Concept, dramaturgy, performance: Minh Duc Pham / Technical support (for music boxes): Daniel Möller / Music: Neda Sanai / Music box composition: Minh Duc Pham / Dramaturgical consultation: Hai Anh Trieu
What are the consequences of the political and economic exploitation of migrant labour experiences? The performance “Be Right Back” explores this question proceeding from a telephone call, examining loneliness as a state situated between participation, absence and structural invisibility.
The starting point is the labour agreements between the GDR and its socialist sister states, which were geared towards temporary employment and interchangeability. After reunification, these agreements led in many places to criminalisation and the threat of deportation. The logic of exploitability inherent in them continues to have an effect: to this day, migrantised individuals are divided into usable labour and undesirable groups and played off against one another.
“Be Right Back” understands loneliness not as a private feeling, but as a politically constructed condition arising from regimes of mobility, economic pressure and denied belonging. Care work across distances, financial expectations and everyday discrimination are thereby individualised and excluded from public discourse.
In a present where new recruitment agreements are emerging whilst social belonging is simultaneously being renegotiated and restricted, the work traces these historical continuities. Between archive and memory, the loneliness that is structurally denied to diasporic experiences becomes apparent.
Team
Dates
Current
Day ticket “Be Right Back” (HAU2) + “A Conversation on Displacement and Loneliness” (HAU2) + “Loneliness and Agency in Digital Spaces” (HAU2) + “Johatsu – Into Thin Air” (HAU1)
Credits
Part of “Being Alone – Artistic Perspectives from Central and East Asia and Beyond“, a project within “Solitude: Loneliness & Freedom,” an initiative of the Goethe-Institutes in East and Central Asia in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Production: Minh Duc Pham. Co-production: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Goethe-Institut Seoul.
Location
HAU2
Hallesches Ufer 34, 10963 BerlinThere are two marked parking spots in front of the building. Barrier-free restroom facilities are available. Four relaxed seats are available in the first row of HAU2.
