OPLATZ BOX – The Refugee Movement Is The Movement Of The 21st Century
Library
This was the library. After the eviction in 2014, we were internally displaced because we didn’t have a place to continue doing the work. So we tried to organize with alternative groups where we could find a meeting place. And we had one with a Turkish feminist organisation [TEO, unsure of spelling]. And then we went to the Stadt [Teil, unsure of spelling] Bureau in Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain. And then we were able to come to this third place, the [Musischgang, unsure of spelling] at Heinrich Platz, where we continued meeting, and it was from Heinrich Platz that we were able to find an office.
This is also an image that has to do with the history of IWS, but it also has to do with the act of publishing, in our own words. And what was the second one?
We exist. We are here.
Yeah. Because that was also done around that time, right?
Yes. By this time we had already finished with the publishing. But then we were preparing for the conference and documentation.
OPLATZBOX is a mobile archive dedicated to the feminist struggle in the Refugee Resistance Movement with a focus on testimonies and visions of women* and queers from Black, Indigenous, migrant and People of Colour communities. Showcasing films, podcasts, publications and ephemera gathered and produced by International Women* Space / IW*S across 10 years as well as art works, performances, radio programs, poetry, music and talks OPLATZBOX is a temporary education centre of migrant anticolonial knowledges open to all over a period 5 days.
A monument to the resistance and worldmaking of Black women* that shaped the fabric of the refugee movement and its enduring legacy, OPLATZBOX is part of the arts and culture festival “Oplatz wird 10 – Baustelle Migration“. Ten years after the beginning of the occupation of Oranienplatz square, the festival organized by IW*S celebrates the empowerment histories of the Refugee Resistance Movement in Berlin and makes proposals for a diverse, postcolonial, grassroots democratic, and postmigrant society.
International Women* Space was founded as a radical feminist wing of the Refugee Resistance Movement in Berlin, which emerged from the protest occupation of Oranienplatz square in Kreuzberg in 2012. From the beginning, the self-organized making of culture based on the lives, struggles, histories and visions of migrant women, dykes, intersex, non-binary and trans people has been an important focus in the work of IW*S.
“Women* who had become refugees in their own regions before attempting to reach Europe through the deadly routes available. Women* fleeing war, poverty, environmental disaster caused by corporation’s greed, women* feeling persecution for not conforming to the gender they were assigned at birth. … we needed to speak to each other to understand the paradox of seeking protection in one of the western countries, knowing the roles they play in destabilizing our regions, through wars and neo-colonialism. In a less insane world this would be the last place we would choose.”
IW*S propose that listening to one another and creating records of survival in the face of violence, erasure, death and deportation are the base for creating strategies for a common struggle, for working on transformation together. A grassroots archive of resilience, achievement and loss, OPLATZBOX amplifies this Black, migrant, queer feminist take on decolonization put into practice through feminist self-organising.
Addressing the violent repercussions of colonialism, the dangerous migration routes, the fortressed borders to Europe, the realities of deeply engrained structural racism in Germany, the testimonies and reflections document migration as a political movement. A feminist anti-racist, anticolonial movement that connects a multiplicity of BIPOC and migrant histories and struggles in and beyond Germany.
OPLATZBOX is the first manifestation of the transterritorial decolonial feminist network WHEN THE JACKAL LEAVES THE SUN: Decentering Restitution | Pedagogies of Repossession.
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