COAPPARATION

For the residency I will start working on the topic of Coapparation*, by recuperating a family history of ‘temporary’ migration to Germany. My grandfather was a ‘guest worker’ in FRG (West Germany) at the end of the 70s, mediated to a German company, by the communist Romanian state enterprise, where he was employed. He was a welder, and in FRG he mainly worked at expanding the gas pipeline infrastructure. His personal history was of course made possible by the west Germany’s Ostpolitik ambitions, matching with those of the Romanian government at that time, and the resulting economic treaty between the two countries.

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Alexandra Tatar - Artist Talk:
Recollections of a cold war working body
or: "What is 'RASTPLATZ’?“, he asks in Romanian

In the frame of the residency, I will revisit and document the places where my grandfather worked. I will weld the resulting material together with the prerecorded interview and research into a video work. The first insights will be presented at the end of the residency in the frame of the artist talk.