Voice and Sound – archipelago of Vietnamese migration stories.
Nowhere in Germany are the histories and presences of Vietnamese migration so closely connected to concrete places as in Lichtenberg: whether the Dong Xuan Center with its small pagoda, former factories and dormitories of contract workers*, the first German-Vietnamese kindergarten, the hospital where the first psychiatric outpatient clinic for Vietnamese was established and abortions of Vietnamese women were performed, the headquarters of the Association of Vietnamese in Berlin-Brandenburg, and the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security.
Silent Moves assembles sound recordings, interviews, files of the Ministry of State Security, and music into an acoustic archipelago of Vietnamese life from the GDR to the present and links them to concrete locations. In this way, the district becomes a walk-in audio archive. In addition to contemporary witnesses and the „second generation,“ ethnologists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, musicians, and many more have their say. Among them are Anetta Kahane, the first commissioner for foreigners of the East Berlin magistrate, Tamara Hentschel, founder of Reistrommel e.V. and Thuy Nonnemann.
The arrangement of the individual acoustic „islands“ as an archipelago of voices and sounds points to the fact that they belong together in terms of content, but nevertheless avoids the temptation to try to tell a coherent story. The individual orientation of the visitors in the streets and squares is what connects the islands and gives them meaning. Silent Moves always begins in the here and now of the visitors and forms the prologue for the perception of (his)stories.
- Team
- concept and realization - Matthias Schönijahn
- collaboration - Thy Le
- scientific consulting - Dr. Anett Laue
- concept, realization engl. translation - Ana Berkenhoff
- vietnamese translation and voice - Hung Manh Le
- graphic design - Claudia Eckstein
