All the Names

In the summer of 2007 I was artist-in-residence in Munich. The city’s Arts Council had invited me to produce work on the Arbeitsmigration, a mass migration of workers to West Germany during the country’s post-WWII economic boom. During my stay in Munich I visited the city’s public archive in the search for images I could work with. I was stunned when I began to realise that I would not be able to find the images I was looking for. Since my parents had met in West Germany during exactly that time – my mother being a local and my father a student – I had heard many stories about that time, but nothing in the archive bore witness to them. Two years later I discovered a plethora of images that seemed to tell stories similar to the ones I knew, in Archiv DOMiD, an archive established by Turkish migrants in Cologne. ‚All the Names‘ was the first work I created in relation to this collection.

(All photographs were kindly lent by Archiv DOMiD).