Museum of Human Hunting

For over a decade, the Belgian artist Thomas Bellinck has been investigating the European Union’s border regime and the mechanisms of the institutionalised hunt for human beings. In close collaboration with journalists, police officers, humanitarian aid workers, traffickers and people crossing the borders of the EU without official permission, a multi-voiced audio installation is being created in the heart of Munich. At its core is the exploration of the violence that makes the EU’s fiction of freedom of movement and open borders possible in the first place.

In Bavaria, a federal state steeped in hunting traditions, Bellinck searches for traces of the hunt for human beings and places them in an international context. The logic of borders and exclusion is omnipresent. It is negotiated in offices and university spaces, in security companies, in reception and deportation detention centres, on the streets, in subways and on trains. From Aristotle’s ancient philosophical justification for human hunting to Frontex operations on and far beyond European borders: the “Museum of Human Hunting” brings together local narratives and years’ worth of research material. What form would such a museum have to take? Whose voices would we encounter there?

During this audio installation in the public sphere, other artistic voices addressing border controls and forms of (human) hunting are being presented in the Werkraum and the Habibi Kiosk.