Be Right Back

The starting point is the labour agreements between the GDR and its socialist sister states, which were geared towards temporary employment and interchangeability. After reunification, these agreements led in many places to criminalisation and the threat of deportation.

The logic of exploitability inherent in them continues to have an effect: to this day, migrantised individuals are divided into usable labour and undesirable groups and played off against one another.

“Be Right Back” understands loneliness not as a private feeling, but as a politically constructed condition arising from regimes of mobility, economic pressure and denied belonging. Care work across distances, financial expectations and everyday discrimination are thereby individualised and excluded from public discourse.

In a present where new recruitment agreements are emerging whilst social belonging is simultaneously being renegotiated and restricted, the work traces these historical continuities.

Between archive and memory, the loneliness that is structurally denied to diasporic experiences becomes apparent.