Ob Bread culture, porcelain painting or wickerwork: Within the framework of the UNESCO Convention on the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage, 131 so-called “living traditions” are currently considered worthy of protection in Germany alone. The Bundeskunsthalle, in cooperation with the Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation, shows that this is by no means all that the local cultural landscape has to offer in their current exhibition “The Last of Their Kind”. A temporary memorial is erected in it for five endangered or already extinct professions from the region and they are thus raised to the status of intangible cultural heritage.
The talk is of small people and big issues, individual fates are staged against the backdrop of buzzwords such as mechanization, digitization, globalization and decarbonization. What progress brings with it always has a negative aftertaste, was the tenor in Bonn. Numerous exhibition texts point out that traditions in the baking trade and in textile production are falling victim to the long supply chains, that the coal mining industry is losing the social identity of an entire region as “miners” and that the profession of cashier will soon be like that of typesetter now, thanks to digital innovations, could no longer exist. At least not as familiar as before.
Even if it is not just a matter of crafts, the five selected fields of work are nevertheless united by work with the hands, which Richard Sennett already raised to the standard in the announcement. “The emotional reward for acquiring manual skills is twofold: people are anchored in a tangible reality and they can be proud of their work,” the sociologist is then quoted as saying. The curator Henriette Pleiger tries to approach this importance of manual work with the help of a multimedia collage of materiality, historical photography, film material and textual classification.
Positive is a marginal phenomenon
In partially glazed metal shelves, which reach almost to the ceiling, you will find bread sliders and baking trays, children’s shops and cash registers, sorted by profession, as well as one of the last mined pieces of hard coal from Bottrop. They stand for individual destinies, regional identities and continuous progress. But the unexpected is also on display: Wholemeal wheat bread packaged by Lufthansa Service as in-flight catering for the MIR space station with a sell-by date in 1992 points to a small field of research, and Cristina’s short film “For Women: Chapter 1”, which is considered a pioneer of “women’s films”. Perincioli from 1971 deals with the rebellion of the female employees of a supermarket branch. Such marginal phenomena are good for the otherwise small compilation.
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