Date: Friday, 12th July & Saturday, 13th July 2024
Venue: Humanities Institute (H204 / top floor) & Goethe Institut (Film screening)
2021 saw numerous events take place across Germany to mark the 60th anniversary of the Anwerbeabkommen [bilateral recruitment agreement] between the Federal Republic of Germany and Turkey, signalling its importance within Germany’s post-war history. As historians such as Rita Chin (2007) have shown, however, it was the Anwerbestopp, the German government’s decision to unilaterally end its guest worker programmes on 23rd November 1973, that paradoxically led to greater pressure on individual foreign workers and their families to settle in West Germany. Despite restrictive citizenship laws, this resulted in longer term diasporic residency, which has significantly shaped and been shaped by the FRG today.
This two-day conference marks the 50th Anniversary of this turning point by exploring the cultural political implications of ‘residency’. Residency as a legal status can both precede and preclude citizenship. Its ambivalent relationship to twentieth-century assumptions of a singular national identity invites alternative ideas about what it means to be at home in and to access the state in transnational times. Its temporal aspect calls teleologies of integration and assimilation into question. These ambivalences are reflected not only in artistic work which situates itself in relation to experiences and practices of residency in Germany, but also in the use of artistic residencies within the cultural sector (programmes in which artists have the opportunity to work in a different institutional environment for a time limited period).
This two-day event includes a public screening of the film(opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)Liebe, D-Mark und Tod(2022) by Cem Kaya,and a keynote by Prof. Onur Suzan Nobrega.
We are grateful to the UCD Humanities Institute, the UCD College of Arts and Humanities, the Goethe Institut, and King's College London for their support.
Conference organisers: Maria Roca Lizarazu, Leila Mukhida, Lizzie Stewart, Joseph Twist