Hakan Savaş Mican

Hakan Savaş Mican's play, which celebrated its premiere at the Ballhaus Nauynstraße in November 2009, examines aspects of the history of divided Berlin that are rarely considered, even today. He used interviews to create a work about inner and outer borders, in which both East-West German and German-Turkish histories are told from a post-migrant perspective.
Now Die Schwäne vom Schlachthof (The Swans of the Slaughterhouse) is making a comeback in a staged reading as part of the »30 Jahre Friedliche Revolution« festival for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's a search for lost memories of a time gone by, when the borders and walls through Berlin and between people were still made of visible concrete.

Photo by Steffen Osterkamp
© Claas Osterkamp

Hakan Savaş Mican’s mother came to Germany as a migrant looking for work in 1972. She returned to Turkey in 1999 and has been living on the coast of the Black Sea ever since. Her son, her monthly pension and an innumerable collection of porcelain in a cellar in Berlin are her last connections to Germany. For the past 18 years she has been planning to take the porcelain to Turkey. Mican fetches these objects from the cellar and invites his mother to reminisce about the individual pieces. Souvenirs is the attempt to reconstruct a past and the search for a present that has not yet begun.

Photo: © Lutz Knospe