Those we call foreigners

Akademie Schloss Solitude
Baden-Wurtemberg, Germany
October 2022 – March 2023
The Trailer Collective

This project is a kind of artistic/socio-political obsession. It is a documentary research based on the migration experiences of Latin American women living in the Baden-Wurttemberg region. Their experiences related to their arrival in Germany, their different ways of facing the so-called integration process, and also the way in which the German law frames this process from the legal and political point of view, are the axes on which this project works. What is it to integrate into a new society, what is carried and what is abandoned? What are the renunciations, the affective and social behaviour adaptations, how is this process approached from the body, the strength and the fragility of women who arrive from another continent?

In this moment of the project, we decided to create a material that could creatively interweave the various files collected and generated during the work process. We have called this material an album: because this format allows us to collect testimonies and materials of different typology, such as photographs, texts, graphics, codes, timelines, and references to other video and audio files, without losing its quality as a sensitive record, a kind of gesture for memory and the future.

The album opens a window to the senses, the affections, the experiences, the memories, and to the present, to the fragility of a process that, paradoxically, is difficult to collect in a two-dimensional format, and that wishes to end with a question that looks to the future: a more inclusive future. This attempt is, therefore, a symbolic gesture to map the unfathomable nature of affective processes, of adaptation, of cultural adjustment.

This gesture, this album, of course, is still under construction.

+ info:  The Trailer Collective Website

CREDITS

Experts of life: (the persons listed here are the ones who wanted to continue till the end of the process, although we interviewed 12 more experts of life).

Lidia Corcorán
Laura Sánchez
Nur Alamir
Claudia Parra
Daniela Ramírez

Expert on migration policy (collaborator)
Magdalena Benavente

Coordination/direction/dramaturgy
Alessandra Santiesteban
Karina Pino Gallardo

Photographic documentation
Alessandra Santiesteban

Special acknowledgment/ collaborators
Melanie Mohren (Die Institution)
Bernhard Herbordt (Die Institution)
Paula Kohlmann (Theatre Rampe Stuttgart)
Jasmine Schädler (theatre maker Stuttgart)
Débora Vilches (artist/musician Stuttgart)
Magda Agudelo (La Fuchsia Kollektive Stuttgart)

Funding
Project awarded by the Solitude Fellowship Program in Aural and Physical Sphere (Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany 2022-2023)