Video installation
1920 x 1080, 3 channels, 27 min on loop, 2018
Original 4K digital video, ORWO 16mm B&W Film
Café Togo focuses on the engagement for the re-naming of Streets with colonial connotations — Petersallee, Lüderitzstraße and the Nachtigalplatz — in the so-called Afrikanisches Viertel (African Quarter) in the district of Berlin-Wedding. According to §5, Art.2 Berliner Straßengesetz, each street, event and place in the city of Berlin honours the person, place or event it is named after. The two streets and the place named after personalities, whose biographies are tainted with the blood of German colonial victims, honouring becomes a skewed undertaking. According to the same law, streets, places or events are to be re-named if not in consonance with today’s understanding of democratic and human rights definitions. The short film follows in its documental and fictional scenes visions of the Black activist Abdel Amine Mohammed, who is intensively involved in the process of renaming streets with colonial connotations in Berlin. His key argument is based on a perspective change of symbolic politics implemented by state authorities in this regard: turning away from honouring colonial perpetrators into honouring victims of the German colonial regime. Abdel Amine (a member of the ISD – Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland) is active in a collective of initiatives both from the Black community as well other civil society NGOs, whose activism seeks to implement change, by arguing from a postcolonial perspective: a multi-dimensional politics of remembrance.
Installation view at 68th Berlinale © Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper
Still image from Café Togo © Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper
