As a contribution to the exhibition I am proposing my anthropological-artistic work “Löwen, Götter” in the form of a zine.
This work is the product of narrative interviews with Ibraimo Alberto, who migrated to the GDR as a contract worker, as well as the viewing of his personal and public photo archives. The product is a graphic novel in the format of a zine, which uses certain aspects of the interviews and condenses them into an illustrated narrative in combination with the visual material viewed.
While the thematic complexes of memory, (post-)colonization, enslavement, migration, GDR, contract workers and post-migrant East Germany are touched upon, this zine offers a medium of biographical narrative and anthropological knowledge production, in which the relationship of the interviewed person and their social environment in Mozambique, to the colonial powers is illuminated. Furthermore, the work refers to the protagonist's self-image and its transformation against the background of colonization and migration. By this means it opens up the opportunity of questioning power structures in the context of postcolonial narrative building.
Presenting illustration and the production of graphic novels and other similar formats as an anthropological method, sheds light upon possibilities to use creative practices as tools to share oral history and make them accessible.
The zine in A6 format, consisting of 3 double pages and two single pages, contains an A3-sized poster when unfolded.
This work has been part of the exhibition “Echoes of the brothercountries” in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in March-May 2024.
Mirjam Kislat is a visual anthropologist who uses different forms of photography and film to research on interwoven themes of (post-)memory, collective remembrance, traumatization, dream worlds, migration, and psychic effects of discrimination. She holds a MA in social- & cultural anthropology from Free University Berlin and was trained at Ostkreuzschule für
Fotografie/Berlin. Shaped by her background in post-socialist rural Saxony of the 1990s, her practice yet oriented toward global resonances. Her work has been exhibited e. g. in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Kunstquartier Bethanien.
