(DVD, VHS), 2004
Siegmund endorses the same level of responsibility for the position in front of the camera as for the one behind it. Therefore, she questioned the prostitutes, whom she interviewed ... not about their lives, but about their customers instead. She does not consider the women primarily as victims of adverse circumstances, which their biographical stories tend to confirm, but as women who have access to specific knowledge – about German men and their sexual preferences. In fact, 90 percent of the men who use the services of sex workers from Belarus and other Eastern countries are German.
Brigitte Werneburg (taz)
Work on the video Fremde Freier (Foreign Customers) prompted me to take a fresh look at some general questions about methods of participatory artistic work. Do I use people as materials when I film them? Am I able to lend someone a voice? What situation arises when, as an artist, I enter into someone else's space and encounter experiences of life which I cannot share? How can I avoid imposing my own views on others? I assume, as an artist, that I can neither lend someone a voice who previously lacked a voice nor capture something in a video as it really is. From the early stages of this work, I nevertheless knew what I wanted to avoid: I wanted to refrain from describing prostitutes as victims and allow them to decide for themselves how they presented their work. Descriptions of them as femmes fatales, as women in search of adventure, are in my opinion wrong; in reality, the women I interviewed work to earn money and because they have no other choice.
In the questions about their clients, I was the one who largely determined the subject of conversation. This inquiry into the attitudes of the women towards the German clients arose from the situation on the German-Polish border: 90 percent of men who take advantage of the services of prostitutes from Belorussia, Lithuania, Latvia and other eastern countries, are German. Since those who frequent clubs and brothels and approach women standing on the street come from all social classes, from all age groups and from all over Germany, the survey reveals a representative picture of the situation. The needs of German men to compensate for the failures in their everyday lives and to satisfy their physical desires is the reason why a broad network of pimps and club owners has spread along the entire border and within Germany itself. I carried out the interviews in Russian with the help of an interpreter. It was important to me that the focus is not the women speaking in a foreign language, but that the German audience should hear Russian and read what they say in German.
This work was carried out in collaboration with the staff of the association Bella Donna in Frankfurt (Oder) in order to prevent the women from getting into difficulties as a result of the interviews.
