Wirf dich in Schale und bleib daheim, Trinh T. Minh-ha (2019)

Statement at Love and Ethnology, HKW, Berlin, DE

"In his opposition to the contrived and fantastical aspects of the neo-sensitive contemporary literature of the 1970s that so disturbed him, as well as the masculine- heterosexual, ungentle insensitivity of the German realists, Fichte found an ally in an “aesthetic of the factual.” This, he attributed to journalism, or at least in its ideal form as writing committed to precise research and reporting, but also to people’s unguarded talk and gossip. Journalistic techniques and media were also employed for recording (the in-depth interview and the cassette recorder) whether it be tracing gossip in the Senegalese psychiatric institutions, interviewing politicians such as Salvador Allende or Léopold Sédar Senghor, or developing an ethnography of the German sex industry from in-depth interviews with sex workers in Hamburg."

Text: HKW

I commented on Hubert Fichte’s practices, drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s feminist and postcolonial perspective.

English version