HIERGEBLIEBEN, 2006
Monitor, DVD 6' 23", sound
Three migrant fates in Europe: a US deserter who has fled the Iraq war with the help of a network and now lives in Berlin, cut off from his family and country of origin; a young woman who, having fled from the Balkans to Western Europe with her family, was separated from her father and older sister after they were deported to Bosnia; a Russian emigrant woman who entered the EU with a visa before going into hiding, and who now works illegally for two euros an hour in a restaurant, in constant fear of being discovered.
These three interwoven migration stories are told by artificially generated voices. The persons remain anonymous, and their backgrounds stay vague. However, their accounts illustrate how political laws and regulations impact on individual fates, and how arbitrary the border between legality and illegality is drawn. Even though the voices of the three migrants have been treated electronically, and although the visual environment is made of night shots from a kitchen looking onto a backyard: the stories are authentic, as authentic as the "oral history" statements we hear everyday in the media.
Credits
Thanks to: Dirk Laucke (text)