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Ballarbeit - a Search for Answers


No review of football and migration - at least in an exhibition - can make a claim to universality.

To begin with, which term should we use?

Guest workers? Foreign nationals? Germans of Turkish or African descent? Foreigners? Kreuzberg Turks? Kanaks? Afro-Germans? Immigrants? Migrants? And what are professional footballers who migrate, emigrate or immigrate?

This shows how words have their limits when you are dealing with vastly differing tales of life and woe. If there is to be a rule, it is best to call people how they want to be called.

Ballarbeit ventures through areas where football and migration share common ground. It shows professional footballers as 'global nomads' and football as a field for integration. Ballarbeit gives an idea of what football is capable of achieving. Ballarbeit offers an insight into women's and men's football, into amateur and professional football, and is an attempt to make the interplay between football and migration a tangible experience.

"Football", said Detlev Claussen, professor of sociology at the University of Hannover, "lives on the present of the moment as played. Every kick-off spawns the hope that something different from the expected might happen. This is why football also attracts forces who expect something else from the game other than a confirmation of the established order. The professionalisation of the game has opened it up to more and more people who initially did not belong - workers, Jews, immigrants, descendants of slaves. For them, football is more than just a game; it is a promise of a different life."

In the Duden dictionary of foreign terms, the word 'migration' is defined as the 'Migration of individuals or groups in the social or geographical area'. In this respect 'migrants' is a neutral definition for those who migrate - for people who have left their homeland for a variety of reasons to live in another country. The term thus applies equally to employees working at a foreign branch of their company and refugees seeking protection from persecution and oppression." (Mark Terkessidis)