Einkaufsgenossenschaft antirassistischen Widerstandes (Buying Association Antiracist Resistance)
Natasha A. Kelly (Communications Researcher and Sociologist)
In the frame of the International Weeks Against Racism. EDEWA, the Einkaufsgenossenschaft antirassistischen Widerstandes (Buying Association Antiracist Resistance), is an interactive traveling exhibition and educational project initiated by the communications researcher and sociologist Natasha Kelly. In the form of a postcolonial supermarket, EDEWA offers the opportunity to deal with German colonialism. Supermarkets, which can hardly be more trivial and commonplace and are visited by people of all social classes on an almost daily basis, reflect the ordinariness of racisms and sexisms in Germany.
They are closely tied to Germany’s colonial history. At the same time, the traveling exhibition offers a chance to make the antiracist and antisexist resistance of individual groups perceivable and question relations of inequality. The name EDEWA alludes to the well-known buying association EDEKA, whose company policy of using racist external designations for foodstuffs was publically criticized by EDEWA at the beginning of the work in a scientific research project.
The first Edeka cooperative was initiated in 1898, when 21 merchants of the German Empire joined together in the Hallesches Torbezirk in Berlin to establish the Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler im Halleschen Torbezirk zu Berlin – abbreviated to E. d. K. With products in its own goods shelves, an audio guide, and literature on resistance and emancipation movements, EDEWA advocates self-assertive and self-determined action to overcome the colonial legacy, to help understand the origins of conceptual racisms in our language and to contribute to removing these terms from our everyday life and thought in a self-determined and humorous manner.
Visitors are invited to engage with the historical struggles of feminists such as May Ayim, to familiarize themselves with the historical entanglements of colonial
merchandise trade, capitalism and patriarchal oppression, and to deal with them in more detail on guided tours of Dresden and in an event series from March 13
through 28.