The online audiovisual installation Esmalbesserhabenin.de is dedicated to the family histories, generational conflicts, political struggles and visions for the future in families with a heritage of migration. From the perspective of the second generation of migrants, they talk about being a parent and being a child in the migration society:

“Our parents came here. We grew up here. We are children of the 1990s. And we are still living in Germany. Our parents had to explain Solingen, Mölln and Rostock-Lichtenhagen to us. We are talking with our children about Halle and Hanau.”

The writer and theater maker Simone Dede Ayivi has set up a circle of chairs right in the middle of Germany and invited five accomplices from the second generation of immigrants to share their childhood experiences and memories of their youth with each other. Their shared point of departure is the sentence: “We came to this country so that you could have things better than we did.” In doing so, the stories themselves are very different: the families came from different countries and contexts, they came to work or were forced to flee their home or were following true love. They grew up in fancy suburbs or in accommodations for displaced persons.

On Esmalbesserhabenin.de, these voices from different communities have been brought together into interview-based audio tracks and are accompanied by short videos. Visitors can move playfully through the space and are invited to selected individual themed chapters completely according to their own interests and following the conversations.