Photos are the Initial development of the idea.

This work causes the audience to recognise and confront the metastructre of privileged German whiteness on a daily basis. The work A wie Anton is an interactive

 

Und wie heissen Sie?  A wie Anton is a work that forces it's audience to confront and recognise the privileged metastructure of German Whiteness. The practice of spelling out your name perhaps even several times a day for institutions businesses medical staff government administrators using the uniquely German Phonics system is a part of life in Germany for someone with a “foreign” name.

 

Only the German phonics system causes you to have to recant other popular and famous White German names in order to get an accurate communication of your own (non white German) name.

 

 The body is absented as it is not seen, or rather is seen in a blur as „Other“ and therefore there is the request to spell your name, and you do. Now using the German phonetics system you must become further compliant in effacing yourself by incanting the presence of several other familiar (to the listener) white German names whose only relationship to you is that they share the first letter of their name with your unfamiliar (to the listener) non White German name. This exercise is a very visual one as Germans have a very specific visual reference for these phonetics. Wagner the reference for “W” which Wangue must use to tell his name is for example a highly specific visual reference. Visual References for Wangue  are non existent for most Germans. Perhaps even his individual visual reference has registered, as he has probably not even been seen. Absent cultural references are laid bare all round. Potentially Wangue cannot „see“ himself in any of the White Germans he is recanting. A double blindness is occurring.

 

This double blindness and blurring effacement within the metastructure of whiteness in this instance are made experiential in the two works: (please see diagrams at this point)

 

I want to make this everyday casual privileging of German Whiteness visible, audible and experiential by providing a fictional German Migrants (a mixture of fourth third second and third generation migrants as well as individuals who self identify as German but have non traditional White German names)  version of this phonetic tool. I hope to encourage critical perspectives of whiteness by foregrounding how difficult it is to articulate yourself via  this problematic communications tool that is culturally exclusive and self reflective of the white majority.  The apparent efficiency or clarity of articulating yourself in this way for anybody who is having difficulty in being understood is undermined. It is just the luck of the draw if comprehension emerges. I hope to get White Germans to articulate their identity via the identities of their “migrant” population in order to begin to experience the problems and absurdity of this tool in particular and excursionist cultural narcissism in general first hand.