Be Right Back

Minh Duc Pham

What are the consequences of the political and economic exploitation of migrant labour experiences? The performance “Be Right Back” explores this question proceeding from a telephone call, examining loneliness as a state situated between participation, absence and structural invisibility.The starting point is the labour agreements between the GDR and its socialist sister states, which were geared towards temporary employment and interchangeability. After reunification, these agreements led in many places to criminalisation and the threat of deportation. The logic of exploitability inherent in them continues to have an effect: to this day, migrantised individuals are divided into usable labour and undesirable groups and played off against one another.“Be Right Back” understands loneliness not as a private feeling, but as a politically constructed condition arising from regimes of mobility, economic pressure and denied belonging. Care work across distances, financial expectations and everyday discrimination are thereby individualised and excluded from public discourse.In a present where new recruitment agreements are emerging whilst social belonging is simultaneously being renegotiated and restricted, the work traces these historical continuities. Between archive and memory, the loneliness that is structurally denied to diasporic experiences becomes apparent.

35 mins.

Artists/Collaborators: Minh Duc Pham (Konzept, Dramaturgie, Performance), Daniel Möller (Technischer Support (Spieluhren)), Neda Sanai (Musik), Minh Duc Pham (Komposition Spieluhren), Hai Anh Trieu (Dramaturgische Beratung)

Next date:

• Date Saturday, 30/May/2026 17:00
• Venue Hebbel am Ufer - HAU2
• Address Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg