Historical Sounding Gallery
A multimedia collaboration between Keith Piper, Tina Campt and Nicola Lauré al Samarai
November 17 - December 24, 2005
New Media Space, John Hope Franklin Center
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 17, 2005
5:30 - 7:30 PM :: New Media Space
(Buses available starting at 6:00 PM to the opening celebration of the ACT Warehouse)
Lunch Conversation
Thursday, November 17
12:00 - 1:30 PM :: 240 Franklin Center
Artist Keith Piper
Sponsored by Globalization and the Artist. RSVP for lunch to r.sikorski@duke.edu
The Afro-German population is a community whose history and presence has been widely overlooked in the study of African Diasporic cultural formation. It is a community that distinguishes itself from black communities in the Americas in that the Atlantic is not its crucial geographic conduit of transit, and slavery is not the formative event of its arrival. Collective migration is the exception rather than the rule for this community – an exception that consisted most prominently of the conscripted transfer of Black soldiers from Africa and the US during the occupations of Germany that followed the First and Second World Wars. This community’s formation is marked most profoundly by voluntary individual journeys and migrations primarily of Black and African men; journeys and migrations that were frequently temporary rather than permanent.
The “Historical Sounding Gallery” gives voice to Black German recollections of their lives and experiences in Nazi Germany, rendered in the form of an historical gallery of sound and image. Conceived as a three-dimensional ‘sounding board,’ the Sounding Gallery is intended to enact a ‘sounding out’ of the history of Black Germans in the Nazi regime: sounding out as literally a way of pronouncing, articulating or enunciating an idea, event or experience and at the same time, as a site to bounce ideas off of – in other words, a mode of history-making and historiography that solicits a response, is interactive, and also dialogical.
The oral narratives used in the installation are composed of a series of edited stories taken from interviews with a generation of Black German men and women, read by a group of Duke University African American graduate and undergraduate students. Framing this audio ‘sounding’ are three ‘visual palimpsests’ – complex projections that obliquely echo the streamed aural accounts. This digitized photographic archive (a montage of historical documents, images and photography) creates an ever-evolving collage of ghostly, semi-translucent, constantly overlapping images that literally and figuratively ‘animates’ the lives of Black Germans in the Third Reich.
The Historical Sounding Gallery aims to provoke a confrontation between dominant historical accounts and Black German counter-memories. Weaving together the accounts of individuals raised with little access to a black community and lacking the forms of cultural memory that link and sustain other diasporic populations, the installation’s enunciation of these stories through the words and mouths of African American students stages a form of transnational and intergenerational diasporic dialogue that was unavailable to these individuals at the time, yet enables their participation albeit virtually and retrospectively.
Originally commissioned in 2004 by the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Germany, the current exhibition was made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of The John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Office of the President, Office of the Provost, The Dean of Humanities, Information Science and Information Studies Program, Duke University Center for International Studies, Program in Women's Studies, Department of Art History Visiting Artists' Fund, and the African & African American Studies Program
Curator
Tina Campt
Interview partners
Fasia Jansen
Juliana Wonja Michael
Hans (Johann) Hauck
Interviews conducted by
Tina M. Campt
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai
Editing and translation of interviews
Nicola Lauré al-Samarai
Olga Trokhimenko
Photos, documents and additional personal effects provided by
Annemarie Stern und Anneliese Althoff, The Fasia Jansen Foundation
Juliana Wonja Michael
Dieter Kuntz, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
For more information on this and other exhibits at the Franklin Center, contact Pamela Gutlon, p.gutlon@duke.edu.