This is precisely where Rosefeldt's criticism sets in: he
takes the prevailing image of people from foreign cultures and exaggerates
it further. For Asylum, he picked out 120 actors, many of them
living in Germany as asylum seekers. In a total of nine film sequences,
they are portrayed in groups, organized into supposedly clear ethnic
categories and performing dreary menial jobs - Asian kitchen help, Arabic
newspaper carriers, Indian rose peddlers, exotic prostitutes, and cleaning
women wearing the obligatory headscarf. Yet the locations in which they
perform their tasks are entirely removed from the everyday: in a steam
bath, the rose peddlers are performing strange rituals; the cleaning women
are sweeping a tropical dwelling; and for the newspaper carriers,
Rosefeldt chose a wind tunnel in which they have to pick up the paper
scattered by the storm of a turbine.
Asylum describes a
world of bizarre actions in foreign locations; it reflects, perhaps, the
fate of migrants damned by law to
inactivity as asylum seekers. At the same time, the spaces are also
mysterious, cave-like places where rituals evidently occur, ones that
remain incomprehensible to the viewer. Rosefeldt investigates the clichés
the TV public forms based on the news coverage of foreigners, "just like
when we're travelling and are amazed by the folklore without understanding
what's happening in a particular place. But when symbols of this kind of
culture turn up at home, as a
minaret or a headscarf in the classroom, people are suddenly outraged." Is
Rosefeldt searching for models to school our relationship to foreignness?
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Julian Rosefeldt: from the serie „Asylum“,
2003
©Julian Rosefeldt
It's unlikely. The viewer quickly becomes entrapped by a world in which
secrecy and kitsch interlock. Sometimes Rosefeldt adds a little bit of
offensiveness, letting the prostitutes pose in tempting g-strings and
garters in a room with ancient sculptures and having them dust the statues
with a feather duster. In moments like these, one should perhaps adhere to
Rosefeldt's own statements, and then the next-to-naked beauties from
Thailand become a reflection of high culture - just like the gods of old
that Warburg collected in his Image Atlas.
Translation: Andrea
Scrima
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