ABSTRACT
‘Homeland’ is part of the discursive toolkit of nationalism, which cultivates a sense of belonging among the resident population and excludes those who are regarded as aliens. This chapter adopts the idea of infrastructure as a lens that first permits the exploration of ‘homeland’ as part of the conceptual infrastructure sustaining the imagined community of the nation, and second gives a better grasp of what task artists and cultural producers set for themselves when they interrogate traditional notions of homeland. The chapter links the heated German debate on Heimat (‘homeland’) to the Maxim Gorki Theatre’s 4th Berliner Herbstsalon(‘4th Berlin Autumn Salon’, 2019) held under the headline DE-HEIMATIZE IT! More specifically, this chapter explores how the organizers and contributors sought to articulate a counter-discourse on ‘de-heimatization’ to challenge the discourse on Heimat and used the event as an infrastructure for creating a postmigrant epistemic community as a counter-model to the dominant model of community based on Heimat. Furthermore, this chapter relates the fourth manifestation of this biennial-like event to the three preceding editions and reads it as a radical artistic, curatorial, discursive and feminist articulation of two basic tenets of the discourse on postmigration: equality and multiple intersectional belonging.
