Deconstruction Performance & Public Streaming: Space for New Perspectives
On August 23, 2020, the previous staging of the Brandenburg-Prussian enslavement trade in the permanent exhibition Shipping was dismantled in an artistic performance in the Technikmuseum in Berlin.
In the many years of its existence, especially activists of the Black communities, such as the Initiative Black People in Germany eV and Berlin Postkolonial eV, expressed criticism of the stereotypical and simplified presentation of the staging. Black people were reduced to their physicality within the cube, which was built like a shipping container, and portrayed as passive victims with no history of resistance of their own. The deconstruction of this narrative as part of the deinstallation addresses the centuries-long presence of Black people in the region, which is closely linked to the Brandenburg slave trade, and offers the opportunity to include resistant perspectives in the depiction of that special German colonial [hi]stories .
The artistic design of the dismantling dealt with the installation in two interlocking performance parts. In her performance »Wayward Dust«, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju dealt with the dust that has accumulated in the installation over the years. It symbolizes the time that has elapsed since the opening of the installation, which stands in contrast to the polystyrene figures, which are continuously depicted lifeless. You leave the cube of the museum during Philip Kojo Metz's artistic performance. Together with his team and employees of the museum, he demonstrates the way to the empty space. He concentrates on the deconstruction of the shell and the many components of the installation with his performance SEK »SORRYFORNOTHING EINSATZ KOMMANDO«.
With the performative dismantling of the installation, not only was a void created, which is to be used for a new multi-perspective view of the history of slavery, but it was also the start of a pilot project that was carried out at the German Technology Museum in cooperation with us, the joint project DEKOLONIALE Memory Culture in the City. In two further online workshops with lectures by the historian Paulette Reed-Anderson, which take place as part of the project »Colonialism in the Museum of Technology - A New Deal with the Brandenburg-Prussian Enslavement Trade«, a historical foundation for colonial history during the German Empire is to be conveyed and the Participation of Brandenburg-Prussia in the enslavement trade to be investigated. In order to enable new perspectives on the history of the Black Diaspora in Germany, the Museum of Technology intends to address its own entanglements in the colonial and post-colonial space in the future.
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