InThe Art of Not Being Reduced to Material, historian Astrid Kusser Ferreira refers to a picture postcard from 1912 depicting a Black man standing apart from White guests in the Prater beer garden. Using a speculative method, she negotiates the changeables rules of the visible and ‘the sayable’ in societies as well as the conflicts about racism, migration and colonisation. Kusser Ferreira develops various hypotheses that make it possible to retrace historical facts and biographical information. In order to create a reflective and contemporary approach to the reception of the picture postcard, the historian offers a network of discursive and performative practices that interpret the postcard’s image not only as material but first and foremost as a place of memory.
The Art of Not Being Reduced to Material by Astrid Kusser Ferreira is a publication in the ‘Prater Perspektiven’ series to mark the occasion of the reopening of the Berlin Prater and the municipal Prater Galerie after extensive renovations.
5 EURO, Book orders can be placed under info@pratergalerie.de
