Thursday, September 28 3pm Galerie Rabus

Judith Siegmund
Foreign Customers

A film by Judith Siegmund, Germany 2004, 28 min
Video and discussion

Work on the DVD Foreign Customers (Fremde Freier) prompted me to take a fresh look at some general questions about methods of participatory artistic work. Do I use people as materials when I film them? Am I able to lend someone a voice? What situation arises when, as an artist, I enter into someone else's space and encounter experiences of life which I cannot share? How can I avoid imposing my own views on others? I assume, as an artist, that I can neither lend someone a voice who previously lacked a voice nor capture something in a video as it really is. From the early stages of this work, I nevertheless knew what I wanted to avoid: I wanted to refrain from describing prostitutes as victims. I wanted them to decide for themselves how they presented their work. In my opinion, descriptions of prostitutes as femmes fatales, as women in search of adventure, are wrong; the women I interviewed work to earn money and because they have no other choice.

In the questions about their clients, I was the one who largely determined the subject of conversation. My inquiry into their attitudes towards German clients arose from the situation on the German-Polish border: 90 per cent of men who use the services of sex workers from Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and other eastern countries are German. Since those who frequent clubs and brothels and approach women on the street come from all social classes, from all age groups and from all over Germany, the survey reveals a representative picture of the situation. The need of German men to compensate for the failures in their everyday lives and to satisfy their physical desires is the reason why a broad network of pimps and club owners has spread along the entire border and within Germany itself.
I carried out the interviews in Russian with the help of an interpreter. It is important to me that the women are not expected to speak in a foreign language, but that the German audience hears them speak Russian and has to read what they say in German.

To prevent the women getting into difficulties as a result of the interviews, this work was carried out in collaboration with street workers from the association Bella Donna in Frankfurt (Oder).


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