by Sumugan Sivanesan // Oct. 13, 2023
‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does It Matter Now If I Come or Go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a’ (2023) is a docu-fiction film and visual arts installation, currently on view at Villa Oppenheim, Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Made by Berlin-based cultural scholar, curator and filmmaker Anujah Fernando, the film and installation elaborate on archival research, interviews and onsite documentation of Pension Kant. This hostel in West Berlin housed asylum seekers escaping the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and currently hosts migrants fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Anujah Fernando: ‘Kantstraße 104a: an archive survey (detail),’ 2023, installation view at Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Villa Oppenheim // Photo by Allan Laurent
In the film’s opening sequence, the camera pans down on an archival photo of the building. A voice speaking German, Eswary, informs us of the date, March 15th, 1984, when she arrives to “a really big house.” Cut as the camera pans up on crisp video footage of an elegant interior lobby. Through the open windows and doors one can glimpse a matrix of scaffolding. As the montage unfolds, close-ups of the building’s details and empty interiors are juxtaposed with candid photographs taken by young Tamil migrants, arriving in Europe for the first time in the 1980s. Recovered from family archives, these snapshots depict the quotidian lives of these young men and women. Although we have never met, I find their faces familiar, their features recognisable among my family, friends and peers. Migrants arrived at Kantraße 104a soon after the 1983 “Black July” anti-Tamil pogroms in Sri Lanka, in which over 5000 people were killed. And this exhibition opened soon after Berlin’s Tamil community, including Fernando, marked the 40th anniversary of the tragic event with a reading of eyewitness accounts at Bi’Bak Sinematranstopia.
Anujah Fernando: ‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does it matter if I come or go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a,’ 2023, film still // © Anujah Fernando
The film and exhibition are propelled by a series of fictional letters exchanged between a handful of characters, chronicling the years between 1984 and 1988, when Pension Kant hosted exclusively Tamil refugees. Devised in lieu of letters long lost, they recount a subtle drama as lives intersect, relationships form and unravel as the war escalates “back home.” Eswary, Vasudha and Nathan, Dunstan, brothers Suresh and Gauri describe to invisible interlocutors their experiences adjusting to their unfamiliar surroundings; the gendered living arrangements, struggles with finding suitable work. Desires to travel on, in search of better opportunities and to reunite with family, are offset by responsibilities in Sri Lanka, as news of the war filters in through word-of-mouth and transnational liberationist organising. One sequence recalls a day trip to the Berlin Zoo, where the young migrants encounter flamingos. Another sequence zooms in on street demonstrations and protest performances, revealing a lesser-known aspect of activist theatre in Germany. Suresh muses over the tension between anti-war activists and militant rebels who have seized the AK-47 as an emancipatory tool. Spoken in Tamil, German and English, the film is voiced by representatives of the post-migrant generations who came after—the children of those depicted in the film. Now of a similar age, they might see aspects of their own struggles with identity, racism, patriarchy, caste and the legacies of the civil war, which came to a gruesome end in 2009, through the (camera) lens of their elders.
Anujah Fernando: ‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does it matter if I come or go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a,’ 2023, film still // © Anujah Fernando
Anujah Fernando: ‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does it matter if I come or go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a,’ 2023, film still // © Anujah Fernando
At the film’s conclusion, onscreen text summarises the characters’ lives after Kantstraße 104a. Eswary and Dunstan, who met at Pension Kant, eventually marry. While others move on to Paris and Toronto, they opt to stay in Berlin, moving to Neukölln, which at that time was an economically disadvantaged, working class suburb close to a functioning airport (Flughafen Tempelhof) in a divided Germany. As one of a different Tamil diaspora who recently migrated to Berlin, I’m amused to think of their children—my peers—roaming through these same streets, and of Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin’s renown urban-playground, which has also provided temporary accommodation to a refugee community.
Anujah Fernando: ‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does it matter if I come or go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a,’ 2023, film still // © Anujah Fernando
Entering the small alcove gallery, patrons are met with a large-format archival print. Overlaid with a transparent architectural drawing behind another transparent layer of text, this palimpsestic “poster” resembles the scaffolding that encloses the present building; history re-constructed, renovated, renewed and reinforced. For me, the film and installation sets up Kanstrasse 104a as an intermediate, transforming infrastructure, a “Spekulationsobjekt” through which these memories are projected and refracted; stories (re-)inscribed into architecture to countervail periodic facelifts and renovations.
For many diaspora Tamils, silence and erasure around our elders and relatives’ experiences of war and forced migration manifest as repressed intergenerational trauma. Using fiction as a means to tease out, fabulate and discuss these struggles, ‘இனி வந்தென்ன வராமல் என்ன [Does It Matter Now If I Come or Go]–Letters from Kantstraße 104a’ offers a reparative reading/writing that enables important intergenerational and intercultural healing to occur.
Exhibition Info
Villa Oppenheim
Anujah Fernando: ‘Kantstraße 104a: an archive survey’
Closing Reception & Talk: Oct. 22; 2:30pm
Exhibition: July 28-Oct. 23, 2023
villa-oppenheim-berlin.de
Schloßstraße 55, 14059 Berlin, click here for map
