The settlement Küba was built in the 1960ies by migrants and soon became a place of refuge also for other outsiders like opposition activists, Kurds, smugglers, drug adicts, transvestites as well as Islamic fundamentalists and nationalists. Since then it has developed into a cohesive society which presents itself to the outside world with impenetrable solidarity and a by now legendary sense of resistance, and which settles its internal affairs by own principles. Küba considers itself to be an anarchic enclave in the midst of a society, the social and political values of which are considered to be unjust and corrupt. In this understanding of a solidarity which was created by exclusion the Kübans find their identity – not without proud. For more than two years Kutlug Ataman has worked with the inhabitants of Küba. The interviews with former left-wing militants, unemployed persons, overstrained mothers or furious teenagers narrate about tragic, sometimes bitter events, about humiliation and loss, but also about dreams, luck and love. They are arresting stories which leave a lasting impression and they balance on this narrow ridge where memory changes into myth and fiction.

Here, as in other works by Ataman, individuals who live outside the conventional social categories get a word and in the narration they invent themselves anew. The interviews, the reality of which is emphazised by the slightly blurred images of the hand camera and only a few cuts, show that documentations are narrations – and thus constructed: “Each story, and therefore each life, in the end is created by its subject as art.”