Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue

by Andrea Scrima

I moved to Berlin in 1984, but have rarely written about my experiences living in a foreign country; now that I think about it, it occurs to me that I lived here as though in exile those first few years, or rather as though I’d been banished, as though it hadn’t been my own free will to leave New York. It’s difficult to speak of the time before the Wall fell without falling into cliché—difficult to talk about the perception non-Germans had of the city, for decades, because in spite of the fascination Berlin inspired, it was steeped in the memory of industrialized murder and lingering fear and provoked a loathing that was, for some, quite visceral. Most of my earliest friends were foreigners, like myself; our fathers had served in World War II and were uncomfortable that their children had wound up in former enemy territory, but my Israeli and other Jewish friends had done the unthinkable: they’d moved to the land that had nearly extinguished them, learned to speak in the harsh consonants of the dreaded language, and betrayed their family and its unspeakable sufferings, or so their parents claimed. We were drawn to the stark reality of a walled-in, heavily guarded political enclave, long before the reunited German capital became an international magnet for start-ups and so-called creatives. We were the generation that had to justify itself for being here. It was hard not to be haunted by the city’s past, not to wonder how much of the human insanity that had taken place here was somehow imbedded in the soil—or if place is a thing entirely indifferent to us, the Earth entirely indifferent to the blood spilled on its battlegrounds. Read more »

Why on Earth Should It Mean That It Is Not Real?

A Conversation with Joan Giroux

by Andrea Scrima

Joan Giroux, born 1961 in Syracuse, New York, moved to the East Village in the early eighties to attend Parsons School of Design. After graduation, she began traveling back and forth between New York and Berlin, first as a guest student with Shinkichi Tajiri at the Hochschule der Künste, then to take part in a graduate program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. With a focus on sculpture, Giroux moved from interactive objects and kinetic sculpture into installation, performance, social practice, and community engagement. She has shown internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, American Academy in Rome, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Artists Space, BACA Downtown, and Künstlerhaus Hamburg, and has participated in international symposia for the arts and the environment in Korea, Japan, and Germany. She also shows her work in a number of public, alternative, and nontraditional venues, such as in the exhibition memory marks at the Hospice of Santa Barbara’s Leigh Block Gallery. Grants and awards include the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Residency, a Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and artist’s grants from Berlin’s Senate for Cultural Affairs and the Pollock Krasner Foundation, as well as residencies at the Squire Foundation and the MacDowell and Millay colonies. She teaches at Columbia College in Chicago. Read more »