Reifenstein, Tilo (2025) Work, guest work, out of work: on ‘becoming homeless’ with others. In: Visual arts, narrative and social class, 24-25 April 2025, University of Turku, Finland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

How does the foreigner fit into an understanding of class? Even in specific national or regional settings, the categorization of social class embraces economic, cultural, educational, professional, symbolic and other parameters in such complex and irreducible ways that class belonging is already deeply discursive. The foreigner often plays havoc with this loaded discussion because they refuse to map onto existing frameworks and broach the construct’s presumed isolability and coherence in view of social reality.
This presentation considers examples of Sung Tieu’s installation practice to explore narratives of contract labour, immigration status and social belonging. Tieu’s work regularly engages with the German Democratic Republic’s history of contract labour from Vietnam in the 1980s. The initially precarious and exploited status of Vietnamese workers in the GDR was thrown into further disarray during Germany’s reunification and, in a climate of economic decline capitalised on by neo-fascist political parties, is marked by outright threat. The solidarity between nations and workers, promised by the ‘workers' and peasants' state’, never materialised and the German Vietnamese community remained first and foremost defined by otherness as foreigners, rather than commonness as workers. Tieu’s work enables a view of workers’ (under)common ground as, what Fred Moten (2013) describes as, ‘study’: the ‘talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.’
This ‘study’ does not seek to neutralise difference between workers, dancers and/or sufferers but aims to overcome the presumed antagonism between those not (yet) at home and those who are told that their home is under threat of being overrun by the former. Yuk Hui (2024) has recently returned to Heidegger’s dictum of Heimatlosigkeit (homelessness) as the ‘destiny of the world’ in a response to the threats of capitalism and technological acceleration. ‘Becoming homeless’ is for him inevitable and a techno logical result of European ideas, but also offers a pathway for non-Eurocentric thinking. Between homelessness and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory, the foreigner and the worker may even dance together.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote)
Status:	Unpublished
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DD Germany N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR > N0061-72 Theory. Philosophy. Aesthetics of the visual arts
School/Department:	School of the Arts
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11979

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