Art as Participatory Research / Cana Bilir-Meier & Chana Boekle
Cana Bilir-Meier is a filmmaker and artist based in Munich. Her films, performances, and writings explore - often from a personal perspective - the defiant and invisible aspects of (post)migrant realities and life stories in Germany, linking them to questions of history, memory, and archives.
To bring younger and older people together in intergenerational dialogue about plausible and desirable futures, Cana Bilir-Meier and Chana Boekle have developed a card game. In ‘Moving Futures - The Oracle Speaks …’, people share their personal experiences related to mobility, their opinions on borders and border protection, and their future visions regarding migration to and from Germany in the year 2050. Images help spark associations and get conversations started.
‘Moving Futures’
Cana Bilir-Meier & Chana Boekle.
When you think about your personal mobility,
what will set the future apart from the present?
Discover more of Cana Bilir-Meier's artistic work:
Ein neues Wort / A new Word
Ein neues Wort / A New Word
Trailer. By Cana Bilir-Meier
Can you think of a more appropriate term for foreign workers than “guest worker”?
This was the question posed in a competition organized by public television in Germany in 1970.
In her work ‘Ein neues Wort/A New Word’ (2025), Cana Bilir-Meier revisits the memorable competition that took place over 50 years ago. A journey through time that reveals how people envisioned future developments back then.
In Munich, a choir made up predominantly of former labor migrants of Turkish descent draws inspiration from the more than 30,000 submissions and develops its own musical interpretation. Together with the choir, the artist explores an approach to linguistic labels that is both encouraging and deconstructive - a reappropriation of words that at times appear overtly racist, often hurtful or derogatory, yet also absurd or emptied of meaning.
The collection of different projections sheds light on potential social developments and offers early and present insights into the future of 'guest workers' in Germany. What has changed since then? What has become reality?
A selection of the various terms - alternatives to the term “guest worker” - received in 1970:
Auslandsmitmenschen / Fellow Foreign Nationals
Auslandsroboter / Foreign Robots
Auslandsschufter / Foreign Toiler
Bedarfskollege / Colleague on demand
Bundesrepublikvergrößerer / Magnifier of the Federal Republic
Helferos / Helperos
Integranten / Integrals
Teilbürger / Partial Citizen
Schicksalsfreunde / Friends Bound by Fate
Praktizierende Europäer / Practicing European
Schaffender Internationaler / Productive International
The past is not another country.
It always bears traces of possible futures within.
This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past
Super 8 film by Cana Bilir-Meier
In her Super 8 film, ‘This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past’ (2019), Cana Bilir-Meier portrays a group of teenagers at Munich's Olympia shopping centre, the site of a racist attack in 2016 that left several people dead and seriously injured.
The film's camera follows two young teenagers as they stroll through the shopping mall, talking about their dreams, hopes, fears and nightmares. Fiction and reality are mixed and different time levels are blended, time and again.
The contradiction of wanting to predict the past implied in the title, refers to the continuous and intersectional experience of racism that young people of the 1980s in Germany share with those in the film of today. At the same time, it is also a playful stimulus to break free from established patterns of thought, structures and trajectories.