We’re just gonna have a chat right about all your amazing projects, and then we are going to transcribe the chat and send it to you so that you can add and remove stuff. How did you start working together, how did this project start?

It is not so clear to me when “Sprachnachrichten über Schlonsken” (“Voice Messages about Śląsking”) or Grupa Mauczka started exactly. All the current members of Grupa Mauczka had got to know each other in different club-culture-related contexts; for instance, some of us DJ’ed together. We had never talked about our relationship to Upper Silesia or that our parents migrated. And then there was this moment around August 7, 2020, which, to us, was the Rainbow night or the Polish Stonewall, you could say. It’s the night when the activist collective “Stop Bzdurom” were arrested and experienced a lot of police persecution and violence. This was the moment that we all remember, when we connected and felt our relationship to Poland. We are all queer, but we cannot to talk to our families about our Upper-Silesian Polish-German background, also regarding queer topics. We had to come out to each other as Upper Silesian and Polish in order to be able to talk about how we can form alliances or express solidarity with queer activists in Poland, where all these LGBTQ free zones were happening in parallel. We needed this moment of manifesting or situating ourselves as a group in order to find a language to speak about Upper Silesia and Poland, of our relationship to queerness and Poland, as well as queerness and Germany. That’s why, we wrote “Sprachnachrichten über Schlonsken,” produced as a sound work with no institution behind it. We wanted to do it for ourselves, and only afterwards some festivals picked up and programmed our work.

Can you tell us more about the working process behind the project?

Everything happened pretty fast. We sat together for a few weeks, chatting non-stop, in work spaces and pubs, it all blurs now. We had a lot to talk about. And then we wrote together this text within one day, which changed a lot through many discussions and presentations at various festivals. At some point, we felt we needed to do something beyond the text, that we wanted to invite people to imagine together something that could become the practice of “Verschlonsken.” We made a lot of field recordings. We thought that text as a medium is solid, while Verschlonsken is a fluid practice, so we wanted to make the text more fluid, in relationship to the water that Upper Silesia is surrounded by.  That’s why, we have the flowing sounds of cooking and water in the sound recordings.

How did you work on the sound recordings? Did you pre-produce stuff?

We had collected a lot of field recordings. We interviewed our fathers, most of whom had migrated and are still alive. It was weird because we have queer families collected, but then we have to talk to our fathers, we visited together with them some places, like the Grenzdurchgangslager Friedland, which was their first destination after they arrived in Western Germany. There, we did some recordings too, of conversations between us, for example. We also took field recordings of cooking Mauczka together. Mauczka is usually eaten in winter, but this time we did in the summer, got all the ingredients, cooked it together, and did field recordings of doing so. To me, it feels flat to talk about food in the art context, but “Mauczka” is an important metaphor of how we approach identity. It’s a dish that has different recipes, but what makes it specific is the preparation: it is cooked for as long as it is needed for all the ingredients mix to the point of becoming unidentifiable. If you taste it, you can get an idea of what ingredients are in it, but they are inseparable.

Could you talk a bit about the project’s presentation format? How did it evolve over time?

The best thing that you can do with artists is that people chill or even fall asleep. We had big cushions and pillows. In the project’s original run, we used blue pillows stitched together in the shape of a rope, which looked like a net of rivers. People could lie down together and listen to the sound piece. The location was close to the A2 highway, which is an important route that connects the East and the West, built by people who were forced labor, some of whom were from Poland. Our family members have used this road to travel to Poland or to West Germany. We also knew that people need to take this road in order to reach the place where we showed the piece for the first time. Also, you could hear there the sounds of the cars driving this highway from afar, we asked people to take off the headphones and listen to the highway sounds. We couldn’t do this in Vienna, because A2 is too far away. We installed the piece in a way that it was not just a sound piece, but that people could relate to the piece in a more embodied way. But you know, we could’ve done better if the money hadn’t been short…

You would have brought the piece to the A2!

Or we would have brought the A2 to Vienna! [laughter]

Did you make changes to the piece because of the different context and circumstances? Can you talk more about the adaptation of the piece to different locations?

In Vienna, for instance, I brought some photos from my family album and I blurred them, so that you could have a glimpse at what could have been in the photos, but without being able to recognize the faces. We always try to bring some material aspect, other than sound, through which people could connect to the story not only sonically. But the money was an issue. We produced the piece at a residency, where we were producing something else. So we would have done it in a different way with more resources. We could have installed big speakers so that you could really feel the bass, to have a more embodied reception of sound. We found it crucial to put out our story because there are so many narratives about Spät-Aussiedlung in Germany.

People tend to confuse Upper Silesia with Lower Silesia, which is the story of the Vertriebene, of the Germans who had to flee after collaborating with the Nazis. It is not that our family members never collaborated with any Nazis, but it is a different context. In Upper Silesia, people would not be displaced, they could remain there after the war. Recently, the Polish “PiS” (“Law and Justice”) party, who keep trying to polonize Upper Silesia, to make it “more Polish,” had speeches for the Independence Day celebration in Katowice, claiming that Upper Silesia is so Polish. In the meantime, the narration about the late settler context from Germany’s side is that “we are Germans coming back to Germany.” Neither is about how we identify. We had an urgency to tell our stories in a different way.

Did this wish to tell the story change anything about your perception of what you already knew about this context?

There was a change, because through our work we could connect to other people and get their perspectives. Our perspective was very fluid, but also very narrow. All of us are the second or third generation of migrants growing up in Germany, having weird parents and grandparents telling us different stories about Upper Silesia, and playing a lot with identity since they don’t want to be confronted too much with their migration experience. If you ask my grandma, for example, she will only give you super short answers and will prefer to drink coffee with you or to pray instead of talking. Though our perspective was narrow, we wanted to put it out as a way of connecting to other collectives, like Śląsk Przegięty, a queer collective in Katowice, who work through their connection to the mining history of Upper Silesia. Some of them speak the Upper Silesian language.

Our work was for us a way to “come out,” and to find other people that we could talk to about what we put out, about the key terms, like “Upper Silesia,” “Germany,” “Poland,” “queerness.” In this way, we could broaden our perspective and find people who could verify the status of what our findings. I mean, we have a queer Upper-Silesian perspective, try to find something about it in history books. There’s nothing about it. No, I exaggerate, there are some traces, as the people from Śląsk Przegięty showed us. So many things have changed for us through these connections. When we presented PASKUDNIK in Vienna, I met one person from Katowice, whose family migrated there after the WW2 from Ukraine, I am not sure. He had a completely different perspective. He told me about the 1921 referendum, which I hadn’t heard about. My perspective on Upper Silesia is much broader, since the time that I talked only to my family members.

Do you know why she doesn’t want to talk about it? Or what is the “it” that she doesn’t want to talk about?

I don’t know, I’m still asking myself why she would give me only short answers. During the first interview I did with her, she barely talked at all, then she started opening up a bit more, though now she’s getting dementia, so it’s getting worse. I think part of it is her vibe. She has no time, she has to go to church, she has to work, and everything else is a waste of time somehow. But I think there’s something more. I feel that she relates to this migration story in a different way than I do, because she has all these stories of coming to Germany, of the conflicts within the migrating community in the first block of flats where they lived. There would be a lot of “Ah, these Upper Silesians get more money.” These are stories about survival. After they arrived in Germany, they had no money, they would only have expired food from the supermarket. Such stories… She never went back to Upper Silesia, not even once, though she still chats on the phone with several siblings that live there. Maybe she wants to close this chapter, or to keep it closed, while I’m trying to open it up again. It may also be her coping strategy to process a lot of things, the discrimination that she experienced. They had different privileges than other migrants, but they still encountered a lot of anti-Slavic sentiments. Some of my friends in Grupa Mauczka had a similar experience with their relatives, who’d respond with “Why are you asking me this?” or try to make it seem that what was actually a long process was very short. My grandmother replies, “I’m German, let’s not talk about it,” while she could tell me a story of Upper Silesia, and of how she was coming to Germany. I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t want to go back to her trauma. I’m still asking myself why she does it in this way. Maybe I’m asking her questions that she hasn’t asked herself for a long time.

I also wonder how you work with language. In PASKUDNIK, for example, you change languages a lot. How do you navigate this multi-language space in a working or living practice? Do you speak Polish or any other specific language with each other? I thought of my experience: when I attended a German school in Brazil, me and my friends would speak “Deutsch-giesisch,” a mix between Portuguese and German.

I don’t speak Polish, I would say. In PASKUDNIK, I speak a bit of Polish on stage, but I would not consider myself being able to speak Polish. My pronunciation is great, as everybody tells me, but my vocabulary is shit. After seeing PASKUDNIK, people would talk to me in Polish, and I would get completely stunned. Also, I did not grow up with the Polish language. My grandma’s mother tongue is German, my father’s mother tongue is Polish: that’s also an Upper Silesian reality that, through generations, people within one family would have different mother tongues. I can speak some Polish with my family. We can navigate conversations, though not very deep. We can have some “coffee talk.” We won’t fight, we won’t go into politics, because that’d be too complicated to express in Polish for me. I am unable to communicate with some of my siblings, which is a very weird experience. I know their names, I’ve heard stories about them my whole life, and so have they, but we cannot communicate. I think that if you lived in Upper Silesia during the times of my grandma, you would speak Polish, Upper-Silesian, and German, depending on exactly which period. Or maybe not during my grandma’s times, but earlier: she was born in 1933, when the Nazis had already started to germanize Upper Silesia. A few decades later, during my father’s times, if you were born and raised in this area, you would only speak Polish. I look back to the time when it was possible for Upper Silesians to speak German, Polish, and Upper Silesian. I have a feeling that through this clash, of having Germany trying to germanize and Poland trying to polonize, people had to make decisions about what language they wanted to speak, how they would identify themselves, what citizenship they would have. So they needed to cut out some part of themselves.

In Grupa Mauczka, some people speak more Polish because their parents came to Germany in the 1990s. For me, it was important for me to speak Polish on stage, even though it was really frightening because of my impostor syndrome that people would call me out for being German, not Polish. But I wanted to do it also to bring back this reality of Upper Silesia being a mix of different languages. Did you see the English or the German version?

I think it was the English version.

Because to me, the German-Polish version is more interesting. In the final scene, I speak several sentences in Polish, while Polish people in the audience don’t understand anything. This is a great moment. And it’s weird. I wanted to have a moment in PASKUDNIK of all these languages coming together. This is the change between “Sprachnachrichten über Schlonsken” and PASKUDNIK. For the former, we translated our manifesto into Polish, English, and German, while the latter has the different languages closer to each other, without being separated, which is also the reality of the Upper-Silesian identity. For me, language is also about the process of the collective memory of my family, or Upper Silesians. And I had already known some words, like “dyndać”, I don’t know if you know this word?

In Polish, it would mean “wobble.”

It’s different. In Upper Silesian, you would use it for “chatting” in front of church, while the mass is still happening. This is what some people do: after they receive the hostia, they would go out to have a smoke and chat before the end of the mass. So this is what “dyndać” means. I used to think that the word “paskudnik” is German, but then I realized German people don’t know it. also refers to a specific context, and it has to do with  I used to think it was a German word. I never asked for the translation of this word, but learned it somehow through context. I have a feeling now, having learned more Polish and mixing it more with German, that I am coming back to this linguistic mix of Upper Silesia, which I tried to keep separated. I’m trying to come back to “mauczka” in my mouth, because it also changes if I speak more Polish, if I use more of these Upper Silesian small words.

Language is a huge topic for me. A lot of Polish people try to get a proof for whether or not I’m Polish by speaking Polish to me, while I wouldn’t try to reply in Polish, because it would always be wrong. I’m not used to it. I’m also not used to people in Germany or Vienna speaking Polish around me. I’m used to people talking Polish in Poland, while I don’t understand many words yet still have this familial connection. In my family, this has never been the case that I would be excluded for not knowing the language, even if I didn’t understand a word. Language can become a tool through which people try to figure out who you are and who you are not. I am not very Polish, I know that, but I am Upper-Silesian, but never on my own. This identity is based on my relation to several generations of people using different language blends. My relation is based on having some siblings that I cannot talk to and some others that I can talk to. So if someone stands in front of me and wants a proof that I’m Upper-Silesian or whatever else, this won’t work without my relationality to other people.

I am jealous of people that mix languages in their day-to-day lives. I have a lot of Brazilian friends who live in Europe that insert Portuguese words, while speaking German or English. And I find it extremely difficult: the language I speak has either to do with the situation that I’m in or with the people that I talk to. In “functional” situations like this one, it’s different: we can speak German or English to each other, shifting from one to another is not strange, because we need to have at least one shared language so that we can communicate. I think of situations when I get to know someone by speaking English, and suddenly this person realizes that I speak Portuguese or French, and they want to change the language. For me, it’s a bit strange and stressful because this means reconfiguring my relationship, it feels like switching codes. I have been doing it more, but it’s still difficult. For example, in Austria it’s more “normal” for me to speak English than when I lived in Germany.

Do you think that this changes who you are?

Not anymore. I think I’m the same person in English, German, and Portuguese, probably not yet in French. You said something that made me think of it, when you referred to the relationship between queerness, nationality, and identity. Could you talk about it a bit more descriptively? What exactly does this conglomeration of ideas mean for you? When I say that I’m someone else in a different language, it means that, for example, I cannot pass as smart in French, because I don’t have enough vocabulary. After I moved to Germany, I often experienced that people would put me down because I couldn’t be as “smart” as I was in Portuguese.

So for you this was a marker of identity?

Not only, it was also about being charming, about being nice or deliberately not nice. You need to have a command of specific vocabulary in order to do so. To use a cheesy metaphor, language is like a sculpture. You keep collecting it and, with it, you can make your surface more and more textured. For example, my French is not yet an abstract form. In the other languages that I speak, I have managed to have my face sculpted in a consistent way. In other languages that I have tried to speak, French, Italian, or Spanish, my face is still blurry. I can navigate, but my agency is constricted.

Yeah, I have no agency in Polish. You asked earlier about “queerness, nation, and identity.” I don’t really understand “nation” as a concept, and I’ve tried to understand it my whole life, somehow, but, for an Upper Silesian, it’s really different or difficult to understand  “nation.” It’s a big abstract idea that tries to combine all the different bodies together. That’s why, the Upper-Silesian aspect of our German-Polish migration stories is very important for us, because it is surprisingly comparable to how I understand myself as a non-binary person when it comes to gender. There’s something similarly non-binary about the “nation” experience that comes out of the working process around PASKUDNIK, of going through the interviews with my family, of thinking back to my grandfather, who had already been dead at the time when we started working on the piece. In documentaries about Upper Silesia and in testimonies of migrants, you will find one claim in different versions: “In Poland we were the Germans, and in Germany we were the Polish.” They couldn’t fit into any of the binary categories, they weren’t either this or that. I see a strong connection between being queer and being Upper-Silesian, or between being non-binary and being Upper-Silesian. I don’t think my grandfather would consider himself non-binary in the way that I do, but maybe in a different way.

For me, as well as for Grupa Mauczka, it’s important to come back to the state where categories, such as identity, culture, and language, weren’t that fixed, where national identities produce clear borders within which you have to speak a given language. I don’t yet know how to combine this aspect of identity with queerness, but maybe it has something to do with the very clear structures embedded in heterosexual lives, which are not often thought of as being in a process of constant transition, which is the way that the Upper-Silesian experience offers one an opportunity to think of nation-bound identity.

You can be born in one place and move somewhere else, where you stay until the rest of your life. Would that mean that you are not from the place you were born anymore? This idea of a diasporic identity, where you’re neither “this” nor “that,” but more you are “this” and “that,” is helpful. I also thought of the “abstract drag” persona that you bring through your work. Can you talk about how this functions as a tool for you?

It’s more present in my earlier work called COMEBACK, it’s a video work about my childhood and queerness, where I sing a duet with my younger self. Originally, it was a performance, but, due to COVID, it couldn’t be performed, so instead I did a video called “…a seemingly impossible duet…,” which was presented in the gallery setting. By going back to my childhood, I wanted to find traces of myself that would not be overwritten with heteronormativity or cis-normativity. It was very hard to find them, I was frustrated because I knew that I did drag performances at school, but they were not documented, and nobody talked about this ever again, nobody really remembers me doing that. I tried talking to some people that I went to school with, I talked to my parents and my teacher. I was frustrated by the language that they used. I asked my teacher to describe it as accurately as possible, and the first sentence that they said was, “You didn’t do such male movements.” And I was like, “Thank you very much!” This didn’t give me much. I decided to approach this idea differently. Since I couldn’t reconstruct this performance, I had to do something else. I found a CD, where, as a child, I had recorded myself sing, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” by Britney Spears. At the beginning of the performance, I put two microphones on stage, one in the size of my body, the other one smaller. In the end, I invite the audience to imagine a duet where I sing with myself as a small child. I stand behind the bigger microphone, while the space behind the smaller microphone is empty, so the audience has to imagine me as a child. That was the first time of me not doing “full drag” in the sense of how people imagine it through “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” but the situation was “dragged” because of this impossible presence of absent bodies. In this case, drag was not about “messing around” with gender, but more about “messing” with the concept of time.

For me, that’s the idea of “abstract drag,” which messes with other concepts while retaining a connection to gender. With PASKUDNIK, I wanted to find something similar to this, but I don’t know if I actually found an abstract-drag moment like that. In the end, it’s more “pure drag,” because in the end I am on stage in a femme outfit and sing “Not Gonna Get Us” by Tatu. This performance doesn’t mess so much with time, but with other categories. The song by Tatu brings an interesting context: it’s a Russian fake-lesbian band, whose current members support Putin. It is a crucial reference point, for different reasons, to a lot of queers who had a relationship to Eastern Germany at the time when this album was released. And for them it’s clear why I use a Russian song in this song. What I’m trying to do is to play with these categories of the East and the West. Another layer to this scene relates to the story from my childhood, when I went shopping with my mom for the First Communion outfit. I was supposed to wear a black suit, but I preferred a red velvet dress that was in this store. I remember the sales person telling me that it was for the Muslim sugar fest. In PASKUDNIK, I am on stage in a red dress, which refers to the Muslim religion, while I pretend to be Polish and sing a Russian song in Upper Silesian. So I mix all these categories of East, West, Christianity, Muslim, and so on. Therefore, in terms of gender, it’s pretty straightforward: you see me on stage and understand immediately what goes on. But everything else is way more abstract.

Our project is interested in how artists engage with specific archives. Have you ever tried to access institutional or more “official” archives? Was it something of interest for you?

Archives are important for me no matter if they’re personal or institutional. For PASKUDNIK, it was difficult to find the right archives. Before that, I did a collaborative work about Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, about the contexts before the existence of the term of homosexuality. In that case, we went deep into archives, which included private flats of old gay men who tried to compile a list of all people who were imprisoned under the paragraph 175. Archives are important to me also because they allow finding and talking to people who work on specific kinds of memory work.

For PASKUDNIK, we had to create an archive on our own by conducting interviews with our relatives, and I think we will continue in this way, since there’s no proper archive for queer Upper Silesian stories. We found many books that we read together and discussed through the prism of the interviews. We needed to fact-check what our interviewees had said, because they are great storytellers, good at making up stories as a survival strategy and talking about themselves through fiction rather than fact. For example, one of us in Grupa Mauczka has very creative siblings. If I remember correctly, her mother comes from Zabrze, which used to be called “Hindenburg,” I think. So her birth certificate has “Hindenburg” as the place of her birth, which she didn’t want to tell her daughter about, so instead she said that she was born in Heidelberg and created a whole story around it. This is an illustration of the process of śląsking, when people create stories to formulate an identity. It is their form of drag. The question is: how would you archive this fictional story? It is an important story, though it’s fully fictional. So yes, it was hard to find archives for PASKUDNIK. There are museums dedicated to Silesia. If you go to one in Poland, it will present only the Polish side, and if you go to a German one, you will have a German perspective. There’s no museum that would capture this in-betweenness between both contexts.

We are still figuring out how to approach it. PASKUDNIK will soon be shown in Berlin as a part of the German Polish house, which is a new institution that focuses on the memory culture and the relationships between Germany and Poland. Though we will present only a limited, short gallery version, I am happy that we will show something about Upper Silesia there. Maybe this will bring some input to historians, who talk about Upper Silesia in a totally different way that is not helpful for the work of PASKUDNIK.