Events
English / Deutsch

31.10.2019 | 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint

exp. 1: Das Archiv schweigt. Nicht. [The archive remains silent. Not.]

Die Remise

Activation by Çiçek Bacık and Miriam Schickler. Discussion with Çiçek Bacık (Daughters and Sons of Gastarbeiters), Saraya Gomis (teacher), Sanem Kleff (director Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage [School Without Racisim – School With Courage]), Markus Schega (director Nürtingen elementary school), Miriam Schickler, and Tuğba Tanyılmaz (project manager i-Päd Initiative intersektionale Pädagogik [Initiative for Intersectional Education])

In 2018 Miriam Schickler reviewed the written archive of the Nürtingen elementary school in today’s Berlin-Kreuzberg with a special focus on the history of migration. The archive consists of the school chronicle beginning in 1945 and conference minutes from the 1950s to the 1970s. These are testimonies of the majority society, which are informative in regard to dominant delineations of the migrant “other.” The voices of those who are talked about do not appear: people who came to the primary school as “foreign” school children from the 1960s onwards, who represented 80 percent of the school children from the 1970s, and whose children and grandchildren continue to attend the Nürtingen elementary school today.

In order to activate the Nürtingen archive, Çiçek Bacık and Miriam Schickler invite various protagonists. They fill the gaps in the archive with their own positioning and experience. From their working practice, they talk about continuities and discontinuities in the discourses on racism in Berlin schools. Which discourses prevail in regard to the children of migrant workers? What role did the school authorities and local politics play? What were the attitudes of educators and school administrators towards racism in schools at the time? How do they position themselves today against increasing incidents of discrimination at the school and in the battle against racism?