25:00.021Z

This is what I have discovered about Flotten Strasse so far (special Thanks to Marcus Kern who helped with a very late night Internet excavations and translations):
There were a whole series of forced labour camps built in the area around Flotten str, started 1939 and was significanty expanded in 1941 and 1942. FlottenStr 28 was specifically a forced labour for foreign prisoners as opposed to national prisoners. Because the factory produced aircraft gear, the Germans tried to protect it, which is probably why some buildings have survived the allied bombing.

Flottenstr. 28 is refered in the book 'Des Ort, Des Terrors' as a "Women-sattelite-camp".
1944: 800 Hungarian female Jews and a few Polish women. The Hungarian Jews were transported there from Auschwitz. The number of inmates stayed constant at around 800 until Feb 1945. In March 1945 there were less, only 750 women, then just before the camp was dissolved, there were 743 women registered. Argus Motorenwerke was owned until 1938 by Dr. Moritz Straus, one of the most highly regarded airospace industrials. Moritz Straus was Jewish. In 1938, the German government disowned him and Moritz Straus fled to the US.
The money was given by the Deutsche Bank to fund the Argus Motorenwerke company and the company was run by CEO Heinrich Koppenberg until 1945.

It also describes the camp: one could see into the camp when travelling with the S-Bahn between Alt-Reinikendorf/Shoenholz and Wilhlmsruh/Schoenholz. Around the camp was a double fence with white insulators. The fence was electric.
The women were guarded by female secret service. The SS women suppressed any conversation between prisoners. The prisoner heads were shaven and they wore concentration camp clothing and thin wooden flipflops. The women had to do physical work for 12 hours a day, were visibly malnourished and were beaten on every occasion. They were not allowed to protect themselves against the cold. They only wore thin clothing.
If they were found wearing other bits of cloth against the cold they were beaten repeatedly. On more then one occasion women died as a result of this. The records show that 15 women died there. Their bodies were stored in the coal cellar. The women there were aged between 20 and 43.
This camp was dissolved on 18/19 April 1945 by Germans. 741 inmates were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was then liberated by the Russian and Polish troops on 21 April 1945. Many if not all of the 741 women were freed then. The head Nazi at the Flottenstr. camp was Andreas Vollenbruch who was investigated from 1960 onwards. The case was handed to a higher instance in 1969. He died in 1972 before the case concluded.

There is no memorial for the "Women-sattelite-camp" Flottenstr. 28.

There were 24 satellite camps in Berlin of Sachcenhausen concentration camp from 1943-1945.

We then discovered something else: 28-42 Flotten strasse was a dorm/centre for the asylum seekers, which were ‘evicted’ in 1981. The German equivalent of the Refugee Council led a protest against the closure, but they were not successful. I have been in contact with them, and am hoping to make a visit soon and find out what happened to the asylum seekers, were they deported, how long were they there, why was the place closed, where are they now, is that possible to know, why should one want to know?

I feel deeply drained and upset after these excavations, and at the same time even more compelled to go on. On Thursday I will go back to the Flotten strasse, as the buildings manager said that I can come and have a look inside. I also will visit the local museum's archive to see if I can find out more about this place and its many tangled histories.

References:
Der Ort des Terrors: Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager
By Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder
Contributor Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder
Published by C.H.Beck, 2006

Jahrbuch Fuer Die Geschichte Mittel- Und Ostdeutschlands
By K. g. Saur
Published by Walter de Gruyter, 2007

Zwangsarbeit in Berlin 1938-1945 (Gebundene Ausgabe)
von Helmut Bräutigam, Doris Fürstenberg, Bernt Roder

the Flotten strasse fence...

2009-03-11T09:00:00.005Z

These types of fences always puzzled me, as the only way to see through and piece the image, is by moving or looking sideways...

...in search of the FLOTTEN STRASSE

2009-03-09T20:46:00.010Z

I was very struck by the place B described in our recent interview. The place was a dorm, where in 1968, together with other ‘guestworker’ women she lived in, while working for AEG Telefunken (German radio and television company) The same place had been a forced labour camp in the World War 2 (I will post an extract from my interview with B here very soon). She described the dorm, and said it was in the Flotten Strasse, and that it was still a police station, and that in the basement the beds and the linen were still there from the time it was a hospital (right after the war). So, I went the next day to the place to have a look. The street runs parallel to the overground train tracks, so one side of it is industrial and for the most part occupied by different companies. Some buildings were built after the WW2, but some were from an earlier time. There was no police station though, and so I tried to decipher from her description which was the building she lived in, 40 years ago.

It was Saturday, bitterly cold wind was blowing, and the whole place was quiet and felt deserted. I walked around, looking for the signs, traces, some marks which will speak of the time past…Those that catch my eyes I photograph, the defunct train tracks which suddenly emerge from the ground, as if they are coming out from some dark, internal space (were all these building connected by the train tracks), old rusty signs, ‘new’ signs (well can’t quite say new, more likely to be put there in the 70’s), the lamp posts, tall windows with dirty black grime on it, inside are the lamps on the long cords hanging, ‘Private Grundschtück’, metal gates, trees, tall and strong and black, the wire, short windows (or are they doors?) with lace neatly hung on it (does anybody live or work here?)…I enter one of those ‘Private Grundschtück’ places and half expect a security guard to come out yelling ‘verboten’, but nobody is chasing me out, so I continue…I come across an old porter cabin and speak to the man inside in my broken German. He is from the West Bank, has been working here for 20 years. The place inside looks warm and smokey, he offers me a cup of tea but there is another men inside, and I decline. I explain I am looking for the place, which was a forced labour camp, then a dorm for the guestworkers. He points to all the buildings behind him, and says I can go and have a look. I decide not to get drawn into the whole conversation about Israel and the West Bank (well, at least not yet, I will be back), but again think of all the tangled histories and how their tentacles just seem to get more and more woven in with each other, and I wonder what patterns repeat and which are undone, never to be repeated again!?

(hi)story of my grandparents as guestworkers (part 1)

2009-03-03T14:23:00.011Z

Italian Guest Workers in German Auto Factory, © Bettmann/CORBIS
Original caption: To fill the gap of labor shortage in West Germany, Italian "guest workers" are hired by the Volkswagen Automobile Manufacturing Company in Wolfsburg. These young men working on the assembly line are among the 4,000 Italians who have arrived North of the Alps, seeking their fortunes in West Germany.

As I already wrote in my previous post my grandparents left in the late 60’s Yugoslavia, to work as ‘guestworkers’ in Germany. My grandfather had a job offer in a factory called Georg Grube, which was producing car parts for the booming car industry of the time. (image below, a photograph I took in 2007, the factory is still working, the tower is a leftover of the mining industry which operated in the same spot until 29th March 1965 ending 2500 years of mining in the area, source:wikipedia

My grandmother was 39 years old and my grandfather was 40. They contributed to the ‘economic miracle’ of the postwar Germany, and yet, they remained temporary, their lives marked with the highs of returning home during the holidays and lows upon returning to Germany. My grandmother said that every time they left home, they were subdued, quiet in the car, didn’t speak to each other for a few hours. Slowly the landscape would change and they would each have mourned and accepted the physical fact that they have now left and won’t be back until the next holiday. She said: “Kad ides kuci ides ko leptir, bez ikakvog umora. A kad idemo nazad nikako stici, nemas volje. / When you go home you go like a butterfly, but when we go back (to Germany) it seems as if we can never arrive, we have no will to arrive.”
I interviewed my grandparents over the past year about their experiences of being guest workers, here is an extract from our conversation (photograph of Marija i Vinko Kovacic, 2007):
“Teski su to dani bili, ostaviti djecu, jezika ne znas. Ja ucim iz rijecnika, a mislim sta mi djeca rade, kroz posao i kroz razgovor, moras nauciti. Mama zavrsila srednju skolu, ujko 5ti razred. Ostali sa bakom. A ja se nikad nisam od njih odvajala. Jezika ne znas, sve razumit moras, a ovamo razmisljas o njima. Zasto ih nisi povela sa sobom? Ne mogu djeca skole prekinuti.”

“Those were hard days, leaving children, and one doesn’t know the language. I was learning from a dictionary, while wondering what my children are doing at this present moment, but through work and conversation you learn the language, you have to. Your mother finished the secondary school, and your uncle was 12 years old when we left. They stayed with their grandmother. And I never was apart from them until then. You don’t know the language, but you have to understand everything, and at the same time you are thinking about your children. I asked why she didn’t take her children with her to Germany? She answered that they couldn’t stop their school.”
She added: “Svakome, ko god bude dosao u Njemacku bilo je tesko, dok se ne prekalis. Everybody who came to Germany had a difficult time, until they toughen up (prekaliti is a word referring to working on a steel or any hard material until it was melted and put into shape, but the word is also used metaphorically for life situations).”

Now, I don’t want to paint the picture of only suffering, surely on some level these migrations have been also a positive experiences of discovery, change, new possibilities. Zlatko Skrbis writes in ‘Transnational Families: Theorising Migration, Emotions and Belonging’ that ‘Migrant stories are linked with the experiences of adjustment, settlement, nostalgia, a shattered sense of belonging, renewal, loss, discrimination, abrupt endings, new beginnings and new opportunities - all potent sources of emotions.’
And Nenad Popovic in his essayistic book “Life in the Shadow – Zivot u Sjeni” writes that surely for some guest workers the anonymity of life in Germany was even thou a lonely experience, also a relief from certain social pressure (p. 51) but that also they “emigrated into privacy”, and one could add into invisibility.
Migration is of course an experience of a full spectrum of emotions, situated in the complex personal, cultural and political situation, and one should resist the temptation to see all guest workers as victims of higher economic goals as set by the grander political and administrative forces of their respective countries. At the same time, this particular predicament that nobody forced guest workers to migrate, carries within it a certain kind of collective guilt towards their country, even betrayal – on a specific political context and a relationship of the socialist government of Yugoslavia to the labor migrations, some of which started much earlier then the signed agreement in 1968 see Ivana Dobrivojevic essay ‘In quest of welfare – U potrazi za blagostanjem’. (I also aim to write more about the specific context of the Yugoslavian guest workers in the future post).

INTRODUCTION

2009-03-02T19:03:00.010Z

I started my initial research into the migration to Germany from the former Yugoslavia, because of my grandparents. They left in the late 60’s the socialist Yugoslavia to work in the Federal Republic of Germany, my grandfather continued to work within his trade as a blacksmith, working in a factory producing car parts for the booming German car industry at the time. My grandmother started working first at a factory making stock cubes (the photograph is from a staff gathering at that factory), then she changed several jobs in the catering industry until she settled in a position of a waitress/manageress in the hotel, largely catering to the trucks passing by.
My grandparents were part of an organised labor migration, the German government in 1968 signed an agreement with the Yugoslavian government whereby workers can come on a limited period of time to work in Germany, and then return to their home country. The labour migrants were called ‘gastarbeiter’ or ‘guest workers’. Initially they came from Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), followed by Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965) and Yugoslavia (1968). Dates refer to agreements signed between the government of the West Germany and those of the guest worker countries. (Mattes and Ardem: Gendered Policies - Gendered Patterns: Female Labour Migration from Turkey to Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s)
“Guest workers began arriving in the aftermath of World War II, before the last traces of the physical destruction had been cleared away. But the seeds of their recruitment were sown in advance of the official treaties by the demographic catastrophe (well over three million German male casualties) wrought by the conflict itself", writes Rita Chin in “The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany’, 2007
My grandparents, like many guest workers came to Germany with an idea to stay a couple of years, then return home. My grandmother said that they wanted to build a house back home, and after they've done that, the grandchildren came, so they needed to help out financially our parents, and so all of these reasons meant that in the end they stayed 22 years, until they were in pension. They returned in the 1990, to Slavonski Brod in Croatia (border town with Bosnia & Herzegovina), and then the civil war started.
I am pleased to write that my grandparents are alive and well, and still living in Slavonski Brod, but that through their experience I came to continue my inquiry into the nature of migration, of returns and dreams of returns, of home and belonging (in 2003 I curated an exhibition Leave to Remain which looked at migration and displacement experience in the UK www.leavetoremain.org).
I was curious about the fact that my grandparents lived in Germany for so long, and yet there lives there were so temporary, unrooted in the society in which they played a big part (at the least in the economic success of Germany). I began to draw parallels between their migration and mine: I caught myself thinking that I won’t necessarily return to Bosnia or Croatia, but I will move on from London, from the UK, and realise that a part of me is still temporary, still in movement, still unsettled. I wonder if perhaps this part is necessary for me to not feel trapped in particular cultural expectations, or it keeps me in a certain state of flux, which thou liberating on one hand is unsettling on the other.

My aim is to understand more what the experience of my grandparents has been for other guest workers and migrants and I have spent now 4 weeks in Berlin, exploring, reading about a specific German historical, social and cultural context and relationship to migration but also speaking to many women about their experience of migrating to Germany. I am also exploring different ways of looking at migration aware of a danger that lies in the gaze being directed only on the migrants, in the process of which making them into a separate, exotic ‘other’ that needs to be studied, through a kind of colonial-anthropological gaze. The question (and the challenge) that emerges is how to represent migration without taking on the hierarchical position of the one representing?

The residency is funded by the British Council and it forms part of an exhibition curated by Peter Cross titled “Journeys With No Return” scheduled to take place in Berlin in 2010.