Risking Representation: Abstraction, Affect, and the Documentary Mode in Birgit Weyhe’sMadgermanes

Abstract

Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes was reviewed primarily as an attempt to recuperate a forgotten aspect of GDR history, but it also can be understood as an experiment with graphic documentary. In Madgermanes Weyhe employs a complex visual style to recount the history of Mozambican labour migration to the GDR and to recall the troubled history of visual representations of Africa and Africans in Germany. Weyhe’s aesthetic strategy—which in part mimics documentary styles but also includes self-referential, affective, and abstract images—makes truth claims at the same time that it rejects conventional documentary forms. This approach can be viewed as an attempt to forge a visual language appropriate to the transnational dimensions of the historical period on display, a language that also probes the legacies of colonialism embedded in popular culture. Unbound by a realist mode, Madgermanes challenges the boundaries of conventional documentary and complicates the notion of documentary as a source of immediate access to lived experience.