Content

GUESTures / GOSTIkulacije is a decade-long project by artist Margareta Kern that combines a dual-channel video installation with a participatory migratory archive to trace the overlooked histories of Yugoslav ‘guest workers’ – women who migrated to West Berlin in the late 1960s and early 1970s to work in television factories. The project brings together interviews with migrant women, their family album photographs and personal letters, alongside official archival material. Drawing on her own experience of migration, as well as her family history, Kern’s project addresses the double invisibility faced by migrant women workers, whose stories are often marginalised both in their host countries and ‘back home’.

Methodology

In researching and exhibiting GUESTures / GOSTIkulacije, a number of creative and critical methodologies were developed: the material is presented as interactive workstations, inviting visitors to engage with and expand upon these stories – become ‘guest workers’ – while live readings transform the gallery into an act of counter-memory and a form of living, migratory archive. The two-channel video brings the testimonies of women workers to life through a montage of performance, re-enactment, and archival footage.