Uff, German language is hard, yes, I am Cuban. I was born in 1992, in the middle of Havana. I studied literature and it seems that's why I had to learn a language that grammatically fucked me up. A lot. German is a language that you have to get into your body. It is a language of time. A culture that takes centuries to get into your body and skin.

Testimony of an woman interviewed

 

 

This is a performance about migration of women in Hamburg. Women from American continent. 

 

It is is based on their experiences of travel and arrival in the city, and about all the elements involved with the adjustment.

This project has an inspiration on an investigation about labour rights and migration simultaneously made in Barcelona during 2021, but now and here the new context poses other (likely harder) obstacles: language and cultural background.

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The experience of migrating in these cases is closely related to a social pressure to fit into certain stereotypes of success and personal behaviour, how "we should move, talk and express ourselves as foreign women". Where do we have to forget what we were, and where do we start to build a new "character" (with new gestures, voices, habits). 

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With not much time and not ideal knowledge about the city, we tried to meet a specific group of people and work on these testimonies, in order to create a work in progress: a final performance on stage. This uses videos of a person directly interviewed, photos using relevant spaces in the city previously mentioned in those talks, a re-created questionnaire to have a first job and documents, fictional and personal pictures and protected data offered by the participants in the process. 

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The performance remains as a stage in progress, an invitation to keep investigating a topic intimately related to the current social life of Hamburg, and its history of exile and refuge place for decades. It is also a reminder of our debt with these kind of socio-political researches from artistic practices and speeches.

 

The girls are still opening cans, are still fighting in process. 

Many thanks to all of them.