Introducing the GUEST (part 2)
These are just some thoughts behind the creation of a character, another persona, that of a GUEST for my temporary job as an ‘artist in residence’ with the University of Bath’s Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, and the department of Social and Policy Science.
The residency has been born out of a previous, and now on-going project, on the ‘guest workers’ in Berlin. Last year, 2009, I spent 2 months as an artist-in-residence in Berlin, where I researched and interviewed the ‘guest workers’ who came to Berlin in the late 1960s from the former Yugoslavia (and many other countries like Turkey, Italy, Portugal etc). I focused on the women ‘guest workers’ as I discovered that they formed the majority of workers on the large factory assembly lines of the West Berlin’s electronic and telecom companies such as AEG Telefunken, Osram, Siemens etc. This conflicted with the predominantly male image of the migrant worker in the national narratives and imagery, of both countries Germany and the former Yugoslav countries.
Whilst visiting the ‘guest worker’ women in their homes, for the first time, and as a total stranger (winning trust due to shared cultural background, and also desire on their part to tell their story, which up until I visited them has not been told, the reason for which are complex and to do with the marginalised position of these guest workers during socialism), issues of the ethics and the political positioning and commitment of the artist as ethnographer and historian, grew more important.
I reflected briefly on those in my presentation at the Tate Britain’s conference recently http://www.borderlineproject.org.uk/ and on my guest workers blog http://guestworkerberlin.blogspot.com/, but I also feel that I have only just scratched the surface. In a way my residency in Bath is on one level an attempt to address those questions, by embracing the residency as a mirror of that process – the ‘hyper visible’ GUEST, rather then assimilatory artist-ethnographer and an attempt to reflexively scrutinise processes of collaboration and participation.
Bit more background info on the residency can be found on ICIA’s page:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/icia/events/?page=event&art_…
