Dawać w kość

Dawać w kość - Arbajten after migrating from Poland

Event with Kateryna Danilova, Zofia nierodzińska and Lorena Simmel, moderated by Jadwiga Kamola. Polish labour migration to Germany has a long history. It began with the first seasonal workers in the 19th century, reached its cruel climax in forced labour and the so-called ‘extermination through work’ in Nazi concentration camps, and continues today in the form of unfair and exploitative working conditions.

Artist Zofia nierodzińska and author Lorena Simmel discuss what it means to work under such conditions today in a discussion with a reading. Both have worked in precarious employment in agriculture and incorporated their experiences into their artistic work. Social scientist Kateryna Danilova places these experiences in the context of the current social discourse on unfair working conditions.

Kateryna Danilova (MA Social Sciences) comes from Ukraine and is the branch coordinator for construction and agriculture at the European Association for Migrant Workers' Issues e.V. & Fair Mobility. She coordinates the Fair Agricultural Work initiative, which works to improve working conditions for seasonal workers. While working on a project about the situation of Ukrainian students in German agriculture, she researched placement structures and working conditions in the agricultural sector. As part of an EVW project, she also advised refugees and third-country nationals on their labour rights.

Zofia nierodzińska - author of texts, curator, visual artist, junior professor at the Academy of Arts in Szczecin (Poland); deputy director of the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznań between the years 2017-22; editor-in-chief of Magazyn RTV, platform on art and activism from 2019 to 2024; editor of books: Politics of (In)Accessibility (2023), Acting Together (2022), Creative Sick States: AIDS, CANCER, HIV (2021). Her recent curatorial projects were: FERNBEZIEHUNGEN at Kunstverein Ost (KVOST), Berlin and Geographies of Collectivity in Times of Crises: Berlin Vienna, Graz, Minsk, Kharkiv, Pristina at alpha nova&galerie futura, Berlin. She works on the art of post-socialist countries, with the special focus on accessibility and migration. She studied at the University of Arts in Poznan (PhD) and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (MA). She lives and works in Berlin. More information can be found here. 

Lorena Simmel grew up in Switzerland, studied creative writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel/Bienne and European literature at Humboldt University in Berlin and Warsaw. She has published poems, prose and essays in EDIT, Neue Rundschau and STILL, among others, and was a scholarship holder at the 16th Klagenfurt Literature Course. For her work on her debut novel Ferymont, published in 2024, she received a working scholarship for literature from the Berlin Senate. In 2022, she was a literature scholarship holder of the Jürgen Ponto Foundation.

An event in cooperation with the German-Polish House.