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Project presentation at W3 in Hamburg

von | Nov 15, 2019 | English, News

On the 4th of December 2018, we had the honor to present our project at the premisses of the Werkstatt für internationale Kultur und Politik (W3) in Hamburg.

In this video Dan Thy Nguyen is analysing the theoretical background behind our work, the processes that we follow for putting together our matterial and our targets for the future of the archive. Here you can take a taste of what we talked about:

We are artists. In 2014 we did a work on Rostock-Lichtenhagen 1992. Survivors hardly noticed, ignored a whole perspective and until today a marginal phenomenon.

During the research, we realized that the Vietnamese contract workers were just one of the voices that were not heard. And within this project, we noticed the complexity of immigrant knowledge, to which we can only scratch today.

Because we talk about migration, then we do not talk about uniform groups. We talk about different generations with different social-historical contexts, we talk about different milieus (workers, students, political refugees, activists, apolitics, traditionalists, religious … …), we talk about gender, we talk about city and country, in context of the Cold War in the so-called West or in the so-called Eastern Bloc countries … etc.

So we have strong social-historical imprints that intervene in the individual life biographies and form biographies and future potentials.

However, the discussion about flight and migration since 2015 is diametrically opposed to this complexity. In public discussion, one can often feel that flight and migration is a current phenomenon and does not see it in the context of diversification of society that has been going on since at least the Second World War. Foreign workers, former refugee movements and political conflicts, financial crises, etc. are barely noticed. But it is important to us that, considering that the Federal Republic of Germany has a so-called proportion of people with a migrant background among children under 5 at least 39.1 – so we can no longer our modern history, our social structure in the long term without the inclusion of these Understand people.

Hence the idea to collect voices across communities and put them online in the archive. So that other people can learn.

We invited people who wanted to tell their life story. We have no specifications about Millieus or what these people should tell. We usually had these people tell stories and only inquired once or twice when we felt that things were too unclear. Contractually, we have clarified the privacy policy that they provide this video and their life story for this website and the cooperation partners.
The videos are archive material, that means we barely cut them and they are used for research purposes. The house three and the workshop three not only played a decisive role as co-operation partners, but were also financiers and resellers for premises etc.