The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a poem by Giánnis Rítsos about the island of Makrónisos. Ritsos was among many Greek artists and intellectuals detained in a camp on Makrónisos during the Greek Civil War. The goal of the imprisonment was to "re-educate" the detainees in order to turn them into "good citizen"and "real Greeks". In this process of "re-education" many people lost their lives. Similar camps where located on other Greek islands. Some of them where re-opened during the military Junta, a time in which many of the formerly detained where persecuted again. The works in the exhibition address these repressed strata of history.
Recently the nationalist far right in Greece has called for reopening the camps on Makrónisos and other Greek islands, in order to detain refugees and migrants there. The populist call for reopening the camps is answered by the formation of new kinds of detention centers with limited access to the outside world, and a border regime that criminalizes sea rescue and refugees rights activism. These developments are supported by the German government, the European Union and go hand in hand with nationalist and far right movements in all European nation-states.
The exhibition raises questions about the historical repetition of violence produced by the capitalist nation-state, its antidemocratic tendencies and its nationalist ideology of homogeneous citizenry. Through looking at the visual traces and marks of the different historical layers as well as the signs they leave within language, the works enter a dialogue about the violent past and present produced by the system of capitalist nation-states and their border regimes.
The exhibition is complemented by the workshop "Shadows Cast. Militarized Camps In Greece From World War II Until Today," 15.08., 12-5 p.m. at basis reading room, Gutleutstr. 8-12.