And then life began
A BIOGRAPHICAL - PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN SWITZERLAND AND IN TURKEY
The project deals with migration from Turkey to Switzerland and uses biographical and photographic research to Switzerland and uses biographical and photographic research to uncover a piece of Switzerland’s forgotten history.
The starting point of the bilingual exhibition (German and Turkish) ‘And then life began’ is the family history of photographer Ayse Yavas: her father was one of the first labourers to come to Switzerland from Turkey in the 1960s. He found jobs in Swiss industrial companies for 70 other men from his home country: What did the families experience, feel and hope? How do their children and grandchildren live and think today? Ayse Yavas and Gaby Fierz interviewed relatives and acquaintances from three generations in search of the gaps in their own family albums. This photographic-biographical search for lost faces and stories took them from Windisch, Brugg, Baden and Zurich via Anadolu Hisarı, in Istanbul on the Bosporus, to Doğancılı on the Black Sea.
The resulting unique collection of photographs from family albums, portraits of the interviewees and photographs of the living spaces, which were shown in the exhibition together with excerpts from the oral history interviews and Ayse Yavas’ “Album-Albüm”.
At the same time, the research by Ayse Yavas and Gaby Fierz also resulted in the theatre play of the same name, which was directed by Ursina Greuel (sogar theatre Zürich/Matterhorn Produktionen).