Cologne. »Projekt Migration« was launched in 2002 as a transdisciplinary initiative of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Federal Cultural Foundation). It called on various actors from the fields of art, science and politics to tell the history of migration in Germany since the first recruitment contracts in 1955. It also aimed to study the newly developing transnational migration regimes and migratory movements within and to Europe, as well as curating or giving impetus to artistic projects. This task was taken on by the Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration in Germany (DOMiT), the Kölnischer Kunstverein, the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at Frankfurt University and the Institute for Theory of Design and Art in Zurich, with the two latter institutions forming the organisational framework for the sub-project »Transit Migration«.1 In addition to numerous projects, film series, symposiums etc.2, an exhibition at five different venues in Cologne, including at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, was on the agenda as the climax and focus of the project. The exhibition »Projekt Migration«, which shares the same title as the whole project, not only chronicles three years of fruitful research and networking, but also attempts to give the visitors a picture of migration and its actors that is polyphonic and divergent, political and everyday, documentary and fictional. A 900-page catalogue in several languages supplements the exhibition with a theoretical and historical commentary.
The exhibition »Projekt Migration« does not relate a chronological history of migration. Instead, it maps contributions, struggles, positions and opinions, visibilisations and uncertainties. On the top floor and in the cellar of the Kunstverein, visitors can see official »archives« of the research project »Transit Migration«, which operates on an artistic and theoretical level, and a presentation of objects from the collection of DOMiT which have obviously been accredited with an auratic character. The exhibits invite visitors to search, listen and comprehend. In the four buildings are collected works and documents on various topics in sections that sometimes have titles: »City and Migration, »Soundtrack of Migration«, the discourse on integration and education, workers’ struggles and »Living and Working to the Rhythm of the Machine«, »Reluctant Migration Society – Policies on Non-German Nationals in the Federal Republic«, »Europe as Borderland«, foreign worker regimes and finally »Self-Organisation in Migration«. However, the titles are discreet and do not really cause strict separations; one has the impression that the exhibition would rather have done without any structural divisions or sorted arrangement. DOMiT provides the authentic and historical material, which documents, illustrates and explicates (above all) the »immigrant worker system«, while eluding any form of historiographic verfication of sources.
Like a reception committee in the form of a video projection, the residents of the house at »Metzstr. 11« in Munich confront the visitors to the Kunstverein with the everyday life of migrants in Munich in 1975. This was two years after recruitment stopped, and 20 years after the first contract with Italy. In »Inventur« (Inventory) (1975), the filmmaker Zelimir Zilnik documents not only the completely natural presence of migrants from various countries, the self-image they present to the camera – sometimes embarrassed, sometimes proud -, and the West German house-building policies of the seventies, but also provides a link to another part of the exhibition: a documentation of migrant housing and labour struggles in Fordist Germany.
When you open the door to the work »Rear Window (Story No. 6)« by Anny and Sibel Öztürk (2004), a smell of heat, city and warmth, familiar stuffiness and mothballs stings your nose. You shut the door. You are surrounded by gloomy darkness. Curtains at the window that move without letting in any air, cars that drive past without leaving behind exhaust fumes, an Azan who calls but doesn’t see anything. But still, with this installation you have the feeling of being on a visit to grandma. Of childhood. The feeling of being deposited in rooms that you share with adults, in which sleeping becomes a restless exception. How can this work be categorised in the context of migration? What is it telling us? Above all, it tells us something about the typical experience of visiting relatives in summer, about »going back«, as it is called in the migration discourse; about the summertime, temporary excursion to the place where your own life reality could be if migration had not occurred, if your parents or one of them had not emigrated. The installation relates all this without having a subject that is looked at or made visible (except for an \\\"aunt-chimera\\\" in the form of a projection), and thus addresses a central question of the exhibition organisers: is it possible to tell a story of migration without producing new images that prescribe, exclude and circumscribe? Is it possible to observe without portraying anything? What does compassion mean?
Many other works and testimonies stick in the memory, blurring, in a positive way, the traces that disambiguate the phenomenon of migration: the MigMap,3 the film about the women on strike in Pierburg/Neuss (»Pierburg: Ihr Kampf ist unser Kampf [Their Fight Is Our Fight]« by Edith Schmidt and David Wittenberg, 1974/75); the documentation of longing, »Passages«, by Lisl Ponger; Jun Yang’s camouflage offer, »Camouflage. LOOK like them TALK like them« (2002/03); Taszro Niscino’s Emperor Wilhelm II installation (»Es will mir nicht aus dem Sinn«, 2005); the work »Home« (1996) by Andrijana Stojkovic; the photo series »Markt« (Market) (1989) by Wolgang Tillmanns and »Bag People« (2001) by Mladen Stilinovic; the installation by Christian Philipp Müller on the »Green Border « (1993/2005); and the excerpt from a WDR film of 1966 that documents the election of »Miss Gastarbeiter« (Miss Foreign Worker) (sic!). But in spite of all that, the question of belonging remains precarious or exposed, as in David Blandy’s work »Hollow Bones«4. One has the impression that questions of the second and third generation are only occasionally met with. Black (German) history and its contextualisation within the migration discourse, which is after all controversial, and questions of bi-nationality and immigration from countries other than the so-called classical foreign-worker nations remain at the margins or are only hinted at. The exhibition guides, however, a team made up chiefly of people with a so-called migratory background, say that during the guided tours they are constantly confronted with the question of authenticity and »virtually squashed between the exhibits and groups of visitors.«
The music video by the Heidelberg hip-hop crew »Advanced Chemistry« which is played on the stairs of Rudolfplatz is presented as a »video work« by the band. The song »Fremd im eigenen Land« (1992) (Stranger in One’s Own Land), which was one of the first forward-looking musical statements on issues of identity and belonging in the German language and also marked an incipient change in (self-) awareness with regard to the representation of the young generation of »KanakInnen« (Eng: wops), has undoubtedly earned a prominent place in the exhibition for »Projekt Migration«. But the term »video work« is confusing. Here, one sees the tension inherent in the whole exhibition: by using the wrong word to mean the right thing, it throws a spotlight on the exhibition conception. Very different cultural and political practices, historical archive material, contemporary artistic works and current research projects are presented next to one another and placed on a par. And what becomes clear is that it is and remains a question of point of view: what some people consider as a »video work« is seen by others as a document of hip-hop history and struggle. But perhaps this exhibition’s strength is that it can bear this tension.
http://www.projektmigration.de
1 For more on this project go to http://www.transitmigration.org
2 http://www.projektmigration.de/content/archiv.html, last visited on 15 December 2005.
3 »MigMap – Governing Migration. Kartografie zur europäischen Migrationspolitik«, Labor k3000 (2005). This work can best be viewed online at: http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap/index.html
4 David Blandys »Hollow Bones« (2001) looks at the appropriation of soul music (here Syl Johnson’s »Because I’m Black« by non-black consumers.
Translated by Timothy Jones