Work in Frequencies: On the Acoustics of Gastarbeit and gendered Exploitation
Turkish women, as stated by a West German newspaper in 1968, are easier to come by. Especially the illiterate ones. Despite this derogatory rhetoric, which reveals the intersections of class, gender, and race, public memory of Gastarbeit remains dominated by male figures. The photograph of Armando Rodrigues de Sá receiving a moped upon his arrival in Germany as the millionth Gastarbeiter has become a central image in the memory of German migration history. While the history of Gastarbeit has been extensively documented through sociological research and visual archives, its acoustic dimensions remain comparatively unexplored.
This gap is particularly noteworthy, given that the history of Gastarbeit is deeply entangled with questions of narratability and the possibilities and constraints of articulation. Gastarbeiterinnen were subject to a double structure of exploitation, laboring under conditions of racial and legal precarity in factories as well as the home. Precisely because regimes of visibility frequently reproduce the power relations they bring to light, the auditory may offer a differently structured way of engaging with this history. By examining the durational, relational, and affective dimensions of audiovisual media, my project asks what forms of political subjectivity emerge through audio-vision. The temporal dimension assumes particular significance in this inquiry as sound unfolds in duration, while the image is often understood to arrest moments in time.
Whether and how the different temporalities of sound and image become politically operative in the works examined – as an inscription of exploitation or as a form of presence – is one of the questions the project pursues. How does one listen to images, which images are audible, and are their subjects therefore also audible? The primary objects of study are Gertrud Pinkus’s The Greatest Virtue of a Woman Is Her Silence (1980) and Serap Berrakkarasu’s Ekmek Parasi – Money for Bread (1994), alongside various media projects. Drawing on audiovisual studies and feminist theories of reproductive labor, these works are read as aesthetic sites in which the sensory conditions of democratic coexistence are brought into question. As migrant narratives gain increasing prominence in cultural production, migrant women remain exposed to precarity and exploitation. For this reason, the history of labor migration remains a history of the present. Echoing Max Frisch, Cem Karaca reminds us: Es wurden Arbeiter gerufen, doch es kamen Menschen an.
