Tracking the Traffic

During an eight-month research trip with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD), Elianna Renner developed the interdisciplinary art project “Tracking the traffic”, in which she follows the traces of Jewish pimp circle Zwi Migdal, that abducted Jewish girls from poorer eastern European communities between 1860 and 1930, and forced them into prostitution. The locations in which the circle was active included New York, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Saõ Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Capetown. During her research, Elianna Renner visited these places, conducting interviews with historians, writers, musicians, and film makers, that had already been studying the topic. Simultaneously, she visited cemeteries and archives, searching for clues the women’s lives had left behind in tombstones, songs, theatre pieces, and literature.

Tracking the Traffic is an interdisciplinary project that addresses the history of trafficking in women as part of the history of migration in the 19th and 20th century. Until the interwar period, women from Eastern Europe—many of them from Jewish families—became victims of internationally organized gangs of human traffickers.

For more than eighty years this network extended over several continents. The same period saw a rise in alliances between the Jewish-European and non-Jewish women’s movements, which sought to combat the international trafficking in women.

The primary interest of the project is to research and reconstruct this history, using different media. The project unfolds therefore at the interface of art and science. In places that are historically connected to the migration of women, to the so-called white slave trade and to the people who fought against it, the project conducts workshops in cooperation with art schools and universities. Students of both institutions are encouraged to transcend the usual boundaries of their own disciplines and collectively develop an interdisciplinary approach to making history visible and thereby more understandable.

more:
https://trackingthetraffic.org/

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