Exploring memory and migrant culture through the medium of video, drawing and graphic art.
INSTALLATION ON DISPLAY @ GALLERIE MITTE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY UL SEO)
ON VIEW @ GALLERIE MITTE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY UL SEO)
On display are four compilations that deal with questions of national identity and belonging from a diasporic perspective.
When I was born in 1991 in a reunified Germany, my father's homeland was already in a process of disintegration:
After independence referenda in the republics of Slovenia and Croatia, a series of bloody civil wars ignited in Yugoslavia, which eventually led to the collapse of the hitherto multi-ethnic and socialist republic.
Meanwhile in Germany, rising nationalism costs lives as well: Racist marches and arson attacks on asylum homes are taking place in the newly reunified Federal Republic.
Using news footage and private recordings of family visits to Croatia and life in Germany, as well as material I recorded during my own travels to the newly found republics of former Yugoslavia, a complex and personal picture of a historical moment and its traces in the present emerges.
It is a product of the guest and migrant workers who have been working and living in Germany since the 1960s.
In my short film, a Yugoslavian drilling machine becomes the starting point of such a story:
In the early 70s, my grandma comes to Germany as a Yugoslavian guest worker. There she works as a cleaner and pieceworker in the watch industry. In the mid-1980s, she brought my father, who had grown up with his grandmother in Yugoslavia, to Germany. He brought a drill with him, which he handed over to me 40 years later.
But when the machine is operated for the first time, there is a short circuit and the machine seems to be defective.
From the attempt to repair the drill, a short film was created that deals with the question of which social and economic factors assign us our place in society.
ON DISPLAY @ STÄDTISCHE GALERIE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY BERNADETTE HAFFKE)
ON DISPLAY @ SOMETHING / NOTHING TO DECLARE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY JIYE LEE)
A Head Crash, Post-Wall Germany, Family Visits to Croatia and Poland, Origin and Belonging, Childhood Drawings, The 90s Through Children's Eyes, Magnetic Coated Tapes and Their Ageing Weaknesses.
The starting point for this is the "blue screen", which is the first thing to be seen when connecting a video set to the TV and which became the basis for a series of drawings and the video work itself.
ON DISPLAY @ SOMETHING / NOTHING TO DECLARE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY JIYE LEE)
ON DISPLAY @ STÄDTISCHE GALERIE, BREMEN (PHOTO BY BERNADETTE HAFFKE)
ON DISPLAY @ GALERIE FEIERTAG, KASSEL
I began to fill this visual gap in my memory with the help of the drawings, which (almost) always emerged from a continuously drawn line.
The starting point of this process are forms, objects and landscapes that make associative reference to the stories of memory I tell in the film.
In the finished film, 6 of the drawings can be seen as vector animations. In the entire process of creation, 29 drawings were created, which can be rearranged again and again during their presentation and thus always allow new associations with each other.
ON DISPLAY @ WESERBURG, BREMEN (PHOTO BY JIWOO PARK)
(In english: Welcome to Germany) is a collection of memories on which my grandparents look back to:
In the early 1980s, they left the People's Republic of Poland together with their daughters to start a new life in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The film consists of audio recordings of family conversations and anecdotes that arose from watching old video recordings together. The private VHS recordings themselves were filmed in the 90s and early 00s by my grandfather and show the new life in Germany, as well as the journeys to the old homeland in Eastern Poland (the former Eastern Prussia).
In the course of the film, a flow of memories emerges, which tell of living (and surviving) in the old and new homelands.
The focus of the film thereby is less on a chronicle and much more on the "remembering" itself: Looking at, listening to and reflecting on such material as well as immaterial remnants of a life lived.
In the early 1980s, they left the People's Republic of Poland together with their daughters to start a new life in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The film consists of audio recordings of family conversations and anecdotes that arose from watching old video recordings together. The private VHS recordings themselves were filmed in the 90s and early 00s by my grandfather and show the new life in Germany, as well as the journeys to the old homeland in Eastern Poland (the former Eastern Prussia).
In the course of the film, a flow of memories emerges, which tell of living (and surviving) in the old and new homelands.
The focus of the film thereby is less on a chronicle and much more on the "remembering" itself: Looking at, listening to and reflecting on such material as well as immaterial remnants of a life lived.
My first memories of my father's bombed-out hometown in what is now Croatia; The migration story of my grandmother and father; the media coverage of the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in the early 1990s; how my family and I experienced and discussed them from afar in Germany; the founding of the EU; my relationship to scientific historiography, as well as to history as a school subject.
I narrate and comment from the off, on historical archive material from TV reports, private family recordings and my own handycam footage from past visits to Croatia.