Blog

Afternoon at Cafe Deli Star on Munich’s Amalienstrasse. Artist Cana Bilir-Meier had spontaneously agreed to an interview the day before. A glass of peppermint tea in front of each of us, we started the interview, which ended up being a conversation nearly an hour long. The text below is an abridged version focusing particularly on the aspects of Bilir-Meier’s film work titled ThisMakesMe Want to PredictthePast and her artistic practice in the context of the exhibition Tell meabout yesterdaytomorrow.

This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past follows two young people at the Olympia shopping center in Munich, where a racist attack was committed in 2016. What was your impetus for participating in the exhibition, and how did your participation come about?

“When the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism asked me whether I’d like to participate in the project, I was getting ready for my exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg while also conceptualizing a new work, the film ThisMakesMe Want to PredictthePast, which is also a good fit for the exhibition at the Munich Documentation Centre. I think the concept of intervening in the permanent exhibition by featuring contemporary projects, ideas, and thoughts as contributions to or comments on the history of National Socialism is interesting, because National Socialism and colonialism have aftereffects. Racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination are part of our society, but that’s not all; they actually structure society itself.”

Where does the work fit into the context of the Munich Documentation Centre as a museum of history, or a place of learning and remembrance?

“Everything is more multifaceted than we might think sometimes. The perpetrator of the racist attack on the Olympia shopping center in 2016 harks back to Nazism and other racist attacks in the past. Racist attacks like those in Munich, Hanau, and Halle don’t happen out of the blue. There is a continuity to them; racism continues to work to this day based on that continuity. To understand the present day, we have to address the past, and the Munich Documentation Centre is suitable for that. The past isn’t simply over and done with. It continues to affect the present and future, and there are always links.

My work is fragmentary. It isn’t intended to provide answers.

In my works, I look at specific aspects, conveying a feeling or a perspective – the migrant perspective, for example – or address something without providing a direct solution. Take the film’s voiceover, with YouTube comments on Childish Gambino’s song Redbone, which is also the source of the title, ThisMakes Me Want to Predict the Past. People wrote these comments about their visions of utopia, their dreams and nightmares, hopes and desires. Many of the comments contradict each other or imagine a different society and narrative. I view them as being contradictory in part, but in a productive sense. After all, contradictions are also emblematic of migration as alienation. The concept of home, or homeland, is a construct. It isn’t bound to a specific place or nationality. It’s important to recall the unimaginable or utopian so we can question the status quo and our societal norms as well.”

What is your stance on the term “collective remembrance,” or perhaps we should say “positioning of pluralistic narratives”?

“We should consider who we mean when we say ‘we.’ And whether we are a solidaristic, democratic society. For example, I think initiatives like Die Vielen (The Many) are important, but I do wonder whether we are really ‘the many,’ or whether this might be a euphemism that doesn’t match up with reality. One good example is the question of what is recognized as knowledge, and in what forms. For example, the Tribunal ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ (Tribunal NSU-Komplex auflösen) has spoken of ‘knowledge situated in and derived from the context of migration,’ meaning that the people affected by racism are experts on this topic. In many cases, their experiences and the strategies they have developed are not perceived as true or important, not recognized, or listened to in the first place. We have a hierarchical system, a very strong class system, that forms the basis for everything – how we think, what we feel, our schools and universities are all structured according to it.”

How can these important and yet complex topics be brought home to people, perhaps even to those who don’t have any interest of their own in them?

“It’s important to start during school. When I was in school, for example, I didn’t learn anything about the history of labor migration in the 1960s, which is my family’s history. There was nothing about German colonialism, either. These are important topics when it comes to understanding where we are today and how racism and nationalism work – and how we can counteract them. This is also important because migration and colonialism are part of German history, but they are seldom spoken of or taught. Exhibitions, art, and cultural spaces can also play an important role here, presenting new or different takes on these perspectives and on hidden memories and stories and acting as places of solidarity and democracy. But for that to happen, artistic spaces have to undergo another transformation themselves, because they are exclusionary and elitist in themselves. It all works together as people think about it and explore the topic.

In general, it’s important to hear the voices of those affected by racism – Ibrahim Arslan, for example. He is a victim and survivor of the racist attack in Mölln and a political activist. Because experiences of discrimination are often not recognized as knowledge, there is always the risk that those affected won’t be heard in the first place, or that other people who haven’t had the same experience will speak for them or over them instead or even deny their experiences of racism. One part of the issue is that experiences like the migration experience are hard to understand if you haven’t gone through them yourself. Still, we can adopt the other person’s perspective and stand in solidarity – in fact, we have to. But the experience itself, by body and soul, belongs only to those who have lived through it themselves. Art is a tool for thinking about individual and collective realities. Still, it must go beyond a representational function. Work is needed at the structural level as well. Thinking about artistic spaces, it’s very important for migrant and indigenous artists, lesbian, queer, and trans artists, and artists of color to become more visible. But that also needs to be reflected in structures – I mean personnel structures – at the institutional level, and in decision-making processes. At universities and schools, that would mean asking what knowledge is recognized and taught, what language is spoken, who does the teaching, and so on.”

Can art, as a tool, write history or even the future?

“I think I view artistic work as partly a political medium because art can make something timeless. It’s an important way to highlight perspectives that transcend the moment – like recording an interview. But I also think we need to move away from idealizing art or artists. Art is also an instrument of power and a tool – like a pen that you write with. It’s not about art as the pen, but the fact of what gets written and by whom, and what personal histories the writer brings with them. It’s important to make the many different perspectives that make up society visible. All of this holds potential that needs to be used.

I’d also like to see people move away from memory as solely things that are in the past, even though we are trained to think and narrate things chronologically and linearly. Research on memory and trauma has yielded interesting results: Our brains don’t work like a book that we can flip back through, remembering the same things over and over again. Instead, the brain is continually rewriting our memories, which means they can change, too. We learn from our experiences, process our memories, and find new connections. I’d like to see a lot of things not being separated from each other, but instead being placed in context, with people actively working on this. One result, for example, would be for people to stop viewing memory and history as contradictory.”

By Teresa Rauner, a student of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich