Ein Europe with open borders. This wasn’t just a dream, it was a reality for several years. The key words for this were “Schengen I” and “Schengen II”. These European agreements led to the barriers at Germany’s nine national borders disappearing bit by bit from 1985 to 2008.
One has to be more specific: the borders in Europe only disappeared internally. At the same time, it was expanded into a fortress on its external borders. With the well-known deadly consequences. Nevertheless, “After the Border” was originally a positive project for Silke Markefka and Nikolai Vogel when they set out in 2008 to document the disappearance of the border fortifications. They couldn’t have imagined back then that so many of them would want to go back today.
“We thought nationalism was on the decline. Now it’s coming back with a vengeance.” This is how Nikolai Vogel summarizes the current situation when he leads Silke Markefka through the exhibition “After the Border” in the Muffatwerk. Vogel is a writer and visual artist. Markefka is a painter. And together the two Munich residents visited a total of 22 border crossings from Germany to neighboring countries from July 2008 to July 2009. There should be “at least two per country,” says Vogel, who used analog recording devices to record the noises at the border. He also recorded his immediate observations into a voice recorder. Silke Markefka made sketches on site and later turned them into paintings.
The two were not interested in scientific or historical documentation, but rather an “emotional” one. And so Silke Markefka remembers today that most border towns “felt strange”. They were “depressing places,” she says, “everything was so deserted.” But this was often to the delight of nature, which, as she also remembers, had already “reconquered” a lot of things.
Otherwise there were empty buildings, ruins, some things had already been demolished. Other things were converted into an “ice cream center”, a grill house and an apartment. Swallows lived in a ruin. Vogel and Markefka didn’t talk much to people. Recording conversations was not part of the project. What surprised her was that hardly anyone was interested in her either.
Well, one or two police officers or customs officers spoke to them. The latter was more interested in Vogel’s toiletry bag than in the recording devices in his suitcase. These, from small dictation machines to cassette recorders to Revox tape machines, which can record for very long periods at slow tape speeds, are also on display. Vogel will perform a performance with it on November 23rd at 3 p.m.
The texts recorded, edited and re-recorded by Vogel can also be heard in the same room, lasting a total of four hours. The German national border is stuck on the floor. And on one side there is a poster board with 31 snapshots from back then. Some of the motifs can be seen again in the second exhibition room.
There, 31 paintings by Silke Markefka hang on cords from the ceiling. A wide variety of motifs can be seen on these, mostly in fragments. A car on the road, past a forest that disappears into nothing. A blue roof structure that can be found in one of the photos. A chapel, a parking lot, several coats of arms, a staircase and other architectural details. As with the texts, many things seem associative.
The aim here, as Vogel puts it, is to “bring up” the viewer’s own memories. And also to show how “surreal” such border places actually are. With some of its very own architecture, which is never intended to stay, but only to pass through. However, people’s rights are often determined in very serious ways.
Which subject and which recording device belongs to which location can be discovered using numbers and a legend. To provide more information, there will also be a talk on November 26th at 8 p.m. in which, among others, the directors of the Kunsthalle München and the Institut français Roger Diederen and Michael Schischke will take part. And there is a publication that will be presented at the finissage on November 30th.
On the same day, from 4 p.m., a performance by Anna McCarthy, “Invisible Borders,” will take place on Odeonsplatz, in which “border controls” will be simulated. This is about the “current migration policy”, which now also influences “After the Border”. In a project about vanished borders, or as it is now called: about the “loss of a utopia”.