FranzFerdinandRichter

Citizenships Exhibition

DHM Berlin Citizenship + intolight

Client DHM - Exhibition "Citizenships" 01.07.22 - 12.03.23

Task: Development of 3 horizontally scrollable local websites + 1 video loop/animation as the exhibition opener showing the border shifts of countries within Europe from 1798 to today.

To belong or not to belong? This question evokes strong, conflicting feelings. Citizenship encompasses many of these feelings. It is a legal status that brings people together while also separating them. It creates national and political community, but it also marks a difference and priority over those who are outside the community. Citizenship, through its connection to the modern nation-state, became the subject of struggles for belonging and participation. It allocated rights to state welfare and political participation, and determined who had to serve the state as a conscript. Citizenship thus contributed to the construction of national, collective identity concepts and became the central instrument for the distribution of life and survival opportunities in European states of the 19th and 20th centuries.

For the realization of this project, 3 different families' stories of suffering and flight were told, who had to travel and flee through Europe due to their origin and affiliation.

A horizontally scrollable local website serves as the medium, which illustrates the history using digitized physical artifacts such as images, photos, passports, letters, coins, instruments, etc. and creates a narrative accompanied by text that spans the past 150 years. The focus is particularly on the countries of France, Poland, and Germany, which are existentially intertwined with sharp conflicts and close political cooperation.