Rein-Bericht-Raus

For the people from Central Europe the connotations of ‘travelling’ are clearly positive: vacation, business, education; 'The idea of buying the promises of hapiness, joy, relax appears often '1. The fictional protagonists of the Rein-Bericht-Raus video exhibition had gone on their journey because there are people in Austria driven by their power and erotic fantasies to search for sex workers. Such journey involves money, drugs, physical and psychological violence, as well as broken promises, unfulfilled dreams, desires and hopes, compulsion. The circumstances that can neither be understood nor reconstructed, that can merely be discussed.
In the context of migration words like 'human flotsam' are often used – also Jennifer und Susanne use „Found Footage“: the texts, videos and objects are brought together in the very course of this exhibition to constitute an integrated whole. What should be discovered are the system and the mechanism – an interpretation of the conditions in which the immigrants who earn their living as sex workers live – a new perspective is used, in both figurative and literal sense. Their goal is to provoke the ‘subjective judgment of actions’, encourage the 'understanding' as meant by a sociologist Max Weber but all this without bursting the borderlines of empathy.

 [1] English translation by Bildetage, original quotation in: KAGELMANN, Jürgen in an Interview for the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 8.7.2008, downloaded from: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/reise/728/302724/text/ , on 19.3.2010
[2] vgl. JUNG, Matthias/NIEHR, Thomas/BÖKE, Karin: Ausländer und Migranten im Spiegel der Presse. Ein diskurshistorisches Wörterbuch zur Einwanderung seit 1945. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2000, p. 131.
[3] WEBER, Max: Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, p. 1. J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen 1922. downloaded from: http://www.archive.org/stream/wirtschaftundges00webeuoft#page/n15/mode/1up on 19.3.2010
 [4] vgl. as above: Matthias/NIEHR, Thomas/BÖKE, Wiesbaden 2000.