The cloth of the homeland

July 8, 2020 or fracture museum Projects

Altranft between war and peace
Or: A cloth of the homelands

A room installation by Antje Scholz and Julius Breitenfeld in the patronage church Altranft

In the Altranfter Patronatkirche floats stretched out a large cloth, sewn by Antje Scholz, knotted, forfeited from many individual handkerchiefs. Supplemented, interwoven, contrasted by texts and recordings of conversations, which were created in conversations by Julius Breitenfeld with refugees from Syria and Chechnya, but also Ukraine and Belarus, a special space is built around this home cloth, in which one can dive with eyes and ears into different stories of life and home and flight, and the question arises, what home and its loss mean.

The room installation "A Cloth of Homelands" is dedicated to questions of flight and expulsion after 1945 up to the present. Again and again, people were driven to the Oderbruch who were or are now faced with the difficult question of whether they can settle here and make a new home, or - what? What does home mean to someone who has lost everything? What does it mean to dare a new beginning in an unknown place in an unknown landscape? What is a stranger confronted with in a strange world? Can home be found again, or does this term conceal a unique feeling or longing? The "Cloth of Homelands" by Antje Scholz and Julius Breitenfeld invites us to engage with these questions.

The cloths for the installation come from people from the Oderbruch. They were asked for a cloth - whether tablecloth, towel, handkerchief - and some keywords about their personal and family history that led them to Oderbruch.

Julius Breitenfeld spoke with refugees from Syria and Chechnya, as well as Ukraine and Belarus, and used this material, some of which was very depressing, to create a sound collage about flight and displacement and the question of how to gain a new home.