HAARWERK

2018

Video installation (single channel with audio)

Variable dimensions / Loop 30 minutes

Haarwerk (Hair Work) was commissioned by curator Roger Buergel (Documenta 12) for his exhibition “Mobile Worlds - Museum of Our Transcultural Gift”, produced by the Johann Jakobs Museum in Zurich and the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts (MKG), Germany in collaboration with the University of Viadrina (Frankfurt / Oder) and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University (Frankfurt / Main), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF).

Following the proposal of the exhibition, Dias & Riedweg were inspired by one of the works in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg - a box with embroidery and braids made from natural hair - original work from the region in the 19th century, and they came from it to make a video in the barber shops that are in the vicinity of this museum.

The video reveals intimate images of the daily work of the barbers, accompanied only by the music played at the filming locations themselves and edited to quotes from the barbers about their recent lives and migratory processes. The totality of these barbers and a large part of the clientele are of foreign origin, notably from the same countries that originated the recent waves of mass immigration to Germany and the rest of central Europe that occurred at the end of the past decade ... They are Turks, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Africans who today constitute a considerable presence in Germany's second largest city.

Just as the braided blond hair in the museum's collection is a cultural document of life in the region during the 19th century, the Dias & Riedweg video is inscribed as a document of the new multicultural reality of Germany's second largest city at the beginning of the 21st century.