[...] The racist attack of an 18-year-old male in the Olympia shopping mall was long considered a rampage. In July 2016, the perpetrator shot nine youths dead, wounded five others, and then killed himself. The victims were all from migrant families and most of them were youths. Armela S., Can L., Choussein D., Dijamant “Dimo“ Z., Guiliano-Josef K., Janos Roberto R., Sabina S., Selçuk K., and Sevda D. were killed. Although the extreme rightwing conviction of the perpetrator became quickly known, the prosecution and the State Office of Criminal Investigations called the act a rampage and mainly presented mobbing and a mental illness as reasons. The final report dated March 17, 2017, states: "There are no indications that he chose the individual victims in a targeted way during his rampage. It is also not to be presumed that the act was politically motivated." What is noticeable, though, is that victims were selected according to physical traits indicating that they were of southeast European origin. In March 2018, the Federal Office of Justice then categorized the event as an extremist act. The public learned more details about the perpetrator, his Iranian descent, his hatred, and his socialization in right-wing forums than about the nine murdered youths.
In Bilir-Meiers film THIS MAKES ME WANT TO PREDICT THE PAST (2019) the attack is a starting point for approaching the life-worlds, dreams, fears and wishes of migrant youths. On the one hand, this perspective refers back to the young people murdered on July 22, 2016. On the other, the film is fully obliged to the present and future of youths whose parents or grandparents came to Munich from another country. Bilir-Meier accompanied several youths with the camera on their way through the shopping mall, delving into their wishes and hopes, nightmares and fears. This raises a fundamental question: If xenophobia and racism are fueled by the hatred of collectives and groups, how can they be given back their voices, faces and individual identities in the public discourse? How do "the" migrants, Muslims, refugees, and victims of attacks become individuals with names, subjective memories, and dreams? On site, Bilir-Meier works with the artistic method of frottage: By placing paper on the Olympia shopping mall and rubbing it with chalk, she records and appropriates it. This method already used in the project dedicated to the Freimann Mosque is part of an artistic “thick description" (Clifford Geertz), in which researchers include themselves and their methods in the interpretation. The frottages are prints of the architecture and of a traumatic location that appears as a flip-flop image: both the scene of a crime and a place where young migrants often prefer to linger (and were therefore, by implication, probably targeted by the attacker).
Bilir-Meier's works add to the timeline of German history data that are not, or only to a limited degree, part of the public consciousness: on 5/24/1982 a woman of Turkish descent immolated herself as a sign against xenophobia; 10/6/1967 was the date of the planned laying of the foundation stone of the first Bavarian mosque in Munich-Freimann, marking the construction of a building by two Turkish-born architects of German postwar modernism; on 7/22/2016 nine youths with a migrant background were shot dead by a presumably right-wing perpetrator. These three events are not comparable, embodying themes as diverse as self-immolation and racism, the proportion of migrant artists and architects in the history of German architecture, an extremist attack, and the life of young people in Germany. In her artistic research projects and the resulting works, Bilir-Meier succeeds in distilling the individual from the collective and-vice versa-letting history appear in concrete individual stories. Each narration inevitably incorporates the perspective of the author; the times and events are never viewed neutrally but always from the perspective of a living gaze. At the same time, her works make it evident that historiographies are susceptible to glossing over, omissions and levelling.
[…]
Bilir-Meier's works do not claim encyclopedic objectivity. They refuse to give a bird's-eye view of a life, work, building, or event. The subjective gaze remains fragmentary and prismatic. Bilir-Meier thus commits to complexity, to walking on shaky ground, to fragmented speaking and thinking.
Burcu Dogramaci
Citiation from: Burcu Dogramaci: “Narrating Migration in Art: Memory, Making Present and Resistance in the Works of Cana Bilir-Meier“, in: Bettina Steinbrügge, Tobias Peper (ed.): Düşler Ülkesi, Leipzig: Spector Books, p. 79–86.
©Spector Books 2020
