 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| |
 |
|
||
"Aufstellung" Harun Farocki For “Aufstellung” (“Array”) Harun Farocki has mounted numerous figures – illustrated statistics, arrow diagrams, pie and graph charts – illustrating the theme of immigration, especially in the course of so-called "guest worker" immigration to Germany. These illustrations are taken from official brochures, school textbooks, language textbooks, history books and daily newspapers. They designate various migrant groups as pictograms with attributes: the labor migrant with a suitcase or mustache, the refugee with a bundle. Women, if they are present at all, are identified with a scarf. Farocki follows the illustrations relating to labor migration since the 1960s with cartographic representations of migration movements from various periods of the century: from mass migration around 1000 B.C. to representations of the movements of war refugees in World War II, which always center around migration and displacement from the east since the 1920s up to the present. Other maps about the period of National-Socialism show the locations of concentration camps and death camps. The parallels between migratory movements and migration in conjunction with the concentration camps focus on the primary use of gathering statistical data and the 20th century map of migration as an instrument of population control. On the basis of the image sequence of these graphical abstractions it becomes evident that labor migration is subject to the same logic of import and export as commodity flows. Through the rapid cut of the material, Farocki generates an image text different from the single image with his combination of illustrations and numbers. This is not about information, but about the extent to which these illustrations, which seem equally helpless and stereotypical, are involved in the production of opinion and knowledge. With their seemingly objective pictorialness and the comprehensible schematism of the mostly black and white graphics, the images evoke a reflex-like sense of recognition. This includes, not least of all, the threat scenario of “storming Germany”. Filmmaker, born 1944, lives and works in Berlin. |
|
|
|
