Abstract
In my contribution, I highlight the transnational and multidirectional memories regarding Greek labour migrants’ embodied experience(s) during the period of the recruitment agreement in Western Germany. I intend to accentuate silenced and marginalized perspectives of the “southern periphery” through my positionality as a reflexive ethnographer, and south-European economic migrant in Germany. Particularly, I illustrate parts of my PhD chapter, titled “Subjectivity, Representation III, Endstation Kreuzberg (1975): Where is the film of Giorgos Karypidis? Re-assembling the filmic archive”. Through this filmic/visual case study, I propose a reflexive perspective in regards to this mnemonic device through which we browse and analyze testimonies and embodied experience(s) of migrant workers in Germany. Last but not least, apart from contextualization of the problems that migrant workers have encountered during that period, a crucial audiovisual and memory politics space is given to discuss issues of racism, political participation, empowerment and the need for a common transnational struggle for social justice. Based on my suggested notion of a polyphonic archive, or a Heter-archive1, it is possible to describe spherically and comprehend “the multiple materialities of migrant worlds” (Basu, Coleman 2008), as well as enhance the notion of a dialogue-driven, “relational” museum (Harrison, 2013), and a bottom-up memory archive of migrants’ experiences in the post-migrant society. Finally, this project can be registered in the on-going public discussion on the critical paradigm shift of the topic of migration in Germany, one which can be anchored in the context of museographical practices and interventions.
Presenters
Christos ZisisLecturer, Department of Social Work and Public Health, Fachhochschule Kiel, Hamburg, Germany
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
MIGRATION, HERITAGE, POSTCOLONIAL, MEMORY
