heimaten
2024–2027
According to Article 20, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, all state power comes from the people. Some things can be said with certainty about this people: almost thirty percent have a history of migration, and that percentage will only continue to increase in the future. People desire in different ways, have differing political opinions, belong to different religious communities, are of different ages, and have different incomes and levels of wealth at their disposal.
If, as stated in the Basic Law, all state power comes from the people, this also means that all state power comes from a plural society. This reality is where heimaten comes in; heimaten, used as a verb, derives from Heimat—meaning home or homeland—and is something that is actively shaped and thereby constantly recreated. But heimaten can also function as a plural noun because Germany is conceived of as a place of plurality where people, through loose associations and institutions, initiatives and organizations, shape what is today called German society and culture.
heimaten aims to reinterpret the concept of Heimat according to this plural composition of Germany’s population. It comprises a four-year programme, including a series of talks that bring together strategies of ‘heimatization’ with questions of plural remembrance work, and a a focus on the concept of ‘de-Berlinization’, which examines how colonial structures continue to endure and how much-discussed practices of decolonization can be concretely defined and enacted. The decentralized heimaten Festival takes place in September 2025 together with numerous partner institutions, making visible this plural society as well as the work of many individuals and initiatives to date in upholding and advocating for it.
The project is conceived by HKW and the co-curators Ibou Diop and Max Czollek and is supported by a network of civil society initiatives and cultural institutions throughout the German-speaking world, including Austria and Switzerland.