Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd

This multi-channel film and video installation investigates the historical infrastructure project, “The Baghdad Railway”, at the beginning of the 20th century. Financed and realised by the German Empire, it became a strategic instrument of imperial expansion, nascent financial capitalism and colonial debt policy, implicating Germany in the genocides in the Ottoman Empire and the deportation of minorities in Eastern Anatolia. Industries of Denial addresses the 100-year-long politics of denial and the structural erasure of minority histories.

As a cartographic installation with archival photographs on 16 mm film and essayistic travelogues along the railway line, this 10th chapter of the project re-frames Franz Werfel’s novel “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh”, about the armed resistance of Armenian villagers and their rescue. The installation superimposes the history and the denialism of genocidal politics with the migration routes and museum narratives by the people in this last remaining Armenian village in Turkey.

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