ort_m stands for migration and and its memory, as well as for the Mediterranean Sea. Topics that move us are remembered and reconsidered: war, forced migration, globalisation, and colonialism in non-European, European, and local perspectives, and their significance for art production. It was our aim to present to the public the life experiences of migrants through art and to provide a platform for dialogue.
From September to December 2015, artists from Hamburg produced art in workshops together with migrants from non-European countries, many of whom were themselves professional artists. At the beginning of 2016, the participants presented this work in progress in an exhibition. Migrants from Lampedusa and Ghana were also invited to introduce their projects.
Through installations, objects, sculptures, prints, film, photography, performance, rhythm and poetry production, as well as art in public space, the ort_m exhibition opened space for reflection. The accompanying programme invited visitors to lectures, film evenings, as well as to guided city tours to vestiges of migration and colonialism.
ort_m is a model approach for the conception of transcultural spaces, in which the voices of those are heard whose histories have, to date, been ignored by the European majority culture. In these Third Spaces (Homi K. Bhabha) own perspectives, remembrances, narratives and images are focused. ort_m invited citizens from Hamburg to deal with artistic views of migration and mobility ciphers of globalization that will increasingly change the lives of all of us in urban society.
