Contribution short abstract:

The ethnographer invited actors of postmigration to describe how they view their participation in Germany’s green transition. The resulting "ethnographic portraits" painted by the researcher, use participatory, multimodal, art-based research to query people’s wider participation in society.

Contribution long abstract:

This art-based, multimodal research project investigates social perceptions of former East German urban environments undergoing structural and demographic change. Industrially-built, residential panel-block housing remains the most visible architectural legacy of state socialism in Germany. Following German reunification, former panel-block neighbourhoods experienced divestment and population decline. However, Großwohnsiedlungen, or large housing estates, became accessible to actors of postmigration from the former Socialist Bloc, or present-day Baltic, Central Asian, and Transcaucasian states. For actors of postmigration, the housing from which they came was not dissimilar from the one in which they settled, mobilizing familiar memories and lived experiences; however, owing to xenophobic tensions, these neighbourhoods came to be pejoratively termed "mentality ghettos," effectively equating where people lived with who they were. Panel-block Großwohnsiedlungen have also been critiqued for being the least sustainable type of housing, and present-day policymakers have worked to revitalize these neighbouhoods through green initiatives. However, a policy marked by sustainability and climate neutrality echoes the transition towards German re-unification, which repudiated socialist ideology and devalued East German lifestyles, and risks marginalizing actors of postmigration as full members of a pluralistic German society. Therefore, this multimodal anthropological project examined whether postmigrant actors feel themselves included in the green transition. During ethnographic fieldwork, research participants were asked how they wish to be represented in their urban environment. Taking inspiration from these interviews, the ethnographer then painted a series of portraits, sharing them with participants as a reciprocal gesture for their participation in the research.