A Performative Intervention
Some histories are buried twice: once when they happen, and again when they fall out of the story we tell about ourselves. This is what became of the Tirailleurs — soldiers of the French colonial army from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania who helped free the continent from Nazi Germany. What remains of them today, and who is still sent to fight the wars of others?
Within the HKW exhibition Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations, the Shadow Museum and its audience gather around a collage of sound poems, quotations, advertising texts and interviews. The broken trench-language of the title — after Ernst Jandl, the Austrian poet whose 1957 sound poem stripped a battle down to its raw noise — opens onto the questions of the present: compulsory military service and the “cityscape” debate.
For this, the Shadow Museum devises a performance in which the audience moves through several stations, encountering different experiences from a range of young perspectives. Visitors can experiment, connect with one another and share their views. The language and the apparent sense of the tasks of army life are made visible and tangible to them in relation to the “cityscape” debate and from the perspective of different generations.
In doing so, the performance lifts the exhibition out of the past. The Tirailleurs are not only a historical chapter but a tragedy still unfolding — in the remilitarisation of Europe, in the soldiers drawn from Korea, Africa and elsewhere into the war in Ukraine, in the quiet reenactment that pulls a whole society back toward the front.
By and with: Laith Azimi, Amélie Boßlet, Oskar Glas, Elis Nägele, Phanuel Nlend, Elijah Sagor, Elona Sagor, Moritz Scheffer, Mariama Suwareh
Mentoring: Anja Scheffer, Nadja Talmi
Photos Silke Briel