REFUGEE CONVERSATIONS

2014

Site specific video installation; seamless 5 channel projection, documentary footage, slit scan effects
4:51

Adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversation by Danielle Roney
Translation by David Dollenmayer, unpublished
Reading by Zohreh Birjandian

Adapted from Bertolt Brecht’s play, Refugee Conversations (1940), the project of the same title, incorporates a reading by an Iranian immigrant (USA) with transit routes based in Istanbul. Filmed in 2011, the cinematic piece highlights the historic Sirkeci Station, once the end of the Orient Express, while portraying the expansion and contraction of personal mobility routes to and from a city at the epicenter of migration. The slit scan technique fragments the movement of people and places within the footage, displacing time and space within the fleeting moments of freedom of mobility.

The piece was shot before the subsequent closing of the station’s exterior commuter train lines and the following Arab Spring uprisings in Tahrir Square. Expanding outward from the historic train station through Istanbul’s vehicular and ferry transit routes, Sirkeci Station replaces the original site of a Helsinki train station in Brecht’s original play from 1940. The dialog emphasizes an intimate conversation between two exile immigrants traveling under the darkness of anonymity that is adapted for this contemporary portrayal in a monologue format of excerpts. The reading, by US/Iranian immigrant Zohreh Birjandian, illuminates the current and historical juxtapositions of human migration and conditions of exile caused by oppression and violence.

Dialogue Excerpts from Refugee Conversations

Part 1

We are men and man is noble.
This word ‘Nobility’. What is the noblest part of man?
‘Creativity’? ‘A love of order’?
No. The noblest part of man is his passport.

A man can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless way and for no good reason. But not a passport. That’s why its accepted if its good, but a man can be as good as he wants and no one will accept him.

So you could say, a passport is more important than the man who carries it. The man is just a kind of mechanical device for carrying the passport from country to country.

The passport is a thing. But the man is necessary to the passport, in a sense: in the same way that a surgeon needs a patient to operate on. Its the same in a modern country. The important thing is great men need people to lead. They’re great men, but then someone has to be the little man, otherwise it doesn’t work.

Yes, great men need us. The great men who have surfaced in various parts of the world display a great interest in mankind. That’s why passports are so important these days, you need them to keep order. Imagine if I were running around who I am, without papers, why, they wouldn’t be able to find me when my turn came to be deported.

Think of the chaos. Everything would be destroyed in the pursuit.
Every lover of order knows what I’m talking about.

Part 2

I made a curious observation. I discovered that life in the centers of civilization have become so complicated that even the best brains have no overview. Our entire existence depends upon the economy, but the economy is so complicated no one can understand it! Man has built up an economy that only supermen can understand!

It is simply impossible to know what is going on. The experts and market analysts can only show they have heads by shaking them.

I am reminded of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The problem is this: investigations in the field of atomic physics are hindered by the fact that very powerful microscopes are needed to observe events inside the atom. The light in the microscopes has to be so bright that it causes overheating and destruction, actual revolution in the atomic world.

We set what we want to observe on fire by trying to observe it.

It seems to me to be the same in the world of a society. The investigation of social processes doesn’t leave those processes untouched, but changes them, a directly revolutionary effect. That’s why those in power always try to conceal what’s going on. They fear we’ll start something that will get out of hand.