Namibia Today 2018
Seven people wait in an underground station below Karl-Marx-Allee in former East Berlin. Billboards line the walls, each combining a front page of “Namibia Today” with collaged material about the journal’s history in the GDR. “Namibia Today” was a journal of the Namibian liberation movement, which was printed and distributed by East Germany during times of military confrontation with South Africa. SWAPO’s (South West Africa People’s Organisation) editorial board was forced to operate from exile in Angola and without the ideologically motivated help of the GDR, the mass production of the periodical (1980-1985) would not have been possible. Rushing underground trains pick up the slow moving shot between the billboards and the protagonists, between fragments of image and speech. The participants, both Namibians with a past in the GDR and former East Germans with a connection to the liberation movement SWAPO, stand still in the movement. The present and the past, different locations, many unspokens and unknowns come together in the circular movement of the camera on the underground platform.