»Hammerschlag« is a performative exhibition that re-examines police surveillance targeting queer communities before 1980, activates informal archives of queer self-expression and self-liberation and thus rewrites local queer history in Hamburg, Germany.
The project used the following methods:
- interviews with time witnesses
- ‘Participatory Action Research’ (PAR) inspired community research activating
- private memories
- informal archives
- archival research in state archives and community archives (Schwules Museum Berlin)
- structuring material with exhibition topology of a ‘fever dream of a toilet’
- ‘critical fabulation’
The Case Study
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.
The intervention’s effect heavily relied on the narrative ‘the citizen vs. police as a system’, and on a general critique of militarisation of the police, jeopardising individual rights against safety by ‘law and order‘.
The campaign
- produced images as a visual or ‘viral’ argument,
- used the political discourse of the time #abolitionism,
- led to a strong solidarity in the general media, and
- abolished both surveillance and registers targeting gay people.
The Artistic Research Project
This artistic research revisits the case of gay liberation activism that produced and circulated images of emancipation in order to change public opinion. Former historical/academic research that solely relied on archival documents of police and state provenance could only tell the story by singling out the visible protagonist – an ‘out’ theatre maker and prominent figure of the local gay liberation movement. This frame rendered other members invisible, who had to stay anonymous in order to protect themselves from repression and losing their jobs. Therefore the story has been reduced to a hero-narrative, obscuring collective work and care, as much as the necessary infrastructure like meeting points, groups, and their collective artistic strategies and motivations.
The research project tries to cpmlexify the ‘hero narrative’ by connecting the historical research with an artistic research on the activists, their groups, their narratives, and their meeting points. The precariousness of the material coming from state archives, and the lack of self-documentation due to oppression, absence of institutionalised community archives, and the very nature of counter culture, is approached with participatory methods. These methods include interviews with eye witnesses, history workshop sessions, and other forms of community work. An outspoken goal is to activate personal memories and informal archives. This form of community research also facilitated social validation of objective knowledge.
The artistic research lead to an exhibition that produced and diffused both community-based and academic knowledge. Existing gaps in the material as well as contradictions in the found narratives about the original interventions were met with ‘critical fabulation’.
Challenges
The project face several challenges
- limited original sources
- strong ‘hero narrative‘ obscuring collective work and care
- generational split in the community
- loss of voices due to HIV/AIDS
- gap between now (2026) and 1980 concerning
- terminology and
- social norms
Working with a ‘base group’
Starting from a situation with limited original material, and oversimplified narratives, the first step was to involve the community. Situating the research in a ‘base group’ involved in local queer history (Queer History Month Hamburg) helped with bridging the gap between then and now. This research was conducted by building a network of time-wittnesses, community elders and queer history embassadors. Exploring the case study together sorted the material, the story and its inconsistencies, and —most importantly– the gaps in the narrative fabric. Intense discussions in this network revealed useful questions and vectors to produce meaning and potential. Involving the community also activated ‘informal archives‘, such as forgotten boxes in someone’s attic, a private photo album, personal stories never considered interesting before. A third function of situation the research in a ‘base group’ is the social validation of produced knowledge. Expert interviews and biografical interviews, workshops, and group discussions created a frame to triangulate predicates in testimonies. This helped in navigating historic uncertainties and in mapping the historic terrain. Aim of this endeavor is a critical recovery of history by clarifying, correcting, and complementing the academic acounts of the case study “Hamburger Spiegelaffäre”.
The Exhibition (#ausstellung)
The final step of the research was the production of the performative installation »Hammerschlag« in April 2026 in Kampnagel theatre Hamburg.
After bridging the gaps in terminology and living situation between then and now, the exhibition physically re-imagines a ‘fever dream of a public toilet’ and tells the story of self-emancipation of queer activists from state oppression. How did activist shape public discourse? How did they organise as a collective? What narratives did they use? Also: how was the genesis of state sponsored surveillance of gay people? Photographs, articles, interviews, and videos, were allocated in the toilet stalls, showing where, how, and in which structures gay counter culture was happening.
Guided tours re-enact the production of images, and lure the audience into the logics of identity and observation, intimacy and political identity, community and activism.
The artistic development of this collective memory space heavily relied on what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’. She suggests that it makes more sense to carve out and highlight the very gaps in the archive, and make visible what’s lost and uncertain, instead of filling the voids of the archival process and manufacture a smooth narrative. Overwriting the rim of knowledge would obscure its own means of production and make a critical recovery of the humans behind history impossible. Even if done with the best intentions, this action would defacilitate epistemic justice. Therefore a core gesture of the exhibition was not only to show as much archival material as possible, but also underline the blind spots of the archives, how it was created, and what is missing.
This methodological premise lead to a whole string of other artistic considerations, for instance, the developement of the “fever dream of a public toilet” as an exhibition topology. This was chosen due to both the impossibility to find an accurate floorplan of any pf the public toilets with built in one-way-mirrors, and the lack of an ‘original’ site of activism. In 1980 not just one of the existing ten spy mirrors have been smashed, but several of them. Structuring the material along this admittedly virtual –if not purposely delusional– layout reinforces the imaginative and malleable nature of narratives and historic accounts.
