Greener Pastures
 
Christina B., Ferial Akel B.H., Fatemeh H.S., Summer S., Heide S., Ghosoun A.
with Hannimari Jokinen
 
six blackandwhite photographic portraits of women who are refugees in Hamburg
six interviews
six drawings of plants
an installation of Kassawa seedlings
 
ort_m [migration memory] exhibition
Frappant Gallery, Hamburg 2016
 
With the idiom "greener pastures" a place somewhere else is described where life is supposed to be more easy and properous. The starting point for these interviews was the consideration that women refugees' experiences significantly differ from those of men refugees. And that body experiences like taste and smell can strongly trigger memory.
 
The women from Nigeria, Syria, and Iran talk about plants, gardens, country life and their childhood and youth. Then they remember the painful lack of food when on migration route to Europe. They reflect the question what is "home", and they describe what they would cook if they would have a proper kitchen instead of living in tiny rooms in container housing projects.
 
Common media images suggest a so-called "migrant crisis" showing "migrant flows" of anonymous masses. Greener Pastures confronts such over-simplifications. This art work shows individual stories, and listening to these becomes an essential act.
 
With a special interview technique the narration becomes scenic, a kind of poeticized and pictorial memory. Drawings depict the favourite plants of the interviewed on the paper rolls. The women have been photographed in front of a corn field. Their portraits very directly view and confront the beholder.
 
In the installation seedlings of Kassawa refer to a globalized, migrant plant: originally from the Americas, Kassawa was shipped with the colonizers to Africa and Asia where it succeeded in preventing famines throughout centuries; the history reminds of the similar role of the American potato plant in Europe.
 
Greener Pastures was adapted for the OXFAM shop window within the altonale Art in Shop Windows competition 2016. It won the altonale Art Prize > more

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