Gürsoy Doğtaş: In your film This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past, the two voices from the off-screen alternately reverse object and subject in their sentences. The inversions, once set in motion, no longer stop at anything. It is not the subject that opens the door, but the door that opens the subject. This reverses power relations between students and teachers, policemen, and citizens. Up to biological laws, when it is said, "This wants me to give birth to my mum.” There seems to be a trigger for these reversals, which is not elaborated, but merely summarized in a repetitive "This wants me to." This is where my questions follow: You took the poem from the comments section under the YouTube clip "Redbone" by Childish Gambino. Does the poem refer to "Redbone"? Does "Redbone" trigger the poet's desire for these reversals? How does this English poem come into your film, which is set in around the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum (OEZ) in Munich?

Cana Bilir-Meier: Most of my artworks center on questions of official knowledge production, often through decoding. Every new image engenders more new images, obscuring others. These questions and processes are all part of how power is constituted. In the film This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past, there are many layers, one is the voice-over, which begins with the sentence “This Makes Me Want to…” Each sentence holds a contradiction and opens up new questions, like how can I predict the past, when it is already finished?

I combined these YouTube comments with Childish Gambino’s song “Redbone” with the topic of the racist attack that took place at the Olympia shopping mall in 2016 in Munich. In these comments, we can see how people imagine another society by revealing how discourses and language are situated in power relations. The title of the film, This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past, or other sentences inside the film like “I Want to Remember the Future'' shows the contradictions of the dichotomy between past, present, and future or history, memory, and the act of remembering. This is exactly the point, because the past is not something finished. Furthermore, I see tenses as entities that belong together, are intertwined, contradict each other but can’t exist separated. When I talk about the past, it's a possibility to add multiple and diverse voices. Stories which exist in a discrepancy. My films and works primarily focus on migrant situated knowledge. They are articulated from a specific, marginalized position and counter the dominant perspective of representation with new stories, images, ideas, questioning how history is written. Or as the the educationalist, curator and activist researcher Ayşe Güleç writes, “Situated knowledge is oppositional, since, as a marginalized body in the middle of a hegemonic sphere, it takes on a different position and names it as well. This knowledge is therefore not intended in an identitary way, but is, instead, a perspective that is able to alter and shift our view, our perceptions, and courses of action, and that makes it possible to counter dominant practices of representation with other pictures and interpretations.” I am interested in these contradictions in the sentences, they open up a conversation about how we claim and formulate demands. We need demands which at first appear impossible to fulfil––as this is a way of questioning the roots of structural and institutional discimination. Every demand which can be fulfilled upholds the system, so we need impossible demands.

GD: In both "to predict the past" and "to remember the future," a providence is implied. In a racially structured society, a racist attack does not happen out of nowhere. Aleyna Osmanoğlu and Sosuna Yıldız, the two protagonists of the film, are exposed to the invisible forces of structural racism. In between, there are moments of remembrance and commemoration. There is the sculpture in the form of a ring in front of the OEZ by the artist Elke Härtel. The ring is adorned with nine plates bent from stainless steel sheet, each of the plates commemorating one of the victims killed: Dijamant Zabërgja (20 years old), Armela Segashi (14), Sabina Sulaj (14), Giuliano Josef Kollmann (19), Sevda Dağ (45), Chousein Daitzik (17), Can Leyla (14, Janos Roberto Rafael (15) and Selçuk Kılıç (15). Then there are the staging shots of "Düşler Ülkesi" (Land of Dreams) a youth theater play by the Schauburg Theater of the Youth and Münchner Kammerspiele from 1982. In some of these shots, the actors reenact the humiliations of official inspections on their bodies when they entered Germany as “Gastarbeiter:innen”––which the two protagonists also reenact.
Are the ring and the reference to "Düşler Ülkesi" two equally important moments of the attempt at a self-empowering memory work that tries to crack open given structures, or are the forms of memory work (perhaps also the modalities of the situated knowledge) placed in a critical relationship to one another?

CBM: I wanted to bring it into a dialogue with scenes from the theater play ‘Düşler Ülkesi’ (Land of Dreams in Turkish) and refers to Erman Okay’s pioneer activist theatre play, which was also an theater-educational project for and with children and youths. It premiered in Munich in 1982. Amateur actresses and actors with and without a migrant background played everyday scenes from the life of so-called “guest workers'' and addressed unfulfilled longings, broken promises, prejudices, and misunderstandings. My mother co-directed the play during her time as a social worker. That is how I became aware of the project. My maternal grandparents moved as so-called “guestworkers” to Germany in the 1960s. They were a minority in Turkey with their Alevi-Arabic background and faced discrimination in that context too, as well as many other minorities like Kurdish, Yezidi or Armenian people. The idea was that migrants told their own story which was or is still today not really represented in official narratives. Since my childhood, especially in school as well as at universities, my own biographical history is not told. Therefore, I think it is the root of my inspiration, to tell in art, film, and text these hidden stories and make them visible. 

The premiere of the theater play ‘‘Düşler Ülkesi’ was overshadowed by a racist bomb threat against the theatre. Again, we see the continuity of racism. In the past, in racist attacks all over the world, the media and official authorities described the perpetrators as a “single case” or as the “lone wolf” and someone with mental health problems. The perpetrator in Munich had an Iranian migrant background, which led the authorities and media not to define it as a racist attack. We should be aware of the fact that discrimination is always intersectional and that racism is an ideology which is additive for everyone. The “single case” story is a way to depoliticize and separate it from institutional and structural racism, close the case and deal with it in a superficial way. Post-war Germany always wants to be seen as a country without antisemtism and structural discrimination. Our society, the schools, universities, police, health care system,and other structures are built upon such systems of oppression and profit from them. Then again, it is also crucial to mention anti-racist work and honor people who fought against it in the past. For me, that play is an answer and we can access their produced knowledge and be aware of the genealogy. We need to mention the struggles of migrants and honor them, when in 2021 we do political and activist work. My artworks are always connected to political issues and reality. To access the knowledge of previous fights, it's an empowering method. 

When I started to research for the film, I asked the two protagonists, Aleyna Osmanoğlu and Sosuna Yıldız, how they wanted to be seen in the film: What should the audience take-home with them? Which feeling do they want to transport? They mentioned they didn’t want to be the victim “again.” Every racist attack is an attack on all people who are facing racism. Furthermore, they want to be seen as strong and at the same time tell a sensitive and specific story about loss, sorrow, hope, dreams, wishes, and our own migration biography. This made so much sense. Together with cinematographer and artist Lichun Tseng, we were very careful about how we set the frame. These are very important questions and I always want my protagonists and those who are part of my films to feel seen and acknowledged before, during, and after the film shooting. In a sense, the film is in itself a safe space. The film emphasizes the “migrant situated knowledge” and shifts the focus and adds layers to the history which are most of the time excluded. The film is also my story and belongs to my history. With every film, I give something very personal to audiences. 

Furthermore, this film honors the fight and rights of every young generation. We need to acknowledge children and young people’s voices as equal to those of adults in order to face and approach our current global problems. We can see especially now, how young people all over the world raise their voices and even initiate revolutions for a better future. We need to form alliances and honor their wishes, hopes, and demands. This film is an appreciation of all of these factors. 

GD: Structural racism not only permeates the media, criminological and legal treatment of the attacks, but as paradoxical as this may sound, it also directly affects its remembrance. This can be seen in who is integrated into the process of public commemoration and who is not. How the needs and demands of the relatives of the victims of right-wing violence remain unheard. The 1981 assassination during the Oktoberfest, whose racist background was concealed by the investigators, was commemorated for years by a memorial column on which the names of those murdered did not appear. İbrahim Arslan, survivor of the racist arson attack in Mölln in 1992, recently demanded that the power of remembrance should belong to those affected. I also know from my conversations with you that the relatives of the victims of the right terror feel ignored in the shaping of the official remembrance policy. How do these processes define the way you work?

CBM: In This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past it was important to include Aleyna Osmanoğlu and Sosuna Yıldız because both were born in Munich. Both are sensitive to the topic of racism because they face it themselves, and I see certain experiences and perspectives as a kind of knowledge production. People who experience certain discriminations should be seen as experts. They had to develop tools to fight against structural violence but mostly they were kept out and silenced. In the case of official memorial politics, this directly affects the family and deals with visibility, as for example a plaque remembering the victims or the memorial day. It is crucial that people are included but we see in all the examples you mentioned, that they are not taken seriously. As İbrahim Arslan says: “Victims and survivors are not extras, they are the main witnesses of what happened.” 

In my case, the film plays at the Olympia Shopping Mall in Munich and my focus was on the re-imagination of how we as a society create a space where we all, in our multiple identities, histories, memories, and communities, can exist together. Or as the cultural theorist, writer and scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa says: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” 

I am interested in how we can re-imagine another society which is built on solidarity, re-circulation and transformation. 

The film is in black-and-white. I wanted to transfer the imagination into something which is not connected to a specific time. It could play either in the past, present or future. The Super8 material from the film was placed in between all these periods. We only shot around 18 minutes because analogue material is expensive and you deal with time and material differently. We had to be very aware of what to shoot. There was a very clear script of what we wanted to film and how both of them should interact in the space. For me, the reference to that play from 1982 and the reenactment parts were very important, as well as the images of the architecture. You see them both stroll around, trying clothes on, chilling, and having fun with each other. At the end, they go to pay their respects at the memorial, followed by a silent part. The voice-over is spoken by both protagonists. They envision their own feelings, hopes, losses, and ideas but of course, it is an image for a broader political discussion about migration and also alienation. The social activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs calls it “visionary organizing.” This implies that we should see every crisis as a danger and opportunity. We have to become creative in a period of transition and we need to re-imagine everything. I hope my film can add something to that re-imagination and empower others to rethink and transform our reality to something better for everyone.