»Hammerschlag« is a artistic-scientific research project conducted by Simon Schultz. Collaborating with time-wittnesses and local queer history interest groups, this this project reviews a case study of an artistic intervention by queer activists in Hamburg in 1980, and challenges the modes of lore and storytelling of local queer pre-AIDS history in Germany using participartory methods.
Simon Schultz studied art history and cultural studies at the Universities of Leipzig, Harvard, and Hildesheim, with a focus on queer self-representation in moving images. His artistic-scientific PhD project at art university HFBK Hamburg deals with a case study of a historic self-liberation of queer people in Hamburg from ongoing police surveillance in 1980. Part of his research is the production of the performative installation »Hammerschlag« at Kampnagel theater in April 2026. He lives and works in Hamburg. ➯ https://simonschultz.net
Case Study »Hamburger Spiegelaffäre«
From 1961 through 1980 Hamburg police observed and registered homosexual men in public toilets. From 1964 on, spy mirrors were installed on public toilets and used for surveillance. Along with the first lesbian-gay demonstration in 1980, activists smashed these mirrors, published images of the intervention in magazines and newspapers, making the illegal registers public. Producing the images was essential to build pressure on the city government, and abolish the registers.
...
Artistic-Scientific Research Methods
The challenges posed by the project stemmed primarily from the bias inherent in state archives, as well as from the lack of visibility of activist perspectives due to repression, the lack of institutionalisation of community archives, and the very nature of counterculture itself.The project addresses these challenges by combining scientific and participatory methods. The latter include interviews with eyewitnesses*, community workshops and other forms of community work designed to draw on and activate personal memories and informal archives. This form of community-based research also enables the social validation of objective knowledge.
...
The Team
The people who collaborated on this artistic-scientific research project.
