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Documented by: Ulrich Foremann
When I arrived to Salzburg for my residency at the International Salzburg Academy of Fine Arts this year, I was having trouble figuring out the bus ticketing system at the airport. At another machine beside me were two guys speaking Turkish who had just bought their tickets, and so I asked them for help. We began to talk a little and I learned both were immigrants to Austria and worked in a kitchen, but had recently quit because of the demanding hours and work.
The topic of music came up (naturally in this city of Mozart?)—what we liked, what instruments we played—and they mentioned that Müslüm Gürses’s backing vocalist was living in Salzburg as well.
(Müslüm Gürses—or Müslüm Baba as everyone called him—was a very famous singer from the Kurdish region of South East Anatolia who blended Turkish folk instruments and Arab melodies. Very mournful music.)
I was surprised to hear this. I love Müslüm Gürses. When I asked where his backing vocalist was playing now, or with who in Salzburg, they laughed and replied that he was also working in a kitchen—as a dishwasher.
Though the residency didn’t require a finished project, I made a performance video as a tribute to this singer, where I washed the dishes from my rental apartment in the Residenzbrunnen, a large Baroque fountain the town square, drying my dishes with a dishrag where I had written out the first page of the score of Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca.