Intergenerational Solidarities: Graphic Novels

The deadline for participation was 12 January 2024.

The workshop Intergenerational Solidarities takes place within the framework of Echos der Bruderländer and aims to facilitate dialogue among different generations and explore the potential of stories to foster narratives of healing, resistance, and liberation.

This workshop seeks to foreground the liberatory aesthetics of storytelling by leveraging visual storytelling practices such as graphic novels, comic books, and poster art among others. Critical thinking is thereby facilitated by situating individual and collective experiences in their particular socio-cultural contexts by means of intermedial connections. In his analysis of comics and graphic novels, Adam Turl references seminal graphic novels that focus on the working class and socio-historical events, and posits that graphic novels are ‘an avenue of expression that often allied itself with the liberation struggles of the time’.[1] Through raising awareness, they create an alternative language capable of retelling the history and memory of a working class scarred by exile and migration. In this process of rethinking the past, they generate transformative memories, and narratives of resistance and liberation.

The workshop in Berlin is mentored by visual storyteller Hamed Eshrat and moderated by Thu Hoài Trần. It brings together former GDR contract workers or foreign students, themselves artistic practitioners, such that they can engage with younger generations. Their narratives will explore histories and archival material to unearth forgotten stories. We are looking for participants with a strong interest in the topic and a desire to create artistic work who would like to listen to the narratives of these contemporary witnesses and translate them into collective visual narrative formats such as graphic novels, artworks, or posters.

Echos der Bruderländer: What Is the price of Memory and What Is the Cost of Amnesia? Or Visions and Illusions of Anti-imperialist Solidarities is a multidisciplinary project that critically maps the German Democratic Republic’s complex history and relations with its so-called ‘brother countries’. The project elaborates on the ways in which the Bruderländer policy and amnesia surrounding it continue to shape Germany and the demography, culture, economy, and politics its former ‘brother countries’, and more particularly the lives of those who migrated through the conditions of the Eastern alliances. Echos der Bruderländer comprises an exhibition, performances, film screenings, educational programme, podcast, sonic practices, and digital and print publications as well as workshops in Berlin and in partner institutions in Vietnam, Angola, Algeria, Ghana, Cuba, and Chile.

[1] Adam Turl, ‘A Worker Reads Graphic Novels’, Red Wedge (January 2020), https://www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/graphic-worker.