Patricia Nocon – DIE POLNISCHSTUNDE

40 years after emigrating from Poland, performer Patricia Nocon begins to work on her family history. In interviews in Germany and Poland, she brings to light the events of the war and post-war years and thus fills gaps in the family memory. In doing so, she encounters a variety of coping and displacement strategies, including oneself. There is simply no language to grasp the experienced. In order to make the repressed visible and to name the unspoken, she decides to learn Polish: the language that has been banned from her family and yet is part of her identity.

Together with the Polish-Swiss performer Ewelina Guzik-Zubler, she attempt to draw closer to the stories, to untangle them and find a language to speak for them.

Where spoken language is not enough, where words become impossible or even embarrassing, movements and gestures offer ways out of speechlessness. Sometimes only silence will help to speak against the power of the superiority of the past.