#3 How is immigration depicted in the national culture? The example of National Immigration Museums in Germany and in France

"France-Germany, same foreigners?", bi-national exhibition hold in National Migration Museum in France and Germany in 2010

After my two first blogs which were devoted to an artistic and a social analysis of the impact of the immigration in arts and culture, I chose to adopt another point of view for this last blog. I will try to explain how arts and culture can be used to depict migration, and not how migrants express themselves trough arts and culture. We will analyze these phenomena through the examples of Germany in France, where two national museums about immigration have been created a few years ago.

First of all, as we will see in this blog entry and according to this article of CNN Politics about the creation of the National Museum of Immigration in the United States, the movement for the creation of these very particular institutions is pretty recent. Why? Can they slowly become part of the global cultural scene in France and in Germany?  

Germany - Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland e.V. (DOMiD) in Köln

The Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland 

has officially been created in 1990 by an association of Turkish migrant women. They wanted to point out the fact that the social and cultural impact of the migrant population, and in particular of the migrant women, had been obscured since the 1950’s. The association got widely known several years after, in 1998, when it organized the very first global exhibition on the subject "Fremde Heimat. Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei."

Picture of the exhibition "Fremde Heimat. Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei"

During the early 2000’s, the association cooperated with the Kölnischen Kunstverein, the Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie der Universität Frankfurt am Main and the Institut für Theorie der Gestaltung und Kunst an der Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich for the "Projekt Migration“, an exhibition hold in Köln which focused on the development of the migration in Germany since the 1950’s.

Projekt Migration

Finally, the small association which had been created in 1950 by a couple of migrant women became in 2007 a global national association by joining the “Migrationsmuseum in Deutschland” association. They organized in 2011 the very famous “50 Jahre Migration aus der Türkei” exhibition, featuring many pieces of works of several Turkish artists we mentioned before in this blog. This very interesting article of Die Zeit resumes how strongly arts and culture have been involved in this exhibition. 

As we can see, the history of the Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland is very interesting due to the fact that it has originally been created by migrants, and has been developed over the decades. There hasn’t been any strong and global direction from the government, but several distinct migrant groups and institutional actors have had the opportunity to take part to its development process. 

France – Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration
The National Museum of History of Migration has been officially launched in 2007, at the very beginning of Nicolas Sarkozy’s mandate. This has been very criticized since his several governments led controversial immigration policies throughout the years. Nevertheless, the idea of such a museum doesn't come from the 2000's, but has been imagined way before. Indeed, French historians and militants have discussed the idea of a National Museum about Migration since the beginning of the 1990’s. It officially became a national project at the beginning of the 2000’s, before its official creation in 2007. The museum has been symbolically built in the place where the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 had been held. Today, we paradoxically don’t hear much of this museum, because of the several controversies if provoked in France. Even if many interesting exhibitions are organized every year, the museum still suffers from a lack of legitimacy in the French cultural scene. 

Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration's new exhibition: Algerian People in France during the Algerian War or Independence

Nonetheless, the last exhibition “Des Algériens en France pendant la guerre d’Algérie” (Algerian people in France during the Algerian War of Independence) that has been launched several weeks ago could participate to create a new climate about this question, by showing the social and economical realities concerning Algerian people in France during the second half of the XXth century. 

This is why culture can be a way to convey messages and to bring different symbols and realities face to face in order to better understand the migrant cultures. 

Culture and arts are from my point of view real forces that have been concealed in the past decades, but which could be good answers to our everyday’s questions and controversies about migration in Germany and in France. 

Conclusion
By analyzing the examples of the creation and of the development of National Migration Museums in Germany and in France, we’ve seen how these countries have two different visions of how migration has to be depicted through arts and culture. While migrant communities have been at the origins of the project in Germany, the National Migration Museum in Paris has mostly been created by institutional actors. These examples of National Migration museums perfectly traduce the global attitude of both countries towards the representation of immigration in arts and culture : while Germany tends to make migrants communities be a part of the cultural and artistic process, France is once again stuck with its elitist cultural policies that leave no place to migrants in order them to express their real voices. Moreover, France and Germany have to recognize the fact that culture and arts can be some real and efficient tools to better represent and understand migrant communities. 

#2 Bi-cultural artists in Germany and in France: "I don't like the word Multicultural"

Nezaket Ekici - Performance Atropos, 2006

„For me personally it is most important to show that we don’t just absorb German culture and forget the Turkish. I make use – even in my work – of both cultures to create something new from them. If you simply adapt a culture, you lose your identity“: The Turkish-German artist Nezaket Ekici resumes in this sentence the particularities of being a bicultural artist in Germany. In an interview given to the Goethe Institute in Berlin, she evokes what she feels about her origins, her work and her current life as an artist in Germany. 

We will precisely see in this second blog how bi-cultural artists speak about the fact of being Turkish artists in Germany, and we will try to compare their visions and thoughts with the ones of artists with Migrations Hintergrund in France.

Turkish artists in Germany – Multikulti, multicultural, international?

Nezaket Ekici - Personal Map, 2012

Nezaket Ekici

"I don’t like the word multicultural at all. The word is just used far too often and always has this aftertaste of “foreigner.” I think we’ve long passed that stage. In my opinion, a word such as “international” is a better description for it. Multi-Kulti – that always sounds so folkloristic. Of course, folkloristic elements are important, but we can’t remain stuck on them. The mission of contemporary art is to work with these elements, but to create something brand new from them“: Nezaket Ekici does not consider herself as multicultural, or at least does not like this "label". 

She just shows her double culture through her work, without making it the main point of her art. On the contrary, this aspect is always implicit. For example in her installation Eye for Eye hold in Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2010, she invited people of the audience to go on stage with her and to look her into the eyes, for several minutes. The image of the eyes were then projected onto big screens in the museum. "What happens if you have to look into the eyes of a stranger?“ This is the question the Turkish artist asked through this installation...

Theater - Beyond stereotypes

Shermin Langhoff

"Until recently, stereotypes dominated the image of migration and migrants’ experiences on stage. Consequently, actors of Turkish origin often received offers to play cliché roles, such as the oppressed woman wearing a headscarf“ (Humanity in Action): Shermin Langhoff is a Turkish-German stage director who will soon take the direction of the very famous Maxim-Gorki Theater in Berlin. 

For her as for Nezaket Ekici, it is important to appear as someone else than an immigrant through arts. In an interview she gave to the New York Times, she is saying: „A migrant theater scene has emerged only recently. With increased self-confidence, these migrants and post-migrants have launched a new generation of German theater, which tackles topics of migration or post-migration respectively, but in a way that avoids stereotypes. Instead, these artists intend to draw a transcultural, “classless” image of migrants without labels—an image of identity that reaches “beyond belonging“ (The New York Times)

The work of a last Turkish artist in Germany is very telling about the position of immigration through arts.

Television - "I'm always afraid someone will come along and say: 'O.K., little Turk, you've had your fun. Now here's the door.'" 

 

Kaya Yanar

Kaya Yanar is a Turkish artist who has his own television show in Germany. Unlike the other artists we spoke about above, he constructs each of his shows and performances about his double culture. He also uses his Turkish nationality to criticize some aspects of the Turkish society: ‘In one episode he wore a headscarf for a satire of a Madonna video and danced in front of a Turkish rather than an American flag. 

He knew Turkish-Germans were watching him by the number of complaints he received about desecration of the headscarf’ (The New York Times). Nevertheless, he confesses that it can’t avoid being seen as a Turkish, and not as a regular TV presenter, with this now famous sentence: ''I'm always afraid someone will come along and say: 'O.K., little Turk, you've had your fun. Now here's the door.' ''

France - Immigration as main topic for artists with Migrations Hintergrund

 

Rachid Taha

First of all, unlike Germany, it is difficult to find a very well-known French-Arab artist in France who does not essentially deal with topics related to immigration. When typing “French-arab artist” in google.fr, most of the famous French-Arab artists are to be found in the music field.  

Rachid Taha is one of the most famous Arab-French singers. In all his songs, he deals with his Algerian origins or with topics related to the integration of immigrants in France. And every rap, rai or hip-hop singer does the same. As if they had not yet reached the status of bi-cultural German artists, who now begin to explore other topics than the ones of immigration and integration …

Conclusion 

Even in Germany, position of artists differ when dealing about their relationships to their origins and its expression though their arts. But on the whole, they try to stand out as artists as such, and not as migrant, getting rid of all the cliches that come along with this image. On the contrary, in France, it is still rare to find artists with Migrations Hintergrund who do not deal essentially with this subject in their artistic forms of expression.