That Light of Theirs

A light beam scans a dark, black and white photographic surface and lets objects, faces of strangers and architectural details flash up in front of our eyes. Without additional information, there is very little that the work allows us to decipher. Through following an interplay of interviews edited, transcribed and presented as texts on red screens and the different film excerpts projected, an audience begins a slow deciphering of the work. What do photo-documents reveal about the past and how much remains inaccessible on their perfectly polished photographic surfaces?

‚That Light of Theirs‘ is a multimedia installation based on rare archival footage on the Arbeitsmigration that I collected in a slow door-to-door enquiry in Munich (additional material from the Archiv DOMiD, in Cologne, the Griechisches Haus Westend and the Stadtarchiv, in Munich). The historic mass-migration saw fourteen million workers, from South and West Europe, Turkey and North Africa, arrive in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1955 and 1973.