becoming german
Joanne Moar moves through Germany’s towns and cities in the tradition of a travelling journeyman, following a custom first created in Europe by the medieval craft guilds. This called for young craftsmen to broaden their technical and worldly horizons by encountering other traditions and ways of living. But the concern of this artist, who was born and grew up in New Zealand, is not just to extend her knowledge and deepen her understanding through travel. Similar to a sociological study she is gathering and processing the experiences and memories of others in order to sketch – both for herself and for her fellow human beings – a multi-layered picture of personality. This investigation’s starting point is to discover a differentiation between her own identity and that of her fellow citizens who grew up in Germany.
Growing up in New Zealand, I learned to say things like ‘Proud to be a Kiwi’. At the time, identifying myself as a Kiwi – New Zealand’s national symbol – was entirely normal. It was only when I came to Germany that I found that a ‘healthy’ sense of national identity is by no means a matter of course. (Joanne Moar)
Her project therefore focuses on the problem of roots and origins, but also on the significance of a national identity which, within the context of political, economic and cultural globalisation, can no longer be clearly outlined.
In an online discussion forum on the concept of ‘Germany’s defining culture’ [deutsche Leitkultur], the word culture is described as ‘the totality of a people’s intellectual and artistic forms of expression’. Against the background of a decline in national identity, felt more than ever since German reunification, politician Friedrich Merz and his Christian Democratic Union party have been pushing a continuing and controversial debate since the year 2000 on this subject. The term ‘Germany’s defining culture’ has even been nominated ‘non-word of the year’ by critic and scholar Walter Jens. Nevertheless what this term really entails and its consequences could hardly be defined. Evidently this conceptual construct serves if anything as a polemic instrument against an immigration society.
This discussion stimulated Moar, resident in Cologne, to turn her own experiences in Germany into the artist’s project www.becoming-german.de. Though the title emphasises the process of becoming German, Moar contrasts the patriotic call for a ‘defining culture’ with her own dynamic concept and its rather more open stance.
The project operates on two levels. In her online database www.becoming-german.de, Moar collects memories which depict an image of German childhood. The site’s users are asked to enter personal data such as where they are from, their age and gender but alsochildhood memories of books, hobbies, their favourite colour, their grandparents, summer holidays or a special birthday party. In collecting this data a sociological panorama of domestic situations across different generations is built up, but linked to it is a purely subjective archive of feelings and memories, of lost images, of dreams and desires.
These differing and multi-layered impressions raise the question of whether a typical German childhood has ever really existed or indeed ever will exist. In parallel to this investigation, the artist is testing whether she can herself adopt these experiences, so expanding her own memory and range of experience. The database accordingly has two possible uses: memories from German childhood can be added to the database (‘donating childhood memories’), or, with the help of these ‘donated’ memories, a new fictitious but credible German childhood can be assembled (‘receiving childhood memories’).
Alongside this continuously evolving documentation, Moar has been travelling through Germany since the summer of 2005 with a ‘mobile information unit’ of her own construction. This consists of a portable wooden trolley with folding tables and chairs. Moar sets this up in various public places and invites passers-by to describe their childhood memories by asking them particular questions. The first questions, about where people have come from, are designed to archive the childhood experiences of those who have grown up in Germany, regardless of their own family’s cultural or ethnic background. In the evening, the project is presented in local art institutions (art associations, project or exhibition spaces etc) and used to stimulate discussion. Through this investigation, the artist links the memories of people from different regions and towns, as well as public space, to art institutions and the virtual reality of the database. There is also a continuous and intensive press and public relations programme, designed to reach and resonate with as large a public as possible.
Through www.becoming-german.de, Moar addresses the question of national identity by conveying a model of mutual rapprochement, and an exchange of ideas and encounters. While the people she talks with and the users of her database reflect on pertinent childhood memories, they begin to investigate their own personalities and to find out about the causes and motivations for their feelings and beliefs. In conversation with the artist, images and experiences that have been forgotten or suppressed force their way to the surface, where they reveal their influence on the individual’s personality. Moar’s presence, her questions and her impulses, trigger a process peerlessly described by Marcel Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust invokes memories, past forms, persons and childhood sensations which have long since lost their power, but which, through some special stimulus, such as a particular odour or taste, can suddenly and immediately rise up again.
The many concepts, ideas, sounds, smells and tastes gathered while travelling, and then added to the database, form a tableau that is constantly reshaping itself, opening itself up and forming new boundaries. The www.becoming-german.de project formulates a model of identity that is appropriate to the social, political and cultural present, but no longer bound to the concept of nationality. Joanne Moar’s intervention into public territory, replete with exchange and dialogue, connects the individual with a society that never cuts itself off from strangers, always asks about its roots and continuously reunites the structures of its multiple identities.
Text by
Artistic Director of the Dortmund Art Association
Translated by Timothy Jones
© Translation copyright Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu
