With and in my works – with artworks – I ask questions. Questions about the historical charge of public places, about our collective memory, social constructions and canon formation. The tools of my practice are diverse and multimedia-based, ranging from drawing to pictorial and musical composition to installation i.e. spatial organisation. The paths of searching and finding and setting are not linear either; they intersect and lead to a multi-layered accumulation and intermingling of materials from the most diverse sources.

The ‘red threads’[1] that I want to talk about today are linked to works and themes that I was already exploring at the beginning of the 1990s. I would like to start with a small ink drawing of a stamp from 1988. The stamp shows the logo of the Red Army Faction with a rapid-fire weapon and star in black and white, but without the three letters of the organisation – ‘RAF’ – in the centre. On the one hand, this iconographic logo stands for the resistance against fascism, against the continuity of Nazi elites, who were once again active in important positions in West Germany after 1945 – such as in politics, the justice system, the secret service, economics, journalism and so on. But it also stands for the anti-imperialist to antisemitic-motivated speeches and actions by the RAF-related milieu and especially for the RAF terrorism. And, at the same time, this logo entered into pop and media culture.

In the early 1990s I did a series of stamp drawings – drawings of postage stamps that of course never existed. Stamps accompany the social discourse. Juries decide on the themes and choose the motifs and personalities to be depicted on them. Stamp motifs mark and represent important historical and cultural moments as well as people – which in this way could be put into circulation cheaply. Stamps are a kind of currency and have always been collector’s items.

The red threads also tie in with works that I began in the 1990s under the title Tomboy. The term ‘tomboy’ refers to a girl who does not act or behave according to her socially intended role. In Tomboy I dealt with gender roles, attributes of femininity and the representation of female protagonists in history, art and the media. I produced a series of portraits of female protagonists in collaboration with the facial composite creator of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA) – an artist who had been working there for many years as a portraitist for the police (also an opportunity to earn money as an artist, I guess). At the time, the LKA had started to make scans of the composite sketches this guy had created over the years as part of the digitalisation process, aiming to develop a simple image program with which you could very quickly click together individual parts of the face to create a portrait – a very simple variation of Photoshop, as it were, for which you didn’t need to be able to draw.

From a newspaper article, I had learnt about this first digital program developed in Munich and that it was already being used by police throughout the European Schengen area. So I applied to the police for permission to work with the draughtsman and his new program for an art project. I then selected several female figures who had been largely omitted from the canon of art, politics, literature, music and pop history. Based on photos of these women, I formulated precise descriptions, which the police artist then used to put together the respective portraits. So the portraits created with this program were based on my description of a particular photo of a person – a person I don’t know and have never seen. The mere translation of an image into language, the description of a photo, constructs and sets linguistic and image-immanent attributions. I see every portrait as a projection of the person making the portrait onto the person being portrayed. From a feminist perspective, I am of course critical of the genius of the artist’s hand (usually the male genius that expresses itself through the hand). In other words, men have formulated the canon of art history by focusing on women, capturing them with a pen, brush or camera, sketching, painting, modelling and writing them down. During the meetings with the police draughtsman/artist, I found out that the police computer program was only equipped with drawings of male facial features. These male-coded, sometimes racially charged facial features give the portraits an uneasy expression. But here the story comes full circle: even in the Bible, Eve is modelled by God from Adam’s rib.

One of these portrait drawings is that of Tamara Bunke – the agent and guerrillera known as Tania. I had heard of Tamara Bunke, alias Tania, when I gave a concert with my band F.S.K. in East Berlin, in the Kreiskulturhaus Treptow, a few days after the Wall came down in 1989. Our concert organisers from the GDR youth radio station DT64 told me about her and I was surprised because we West Germans knew nothing about her. We only knew about Che Guevara’s anti-imperialist liberation combat in Latin America. Although the story of these two people, Che and Tania, is so closely linked, it was told totally separately and also differently in the two parts of Germany. 

In 1992, as a reaction to the so-called German reunification that was just taking place, I organised the exhibition Subjekt Prädikat Objekt in Munich, which I dedicated to Tamara Bunke / Tania. What I was able to find out about Tamara Bunke at that time, I only knew from two sources: one was the documentary film Tania La Guerrillera by the Swiss documentary filmmaker Heidi Specogna, which was broadcast on German TV by ZDF in 1991 and which I recorded on a video cassette. The other was the GDR publication Tania La Guerrillera, published in East Berlin in 1973, which I was only able to buy in a used bookstore. This book also contains the iconic photo of Tamara Bunke, which shows her in Cuba in 1973, wearing a beret as a member of the revolutionary people’s militia, shortly before she joined the Cuban secret service as agent Tania. Subjekt Prädikat Objekt asks for a Vita Activa, an active artistic practice, political thinking, speaking and acting and its consequences and images. Tania as an image for an ambivalent mysterious and glamorous subject; Mossberg Model Bullpup as a weapon (machine-gun) representing the Prädikat; and buildings of different architectural types, sites of administration and power i.e. offices and ministries, standing for the objects. The temporal background for these works is the second Gulf War, and later also the civil wars since the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, along with the associated debates about so-called peace-making measures and missions abroad of the now all-German Bundeswehr, which until then had only been given a mandate for defence. And, of course, the massive increase in right-wing nationalist riots in reunified Germany around this time. 

During my research in international weapon catalogues for new types of weapons, I came across the Mossberg Model Bullpup rifle; although largely made of plastic, it is robust and easy to handle. It was used by the American police as well as by various guerrilla groups. I made a series of 1:1 models of this weapon from various fabrics and also a few models 10 times enlarged as soft textile sculptures. The fetish function of the weapon is transformed in the artwork from a hard and destructive instrument into a soft anti-sculpture, which can now take on the function of a pillow or seat in the exhibition.

Then, in 2022, I picked up these threads again for the Red Threads exhibition in Berlin, which was held in the space of the former KINDL Brewery in Neukölln. The exhibition space on the second floor of the KINDL building offers a fantastic view over the formerly divided city – you could say, a strategic overview. This was the perfect place to find out whether new interpretations of the persona of Tania would now be possible. Because now, international sources were available for research purposes. For example, Bunke’s parents’ estate had been archived in Berlin and handed over to Cuba in 2015. The historian Isabel Enzenbach from Berlin, a specialist in GDR history, researched and collected new information for me. Today, in addition to the publications from the GDR, there is a lot more material such as scientific works, documentary films, journalistic articles, literary works and biographies, from Cuba, Bolivia, Germany, the USA and so forth. Again and again, authors have come to the conclusion that Tamara was in love with Che Guevara and therefore became a guerrilla. But this cannot be proven at all from the available materials. There is hardly anything personal from Tamara left, just a few old photos, an empty diary, some letters and the photos she took of herself with the guerrillas. Everything that was published about her in the GDR was mainly controlled and formulated by her mother. 

Michaela Melián, Tania, Sound installation, 2022 and Mossberg Model Bullpup, 1992: Installation view, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, 2022. Photograph by Jens Ziehe.

Michaela Melián, Mossberg Model Bullpup, 1992 and Tania, Mural, Sound installation, 2022: Installation view, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, 2022. Photograph by Jens Ziehe. 

All sorts of different versions of this story are told in Cuba, Bolivia, Chile, Peru and so forth. In South America, Tania is a public figure and is remembered as a heroine. As there are no direct testimonies from Tamara Bunke herself, this has opened the door to speculations of all kinds. That’s why it’s clear that her portrait can only be put together from unreliable narratives, fake documents, cover identities, projections, suggestive documentation and heroic narratives – actually it eludes a clear classification. So who was Tamara Bunke, born in 1937 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed in 1967 on the Río Grande near Yado del Yeso in Bolivia? The following outline provides a brief introduction:

In 1937, Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider was born to German-Jewish communist parents in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The family had fled Germany to South America in 1935 and lived in a German-Jewish neighbourhood where German emigrants had settled for many decades – from 1945 onwards, they were joined by fascist Germans who reached Argentina via the so-called ‘Rat Line’ (Rattenlinie). Che Guevara’s father had an office in the same neighbourhood.

In 1952, Tamara’s family returned to the GDR. They first lived in the newly founded Stalinstadt (now Eisenhüttenstadt), later in East Berlin. After graduating from high school, she studied Romance languages and literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She was active in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), a member of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), worked with youth groups, and founded a Latin American group and choir. She played guitar and accordion and was skilled in handling weapons.

When, in 1960, Che Guevara and a Cuban delegation visited the GDR, Tamara travelled with them as a translator around the GDR. From then on, she was determined to go to Cuba to participate in the revolutionary restructuring of Cuban society. How she exactly organised her departure to Cuba in 1961 is still not clear. In any case, she flew from Prague to Havana on the plane ticket of a dancer from the Cuban National Ballet who had secretly left the troupe to stay in the West. Again, that departure was often interpreted as an escape from the GDR. Other sources assert that she was assigned to act as a spy for the Stasi to track Che Guevara.

Michaela Melián, Tania, Mural, Sound installation, detail, 2022: Installation view, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, 2022. Photograph by Jens Ziehe.

In Cuba, Tamara immediately joined the revolutionary people’s militia and wore their uniform with a beret. She was particularly involved in the Cuban literacy campaign and women’s support program, but also worked as a translator. Around 1963, she was apparently recruited by Che Guevara for the Cuban secret service, with the objective of spreading the socialist revolution on the South American continent. Now she started using the nom de guerre ‘Tania’ and received intensive military and intelligence training, which included travelling through Europe for several months under various identities, such as the code names Tamara Lorenzo, Haydée Bidel Gonzáles, Marta Iriarte and Vittoria Pancini. This took her to South Tyrol, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, West Berlin and Prague – an astonishing amount of travel for that time.

Finally, in 1964, she was infiltrated as ethnologist Laura Gutiérrez Bauer into Bolivia by the Cuban secret service as an agent to spy on the upper classes and provide strategic support for the underground combat that Che Guevara and his troops planned to launch there. Officially, she was researching indigenous music and the cultural history of South America. This false identity opened many doors for her, even to the highest circles. For example, she managed to get close to the family of President René Barrientos. She used the tape recorder and camera she needed for her spy work to document the musical culture of the high Andes. Further, she regularly hosted a radio show especially for women living in rural and remote areas. These radio programmes also included coded messages for the guerrillas. Radio was a medium of information and education, but also a tool for warfare and propaganda, and could also serve as an instrument for political resistance. Radio was able to reach people of all social classes in the city and the most remote villages, to spread pop culture and spark revolutions.

Meanwhile, Che Guevara’s underground fighters marched through impassable jungle terrain in the Andes, trying in vain to recruit the rural population for their revolutionary struggle. Tania was one of their few contacts with the outside world. In March 1967, she was discovered as an agent – presumably through her own fault – and subsequently joined – against Che Guevara’s will – the guerrilla group in the jungle. She was the only guerrillera among approximately 60 guerrilla fighters. The troops marched for five months under the most extreme conditions – she documented this time with her camera – until she and some of the guerrillas were ambushed and shot while crossing the Rio Grande. The rest of the group, including Commandante Che Guevara, was tracked down and captured a few weeks later, in early October 1967, by the Bolivian military with support from the CIA. All but five guerrillas who managed to escape were executed. What particularly interests me was Tania’s camouflage as cultural anthropologist Laura Gutiérrez Bauer and her research into indigenous culture, sculptures and different musical styles.

For the Tania soundtrack, I started by compiling a music collection. The final composition is based on an extremely slowed-down sample from the 1972 song Tania / Eres guerrilla y flor by the Venezuelan political activist and singer Alí Primera – a song very well known in Latin America. Primera sings softly in a high, thin voice – a long, drawn-out, yearning “Taaaniaaaa”, delicately accompanied by the echoing call of a horn.

In addition, there are numerous samples from archival recordings of indigenous Andean music, creating magnificent rhythms with various percussion instruments and snatches of melody played on the siku (a pan flute).

These archival recordings, with their specific sound, always bring their own space into the composition: the location, the room, and also the time-bound nature of the historical recording. I always try to bring together certain layers in the compositions, including digital and analogue recording techniques, which are also stored in the sounds. Into this web of sound I have woven fragments of international protest songs from the workers’ movement, such as Bella Ciao, Guantanamera, Wir sind die Moorsoldaten, the Internationale, the national anthem of the GDR and the Cuban March of July 26. I played these fragments myself on different instruments.

Fragments of the soundtrack Tania could be heard in the exhibition, in ever-changing mixdowns and variations lasting for half a minute or sometimes three minutes – interrupted with short breaks. These fragments of the track wandered around the space, broadcast over loudspeakers, and guided visitors through the exhibition by their ears.

When I was combing through the material of the Tamara Bunke complex, I didn’t take notes but rather drew notes – I was drawing in accompaniment. In the end, I had 250 drawings – people, architecture, landscapes, topographies, objects and so on – and then I collaged all of these individual drawings into one huge drawing the size of a freestanding wall in the exhibition space.

The narrow sides of the freestanding wall were rounded so that the drawing could go around the wall, as if it were a loop without a beginning or end. In the collage, I didn’t arrange events chronologically; I wanted the multiple connections between the individual drawings to be effective. 

In the centre of each side of the mural, I placed the drawing of a mast from Havana with public loudspeakers and their cables stretching out in all directions, the power cables and telephone lines forming a kind of network. I took up this motif directly for the installation in the space: the speaker cables for the sound installation were hung between the different walls and thus connected the speakers inside the space. Next to an image of Tamara Bunke as ‘Tania’ in uniform, one can see Patty Hearst who, after being kidnapped by the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) had become part of this left-wing radical group and called herself ‘Tania’.

Tamara Bunke took her nom de guerre from Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Moscow schoolgirl, who called herself ‘Tania’ as a partisan. Kosmodemyanskaya carried out attacks on SS bases during World War II and was hanged at the age of eighteen. The drawing was based on a photograph – a very famous image in the East, the Soviet Union and the GDR – in which Kosmodemyanskaya is forced to wear a sign labelling her an “arsonist” as she is being led away by SS men for execution. In the GDR, there were institutions named after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and stamps commemorating her. There is also the minor planet 2283, which was discovered by the Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova and dedicated “to German patriot Tamara Bunke”. To this day it bears the name “Bunke”.

My drawing features colonial architecture and works of art from the National Museum of archaeology in Bolivia; Karl-Marx-Allee and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin; Eisenhüttenstadt; modern housing in La Paz; Tamara’s apartment in Havana; and schools named after her in the GDR and Cuba. In addition, it shows Tamara playing the guitar in Havana, playing the accordion in the GDR, or dancing in Berlin’s Treptower Park. You can see a pile of potatoes, landscapes, and indigenous huts from the Andes, Klaus Barbie in a café in La Paz, French revolutionary theorist and Che-supporter Régis Debray in Paris, and the memorial for Che Guevara and his guerrillas in Santa Clara, Cuba, where the remains of the troops – including Tamara’s – are buried. 

All of this amalgamates into one image. This drawing was then transferred to the wall using a technique that translates the linear drawing into small, square dots. From a point overlooking the mural as a whole, one might think that small, square mosaic tiles had been laid. However, the closer one approaches, the more the drawing dissolves into individual pixel dots, and one can see that the small squares are stamped directly onto the wall. 

To create the mural, my drawing was projected onto the wall using a projector and then hand-stamped along the projected lines using stamp ink. The entire installation team helped to transfer the drawing to the wall. The translation of my freehand drawing was therefore a team effort; this is also reflected in the result, as everyone held the small stamp differently and applied the paint to the wall with a varying amount of pressure.

Of course, a connection is intended to the murals and wall mosaics, for example, at the Haus des Lehrers on Alexanderplatz in Berlin, but with the crucial contrast that the mural Tania doesn’t formulate a mission or a message, but functions more like a storage disk or hard drive. Every dot, every pixel carries information that is stored side by side and interacts with one another. This also corresponds to the process that precedes the mural: I read, watch films, browse the internet, listen to music, have conversations, collect, sort, sort out again. And in the same way, the originally delicate drawing becomes abstract, simplified, more perforated and open – when transferred to the wall. There is no ideal viewpoint or clear interpretation of this work. It merely lays out many possible threads, clues and traces.

Michaela Melián is an artist and musician who is known for her multimedia installations, radio plays and sound works. She is a co-founder of the band F.S.K. and taught in the Department of Time-Based Media at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts until 2023. She lives in Munich and Marseille. In recent years, Melián’s work has been exhibited at the Lenbachhaus in Munich; Fundació Juan Miró in Barcelona; Kunsthal Rotterdam; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Lentos Museum Linz; Cubitt, London; Ludlow 38 in New York City; the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, and Kindl Berlin, among others. In 2010, she was commissioned by the City of Munich to realise Memory Loops, an acoustic memorial to the victims of National Socialism.