What to do with the photos of grandfathers in Nazi uniforms that you find in shoe boxes, photo albums or framed on the sideboard? Our grandparents are dead, but these photos remain. And they raise questions: about the persistence of National Socialist ideology in the family, about our own personal Nazi background and about our ideas of what masculinity should be.
The grandparents’ sideboard becomes a stage on which the front photographs of our grandfathers are transformed into life-size drawings. Gradually, a performative comic is created in which Marie Simons and her collective take apart the old photographs, paint over them and question their impact on their own queer biography.
Marie Simons, Dennis Dieter Kopp, Nikolaus Kockel, Nora Schön and Angela Queins work at the interface of visual and performative arts. The group is united by a theoretical and practical examination of critical masculinity research and an intersectional understanding of feminism and queer identities.
Content note: The play deals with National Socialism and contains National Socialist language.