DISPLACED 2015

“Instead of a homeland I hold the metamorphoses of the world.”

Nelly Sachs, ‘Flight and Metamorphosis’

“The Europeans forget all too easily that the phenomenon of forced flight is in fact something originally European, as are the chimneys of Auschwitz and the Gulags in the Siberian snow. All too often they forget that only a few decades ago whole armies and bands moved through Europe, leaving behind them nothing but ruins, smoking remains and vast numbers of raped and tortured women. One forgets that even as late as 1959, thousands of people in Europe were still stranded in camps. One forgets that alone between the outbreak of the First and the Second World War and the resolution of the refugee problems associated with these wars, so in the period between 1914 and 1960, around 75 million Europeans fell victims to deportations, evacuations, flight or expulsion. These victims were our parents, grandparents … “

Jan M. Piskorski, ‘Die Verjagten’

DISPLACED 2015 takes place in the region of Fläming, south of Berlin, over several weekends in June and July 2015.

This year our annual contemporary arts festival focuses on the issue of Displacement: be it geographical displacement – the migration and dislocation of persons – or cultural displacement; as a result of conflict, economic pressures, the effects of environmental degradation, of globalisation, through increased freedom of movement and an increasingly interconnected world.

2015 marks the 70 year anniversary of the end of WW II, a period of mass displacement of persons around the globe. The estimated figure of over 50 million Displaced Persons worldwide, in the years following the war, has been surpassed this past year for the first time, making it a topmost European and worldwide concern, closely linked to political, economic, and not least, environmental factors. The mass displacements and expulsions of the past are still reverberating today, as those who are displaced displace and the unsettled unsettle, in a chain of events that has yet to run its course.

Our festival is held in a region that has known many millions of Displaced Persons throughout the centuries: displaced by the bloody religious conflicts that decimated Europe, and which began here; displaced by the emergence of new nation-states, the redrawing of borders in the explosion of WW I, and in the resulting hunger years; displaced during the huge upheavals of National Socialism and WW II, with its death marches and lost armies, and in the mass relocations following the war.

This local history of Displacement is our link to Syria and to Sudan, to the Indians of the Amazon displaced as their homeland forests are being destroyed, to the millions of Chinese migrating into megacities, and to France of the Front National; to all who are displaced from their homes, who are displaced within their homeland, and those affected by Displacement.

DISPLACED 2015 offers a platform and an opportunity for artists, performers, thinkers and audiences to engage with and highlight the important issue of Displacement, as reflected in our local, personal and global contexts: as a physical, temporal, cultural, and psychological experience of dislocation, the sense of being uprooted, of unfamiliarity, uncertainty, instability and insecurity.

Festival Programme

Our Venues

The Mendelsohn Hall

Industriestrße 2, 14943 Luckenwalde

The central venue for our festival is the former hat factory in Luckenwalde (Brandenburg), one of the most important examples of architecture by renowned architect Erich Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn himself was a displaced person: as a Jew Mendelsohn was forced to emigrate from Germany in spring of 1933, after the National Socialists’ takeover, first to England, then to Palestine and finally to America.

The recently renovated hall itself has an unsettled history. From serving as a hat production plant for the Friedrich Steinberg, Herrmann & Co Company, it became a weapons factory producing parts for the Luftwaffe after the Jewish Herrmann family were forced to emigrate due to Nazism’s race policies.

After the war in 1945 all the machinery was dismantled and brought to the Soviet Union as reparations payment. The Red Army used the hall as a workshop until 1956. From 1957 the VEB metalworks had its production in the former hat factory, following which the grand building was abandoned and left to decay.

Now it stands as a very unique exhibition hall, stretching over more than 10.000 square meters, ready to be filled with creative ideas.

Getting There

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Gallery

SCHLACHTEN | Mendelsohn Hall | Image © Alvaro Torres Vallejo

Schloss Wiepersdorf

Schloss Wiepersdorf is located southeast of Jüterbog (Brandenburg). The beautiful castle has held a very special place in the history of German arts, especially literature. The former home of celebrated romantic poets, Achim von Arnim and Bettina von Arnim, it has long served as a place for the exchange of ideas.

After an eventful history it was eventually placed in 2006 under the administration of the German Foundation for Monument Protection, and with the support of the State of Brandenburg and that of the German federal government was permanently established as an artist-residence center.