Tommaso Bonaventura recounts the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall with an exhibition on Begrüssungsgeld

Tommaso Bonaventura - 100 Marks - Berlin 2019 is an artistic project by photographer Tommaso Bonaventura (Rome, 1969), developed in collaboration with curator Elisa Del Prete, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989). The exhibition, in three stages (from October 30, 2019 to January 6, 2020 in Turin at CAMERA - Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, Project Room Museo del Risparmio; from November 9, 2019 to January 26, 2020 in Trento, at the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino in Trento, Le Gallerie; from January 18, 2020 to March 22, 2020 in San Vito al Tagliamento at CRAF - Center for Research and Archiving Photography, Church of San Lorenzo) offers an account of the Begrüssungsgeld, the welcome money that from 1970 to December 1989 GDR citizens received when they entered West Germany for the first time. This affair offers a cue to question an epochal change from a vantage point that privileges private and family stories, returning them through a dual narrative: photographic and video.

The simple question, “Do you remember how you spent your Begrüssungsgeld?” posed to a sample of former GDR Germans of different generations, interviewed during 2018 and 2019, provided the starting point for a journey into the memory, still little shared today, of these people who experienced total change, whether from a material, labor, social and economic, or political point of view.

While the fall of the Berlin Wall laid the foundations for a new political and geographic world order by marking the end of the Cold War, the reunification between East and West Germany still remains a complex and little-discussed phenomenon in its deeper aspects. Often simplistically resolved as the crowning achievement of a foregone desire for freedom, the crossing of the physical boundary that symbolically coincides with the tearing down of the wall inevitably brings with it the need to cross an ideological boundary as well.

On November 9, 1989, not only does the Berlin Wall fall but an entire country changes: the part that rejoins its origins undergoes an inevitable metamorphosis and a way of living, thinking, behaving, dressing, and spending quickly vanishes. In a very short time the German Democratic Republic is removed from imagination and memory. Nearly 17 million people suddenly find themselves immersed in a new way of life, where the rules learned until then no longer apply. The transformation is abrupt. In government policies and in people’s daily lives the new alphabet of the West, its colors, its smells, its economic and social policies, is established, and what were two distinct communities find themselves living together.

Comments Tommaso Bonaventura, “I was interested in opening a dialogue with people, often of my generation, who suddenly experienced such a radical transformation of their lives, who had to reinvent a new existence with new codes, new rules, who had often struggled against dictatorship in their country, but who did not think they would see it disappear overnight.”

The outcome of the research will be a photographic narrative that, interwoven with the narrative of these biographies, aims to return a contemporary Berlin made up of faces, places and stories that are not taken for granted, which has remained a symbol of one of the most significant events in recent history, still alive and present in the city’s urban and social fabric. Indeed, the research focused on Berlin as an emblem of this change, but also a city where the physical and “mental” presence of the wall, which so strongly marked people’s experience, somehow lingers.

“In this sense, the exhibition,” says Elisa Del Prete, “is a project that also opens a glimpse into the current sociopolitical context with the coming and going of new ideologies and the difficult testing of processes of absorption and integration between communities. It is not a matter here of telling History or drawing conclusions from it, but of positioning oneself before, indeed within, remaining immersed in it, trying to throw out what is extractable. In this sense, photography is valuable because it goes to tell and build new direct sources for contemporary history and in particular for that material history that lies on the margins of Great History.”

Tommaso Bonaventura (Rome, 1969), a graduate in Humanities, has devoted himself to photography since 1992. His works have appeared in major international newspapers and received several awards including World Press Photo, Sony Award, Ponchielli Prize. In 2005 he published Le vie della fede (ed. Gribaudo) dedicated to the great pilgrimages of Christianity in Europe. Since 2006 she has lived in China for several years producing several projects including Beijing in and out, Real Woman Photo Shop and If I Were Mao. Her works are exhibited in several festivals and museums including Paris Photo, PAC, NoorDeerlicht Photofestival, Supermarket Art Fair, Zephir, Triennale Bovisa, Officine Fotografiche. From 2011 to 2015 he works on the project “Corpi di Reato, un archeologia visiva dei fenomeni mafiosi nell’Italia contemporanea” whose excerpt Immediate Surroundings is selected and exhibited at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and since 2016 is part of the permanent collection of MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome. In 2017 he is invited to Fotografia Europea where he exhibits the project Fondo.

Elisa Del Prete (Bologna, 1978) works in the production and curatorship of art projects that invest the public sphere. She graduated in Art History with a thesis on Aby Warburg’s influence in Italy, (published in Aby Warburg e la cultura italiana, 2009). In 2006 he opened Nosadella.due (www.nosadelladue.com), a residency program for artists and curators in Bologna (in 2012 he published an account in the Journal 2007-2011). In 2008 and 2011 she curates the visual arts section of the Gender Bender Festival, in 2012 she realizes at MAMbo the first solo exhibition of the South African artist Bridget Baker dedicating herself to the research of the Italian colonial history, in 2014 and 2015 she is co-director of Archivio Aperto, an exhibition dedicated to amateur cinema. She writes for doppiozero.com, for which she recently published an essay on William Kentridge.

Source: release

Tommaso Bonaventura recounts the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall with an exhibition on Begrüssungsgeld

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