Fallschirmseide / Μετάξι Αλεξίπτωτων / Parachutesilk – Situating Memories is a workshop about practices of commemoration within the frame of the Greek-German history and its continuities starting from WWII and the threads leading to the context of our encounter today on Hydra. It’s about artistic approaches and methods within a process of perceiving places, people, material and layers of history.

During the workshop we explore the space between the two languages through reading Greek and German together from the bilingual book “Fallschirmseide / Μετάξι Αλεξίπτωτων“. The act of listening to an unknown language that is at the same time talking about a common history is meant to build a frame in which the participants can pick up threads in history in order to intertwine them with their perception of the island, their surroundings, their own personal historical position. 

We talk about questions like how history is told, who is telling history, which images are used in order to describe historical events or developments, who is listening to whom and how history is silenced. The workshop provides examples of practices challenging memory and involvement in history. With the example of Cretan women entering their memories to their everyday life and the war crimes of the German Wehrmacht on Crete through remembering the parachutes, with which German paratroopers invaded the island Crete in 1941, we question the established narration and try to understand which role objects can play – as examples, as container, as agents.

We go into an exchange about established presumptions in their specific cultural context. We will speak about stereotypes, impulses for research and historical developments that brought us where we are today. Within this frame we try to formulate own, personal questions concerning significant details, obstacles, curiosities, stories or found objects that cross our way, that raise our attention in order to find gaps, grey zones or places beyond, that are worth to step into.