Diona Budima: To start, could you please state your full name and where and when you were born, and then maybe start by telling us a little bit about your background and how you came to your current practice.
Franziska Von Stenglin: So my name is Franziska Von Stenglin. I’m an artist and a filmmaker. I was born in Munich in 1984. I moved around a lot in my life because my father was in foreign service in Germany, so, I’m German, so I spent as much time abroad growing up as I was in Germany. So, yeah, that’s maybe…
Diona Budima: What was it like?
Franziska Von Stenglin: …helpful too. Amazing for me. I mean, I have two brothers, one older, one younger. I think it was a big privilege to be able to, in this very privileged context, obviously, of being a diplomat’s kid, to move around all of these different countries and experience different people and contexts, languages and other cultures. And, I think the best kind of education you can get.
And yeah, I loved it. It doesn’t come without its problems, obviously, but, no, a total gift. But I’m also a very open person. And, so for me it was easier to change schools and change contexts. Like my older brother, for instance, is a bit more introverted. For him, it wasn’t so easy and had more difficult changes in his life in terms of school changes in the middle of, you know, the year and stuff. So for him it was more difficult. But for me, it was really nice.
Diona Budima: Did you have to learn all the different languages?
Franziska Von Stenglin: I didn’t have to. I was, when I was, yeah, we were in Senegal when I was like kindergarten age and, I remember very distinctly that I was put into French kindergarten because it was a French colony and hated it. I remember the feeling of hating it because it was super disciplined and very… Yeah, French like {acts out a chef’s kiss}. And I was just not that.
And then, I must have made such a fuss that my parents put me in an American preschool, and I loved American preschool with Daisy Girl Scouts, and, I don’t know, they were just much more relaxed and fun. So I learned French a little bit, but then I learned English very well and went on to Germany and then I forgot everything in preschool in Germany, in Bonn.
And then we went to India and I had to relearn English because that was one of the government languages next to Hindi. So there was a lot of English spoken all the time. So I relearned it, and my parents, to their dismay, I never learned French as good as I learned English, because they were like, “You have to learn French. You have to learn French.” I never really… maybe because of this childhood trauma of being in the kindergarten. I never really loved French.
But I learned a bit, but not really well, so no, I don’t speak. I mean, I speak a bit of Hindi, slightly like a few words and sentences, but nothing major. And, yeah. So English was basically the one thing that I learned really, really well. Yeah.
Diona Budima: And how did you come into your…
Franziska Von Stenglin: In my artistic practice, yeah. So, my mom’s an artist. She’s a great painter. And… drawer, she draws really well. She studied art, but she never made a career out of it. She was married to my father, and she moved with him every couple of years, so she sort of never was in one place to build a career. And also, she never had the confidence to do it. She’s really good, and to this day, she still doesn’t, you know, believe in her own work.
And, so art was always in our family very much. My father also was a big art, or was a big art supporter, like in every place that we lived in, they found works that they bought, like, you know, they weren’t like collectors in that sense, but they bought some works from people that they loved.
And then some of them turned out to be very successful, but they also went in places, you know, just to sort of… it would say indigenous art or things like that they bought. But that was always like a thing. We always went to museums, my mom always… So it was there and then I thought I would do something with art, but thought it would be more applied, like design or something like, interior design I think was the first thing that I thought was really good.
And then I ended up studying photography because I think photography is the only passageway for many artists to start doing work, because it’s a way of training your seeing the world and recording it. And a lot of young people start doing photography when they start getting into an art practice I feel. And I studied photography in London and then I studied, and then I was like, “Oh, this is too rigid, this is too limited” somehow.
And I wanted to do fine art. And then I studied fine art and then I thought, “This is too crazy. What the fuck?” I mean, I loved it, but also I was a bit like, “Wow, you know, now this is sort of…” And to this day, and now I make films also, which is sort of a medium that I discovered after art school, and I never studied it, but really like it. It’s like it’s really something I really love doing. And I still work in photography and installation and archives and yeah, so sort of just, the universe and…
Diona Budima: And what are the main questions or themes that reoccur in your work?
Franziska Von Stenglin: You know what, I always think like artists explain… I mean, this is sort of expected of us that we are very good at articulating our own practice. And I’m very envious of artists who are very good at that, that sort of really pinpoint what they’re interested in. I mean, I can tell you what I’m interested in, but I find it very hard to say, like too eloquently, sometimes articulate what my work’s about because…
Diona Budima: Yeah, that’s okay. Because you have a different medium.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah, yeah. No. And I also always think it’s like a, it’s like, “There we have historians and curators and art critique people, it’s their job,” you know, “otherwise they don’t have anything to do if I explain everything.” I think reoccurring themes are humanity, humanness, I like photography and film because they are both very democratic mediums in the sense that they were used by… now film is used by everyone. Everybody can make films with their phones.
And, photography is also, you know, a medium to share and like it was used to share art, also make photographs of art and distribute them in postcards. So everybody could have a Renoir at home or whatever, you know? So it’s like a popular medium, you know, which is also a problem in the art world because they kind of don’t know how to deal with it, because it’s not like one offs.
It’s like editions. And then it’s not precious enough to be sold for high prices and things like that. But I really like that, and I like that it always depicts a form of reality. Film does, photography does, so it’s accessible for an everyday person, because they see something that they can have an access to, an entry point at least, easily distributable.
So, democra… like humanity, working with… showing how things are used really like in a daily life and how people live and what touches them and what… So it’s… Yeah, that’s definitely a recurring theme. Archives are a recurring theme. I use, I work a lot with archives. I travel a lot, still this thing that I do, that I love doing the most is going to places and learning new things, always being curious about people and the places that they live in and how they live and why they live that way, and how that’s different to me. Yeah, yeah. Those things that are…
Diona Budima: The everyday. And I think in the, in the text, the description in the text says, “The bananas…”
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yes.
Diona Budima: …shows up in the work that you produced here or that you curated.” Could you describe it first for the record? And then maybe say a bit about how that emerged and what were the questions that you were dealing with?
Franziska Von Stenglin: So I made, I curated an exhibition of photographs that are from an inventory of the Anthropology Institute in Tirana. This inventory is a collection of photographs that are ethnographic photographs, photographs that are taken from ethnographic purposes, stuck onto cardboard and filed in folders so that, ring folders. And it took, I made an eclectic edit out of these photographs and put them, I think over 70, and curated a show in my studio, my different rooms of my studio.
And this edit is a joyful edit for me. There’s humor in it, there’s poetry in it, there’s mysticism in it, there’s filmic scenes in it, there’s a fashion room, there’s a bit of queerness, there’s a queer, some queer images. And I just created on the walls and how the images communicate with other, with each other’s different stories, different poems, I would say.
And I just discovered, I discovered this… which is an inventory and they’re, you know, they have a very functional purpose. These photographs are not meant as artworks. They’re meant as a graphic archive and document of what there is, clothes and objects and rituals. But they are beautiful. They’re absolutely magical.
A lot of them are, I mean, extremely talented ethnography photographers. And I was completely fascinated by it. And the archives to me are always fascinating. They’re kind of also daunting because they’re like these bottomless holds of information, and you just get into them and you’d never get out and you feel like, “Oh, my God, it’s overwhelming information. And…” But, in this case then, you know, I first encountered three of four or they were showing us when we were visiting the archives and I was like, “This is such an amazing body of work.”
And then, Olsi, the director, he told me that there’s no, there hasn’t been a museum of ethnography in Tirana for… I think since 2008. And don’t quote me on this, but something they needed the building for something else and they only have this sort of archive storage slash place where they have all the objects and the photographs in these big cabinets and, yeah.
And the purpose was, you know, for me, that’s the joyful part, to edit this sort of, these photographs and curate the show. But, this archive is also, obviously has, is highly politically charged because it has… serves a very clear purpose of… it was established during the communist regime. So it’s obviously, it’s a national identity building purpose.
There’s a lot of… it’s not like old vernacular, sort of, “Oh yeah, something’s happening. I’m going to document it.” But there was a lot of stageness, a lot of performed culture for the archive, for documenting it. Olsi was also saying, and we will talk about this later also. But he said to me that, “This is also part of… documenting is also part of the destruction.”
So there’s things that they, you know, wanted to have sort of safeguarded it and put it in a sort of contained archive but not let it exist in the real world. So some of the rituals and stuff, you know, obviously, because religion was not a thing that they loved. And so a lot of the Ottoman rituals, I would, they were trying to sort of negate like, how do you say… cease, make them go away, you know, and, but to, but still you want to sort of… romanticized mysticism something.
So you keep it and then, you know, you can still sort of tap into it, but it doesn’t actually exist anymore. Sort of… And I felt this, I, this was also a really interesting… and also, of course, all of the things that weren’t documented, you know, so it’s a very specific… everything in an archive also talks about things that are not there, you know. And there is also photographs of these fantastic photographers that are from Shkodër, the Marubi dynasty, and [inaudible].
So they’re also in the archive because of the clothes that the people wear in the pictures or the things that they were doing. So it’s just this, and we’ll talk about more with him tonight, but it’s just, it’s this insane, crazy, beautiful, difficult archive. And for me, I wanted to come and use this platform of Art Explora, of this villa, which is already such a difficult space to be in and not just come and produce my own work that just serves me.
I mean, not just serves me, but, feels more like a in a bigger… predominantly serves me, but also make something that is useful for the people here and for the place that I’m in and the town that I’m in, the country. I mean, and I thought, if if I can use this space, this platform of the open studios in a meaningful way, and I do this edit and this exhibition, and then maybe this can be an advocation for some form of a museum in the not so distant future. And that was the intention. So I asked Olsi to take these photographs and put them on the wall and then return them after the exhibition. He was, first he wanted to ask me, like, “Do you want to do prints? And do you want to, like, scan and do the print?”
I think they have them already scanned. But anyway, make like, how do we do it with the copyright? I’m like, “No, I don’t, I just, I just want the… if that’s okay with you. I just would take these cardboards, you know, put them in the way that you don’t… they’re not damaged and then just put them back again.
And he was like, “Okay, that’s weird.” And he’s, you know, he wants to… he was very vocal about trying to get a museum, get financing for a museum from the government, and hasn’t succeeded to achieve that for a couple of years now. So I’m not sure this will help, but, yeah.
Diona Budima: I mean, we’ve been asking all the residents about their relationship to this place.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah.
Diona Budima: Because obviously, it’s such a historically charged place, and it triggers trauma for a lot of people here. And in your case, it’s so closely related to your work because the people that lived here kind of, like, made certain decisions that determined how the archive has to look like.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yes.
Diona Budima: And you already spoke a bit about this, but I’m interested in this. What do you think your gesture of curating, like the archive otherwise does? And how it speaks to you to being here, how it reflects that history? So just maybe say a bit more about the aesthetic choices that you make, like what you chose to emphasize and how you dealt with those absences that you said, like the archive it’s made up through what it doesn’t show just as much as through what it shows.
Franziska Von Stenglin: I think that. All of these dictatorships, all of these regimes, you know, also the ones that we had in Germany, they’re not, there’s not only bad sides to them. No, there’s obviously a lot of suffering, horrible things that happen, but, there’s also something to be said about state supported maybe, obviously ideologically driven, production of art or ethnography in this case or films, in the case of Kino Studio and what I’ve seen here also from watching a lot of films in the archive in the film archive on the Kino Studio time, there’s I mean, obviously a lot of propaganda.
But there is just such good work, you know? Incredible. Incredible. Yeah. Xhanfize Keko, you know, it’s incredible work. And also the ones that it’ s, like, super propagandistic. There’s this Dhimitër Anagnosti, and he may just, I mean, he’s just a fucking genius, you know, just so fantastic. And although also with this archive, you know, there is the intention, you know, might be to, might be criticized, you know, of a national, for nationalism or, suppression or something.
The outcome to me, to my eye and to, what I see on the wall and what I see, this archive and also to some of the audiences has been… the visitors who have been up in the studio because it’s day three of the… They’re like fascinated and they’re like, “Oh,” they’re interested and like, “What is this? Ah, this is from the town that I’m from, and I’ve never seen this before and [it’s] so interesting.” So I see a lot of positive and beauty in it. And good outcome. Although there is a lot of suffering that came with it, I think, and ethnography, rightfully so, you know, it’s a tool of oppression.
Also, it’s, you know, how much consent was given in certain… And there’s also images that I didn’t take in… I mean, there’s so much to choose from, obviously, and a lot of things that I left out because I didn’t have the space, but also photographs, there were photographs of very, very poor people where you understood that there was no consent given probably.
That was just sort of them hanging out in some market. And I don’t know which town or where it is exactly anymore. But… and I was like… feel somehow too voyeuristic or something and then, but then and then there’s images where you very clearly see the consent and the interaction with the person behind the camera and this… Sorry, touched my mic. There’s the forefather of… forefather, sort of autodidact.
I know I’m pronouncing the name wrong [inaudible].
Doruntina Vinca: [inaudible]
Franziska Von Stenglin: [inaudible] And he took the best photographs and I was like, so curious. I was like, what does this man look like? You know? And then I asked Olsi for a photo of him, and I see his face and I’m like, “Ah, he’s…” You can understand why people are reacting to him in a certain way.
You know, because he’s like a nice… he seems like an engaging person, but also he has, you know, there’s also a problem politically, as I understood it, he’s politically problematic, you know, because he practices sort of… And this is really stuff Olsi has to talk about because I’m not an ethnographer and I don’t know enough about this stuff.
But he said to me, he was also practicing this German ethnography data race thing and sort of, you know, so in this sort of… But what I see, what’s here now, you know, what has survived of what is still there. I think to work with these, to show these… like to make this archive accessible in a way that there is a museum and there is a sort of an interaction with the audience.
And all of these questions can be asked and dealt with. And people can see it and also admire it, you know, because there is a… I don’t know, it just feels like a mystical treasure. And I hate to use this word, but then also there’s a lot of romanticization. And this is something that’s very interesting.
There’s a photograph in it where you see the film camera, a man with a film camera, very closely with the shepherds. And they’re in these traditional outfits and they’re sharing the sheep. And you really understand. Okay, this was staged for. And there’s a lot of staging. There’s just a lot of staging. But then it’s also this is my film interest, obviously, you know, how much do you the mise en scène, you know, supposed, like the imagined reality, you know,
Diona Budima: Is that what the title refers to? Shepherds without sheep?
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah. Exactly. Like, you actually. Are you still shepherds or is this just, you know, for the cameras? Obviously I don’t… there’s a lot of shepherds still in Albania, and I’m sure that there was a lot back when those photographs were taken. But, yeah. Yeah. That’s part of it, you know, because all of the staging.
But I, you know, I do documentary art films, but there’s so much mise en scène staging. And my next stage is a collaboration with the protagonists in my films also. So there’s, because I shoot on film, I have to be very clear about what I shoot, when, because I don’t have that much material. So I can’t just let the camera rolling, leave the camera rolling.
So you have to have a collaboration with the protagonists to say, “Okay, they’re much more acting in that sense, but then they’re acting themselves in their real lives. And, reenacting their lives,” or something like this. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to… this is what I’m saying. It’s hard for me to talk… pinpoint things because I’m like, “I don’t understand it myself.”
Diona Budima: Yeah, but I mean, the most interesting stuff always comes out from not fully understanding, I guess.
Franziska Von Stenglin: You think?
Diona Budima: Yeah.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah. It’s just, I mean, you work as an artist, I do at least a lot of gut feeling. When my belly tells me, “Ah, yeah, this is good.” And then I also, I’m always aware of the people that I work with and is it, you know, is it just like, am I… is this something that I try and make work the way I film? Also that… it’s also beneficial to the person that I’m working with because obviously, you know, I’m filming them and they’re giving me something.
So I also want to give something. I want to respect them and respect who they are and how they are and portray that in a good way, you know, so they feel seen. So when I work with film and here it was important for me to… respect this archive, like respect this heritage or something like this.
I don’t know, it just sounds, you know, conscious, like, does it sounds very pretentious or something? But, like how can this work for the place that I’m landing in here, you know, like, how can I do something that just, doesn’t just do something and then take it away? How does it stay? And already now it’s really interesting.
Like, someone, another friend of ours was seeing another artist who came on Friday, and he was like, very like, “Oh, but how can they let you have these originals? How can they let you have the originals? That’s crazy. La la la.” And I was just like, I was like, “Yeah, interesting.” Because they don’t see… this is not art.
This is not artworks. You know, this is a catalog. It’s like an inventory. So they don’t see the… you know, that the photographs are stuck with glue onto this cardboard. So it’s not like this is a photography archive. It’s a, yeah, it’s a functional thing, you know. But because I put it on the wall in an art institution, it changes its meaning.
And it’s viewed automatically as something more precious. And then, and then I was like, “Okay, so maybe it’s already doing its job,” you know, maybe some people are like, “What? We have this? This shouldn’t be here,” you know?
Then maybe… and this is something I’m going to say, something critical. And I hope that that’s okay. For instance, there’s this photography museum in Shkodër, which is a Marubi archive, and it’s a very disappointing thing, actually, because you go in, there’s this incredible amount of body of work from these photographers, and they have this permanent exhibition, and it’s not the original prints.
It’s some kind of structure. It’s just… And when you come from photography, you know, and you have old prints, vintage prints, there is an absolute level of quality that is very hard to achieve these days because the chemicals are the difference, the papers are different. So if you have old school prints, you need to show those old school prints, because the level of gray tones and the depth of the like, you don’t, it’s very hard to…
And I was there and I spoke to other people who’ve had the same thing, and I was like, “Why are they not showing… And they must have stacks and stacks and stacks of original works, you know, why are they not, you know, framing them and, you know, maybe some money problem, but this place looks really well-financed.”
I don’t know, but I was just… Yeah, I was like, “Fuck! This is just, you know… So that’s… because somebody was just coming in and was like, also saying that. And then he was like, “So nice to see these original prints here.” And they’re not… you know, they’re just stuck on to this board, but still you see the, there’s no glass in front of it, which also makes a difference. You see the actual thing now.
Diona Budima: Yeah. It sounds like this project really emerged from your time here.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah, completely.
Diona Budima: So I was wondering, like, what was your… if you had an original idea that you came here with and how that changed and how this project speaks to your previous work?
Franziska Von Stenglin: So I came here, I proposed to research Xhanfize Keko’s work, the filmmaker, a female filmmaker that was working during the Kino Studio time. And I did a lot of watching her films and reading about her, and… but I didn’t really know. I’m not an archive… Sorry. I’m not a research artist in that sense. Like, I didn’t feel like making cutting a film out of material, you know, making some kind of…
I just didn’t know what to… like, what to do with this, you know? And then I discovered all of these other great filmmakers in the archive and actually thought, {covers her face with her hands} also not allowed to say this too loud, but I don’t think… I’m not… She’s not my favorite anymore, although she’s a woman and it’s like, of course you can also tell. this is so interesting. that the budgets she had are not the same budgets that the guy, Dhimitër Anagnosti had, obviously, because she made children’s films and all this importance of… you can tell the difference.
And she made one of my favorites, I think Beni walks alone, but yeah. So I spent a lot of time there and then, I don’t know, it just evolved. And then we got… because the staff here is so fantastic. So we get to see all of these places and they introduce us to all of these people and archives.
And then I just went there and I saw it, and, and archives offered me the first… no, not the first work. But like when I finished my photography Bachelor in 2008, two years ago, no (laughs). Anyway, a while ago, I made a work with my family archive, photographs from my grandparents’ side, which also were back in our home, just like in boxes and there and then I photographed… I had those old photographs, black and white, obviously, and then went around these places that… because there was a lot of movement after the war.
So they did, you know, the old places that my family lived in and went back to these places and photograph them again and photographed my friends and kind of made these small diptychs with old and new, how it changes… So kind of this very much ties into that work, which is a very old work. So it’s like… and then the archive is always something that I also use in my films.
Because I’m also a fan of using things that are there and not making, producing, producing, producing, producing, producing new things because it’s such a richness already. And I also don’t produce a lot because I’m also… with art, somehow there’s a frustration with production and objects and commodity, commodification, and it’s like maybe my anti-capitalistic streak, you know? So I like….
Diona Budima: Maybe you’re more interested in just shifting perspective and saying…
Franziska Von Stenglin: Yeah, and creating content. And this is also why I like film. You work with people, you have a team. You know, obviously I’m the director, but I have all of these people who are really good at what they do, and I bring them together and we make this work together. And through this process of… the nice part of the process of the making of the film, not the finished, I mean, the finished product. Also sharing that was nice, but creating humanness, experiences together. Yeah. And shifting focus I suppose. Yeah.
Diona Budima: How do you see the future of this project or do you think it has one?
Franziska Von Stenglin: Olti wants to make a publication (laughs), which would be really, really nice to have. He’s written about photography and anthropology, I think Doruntina’s reading it on the side right now, 20 pages, 50 (laughs). In Albanian. I have not read it because it is in Albanian, I think. And he said it would be nice to do something and then show the edit that I made in this publication. It would be wonderful.
Diona Budima: Yeah.
Franziska Von Stenglin: I’m looking forward to our conversation tonight. I don’t know, I mean, you know, I hope this will manifest in the museum at some point. Not that I am the reason. I’m just saying, like. Yeah, I hope that at some point this will… these works will be shown and many more, and many more of them. And then people can, you know, can give joy and thought provoking, and content for, how you say, like, reason to research and to question and to understand and to… Yeah.
Diona Budima: Could you speak a bit about your influences? Like are there any, I don’t know, texts or other artists or just even people in your small circle that have affected the way that you work or what you hope to achieve?
Franziska Von Stenglin: Whew. I am… What do I love? God, now you’re getting me off guard (laughs).
Diona Budima: You can also not answer that.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Photography wise… God, there’s so much, this August, I mean this German photographer called August Sander who did these portraits of people in their job with their working tools. There’s also some of Marubi’s which look like him. So a cook with all his cooking tools and stuff is fantastic. There’s a photographer called Dayanita Singh. She’s Indian. She photographed… like she comes from a culturally upper class background.
And she photographed, documented her family. And this is… then also a lot of other, you know, expanded her practice and went to different social circumstances also with her photography. Amazing. Manuel Álvarez Bravo is also a photographer who’s fantastic. And you’re getting me off guard because I always forget people. And, I know there’s so many good ones, and then I’m always the one who doesn’t remember things.
Filmmaking wise, there is… a filmmaker, a Mexican filmmaker who made a fantastic film called Stellet Licht, Silent Night, Carlos Reygadas, which is a bloody masterpiece. And I don’t know if I’ll ever make a film as good as that. And I don’t know, that’s fine also, it’s okay, I admit and acknowledge that.
And reading wise… Oh, God, this is really…. The names… I just finished, I don’t know, this is really random, Patrick O’Keefe, Say Nothing, a book he wrote. He’s a journalist, but he wrote it about the IRA and used all of these archives, again, from someone, people did… they recorded all of the members of the IRA and collected these oral interviews like we’re doing now.
Actually yeah, that’s what we’re doing now. They did exactly that, but more… people were not allowed to know that they did these interviews because they were talking about all the crimes, “crimes.” The things they… the people they killed.
Diona Budima: [inaudible]
Franziska Von Stenglin: (Laughs) And that was an amazing… Say Nothing, it’s called, is an amazing book. If you haven’t read it, it’s like everything, like super amazing. It’s the last book I read, proper book I’ve read.
Diona Budima: So you say that you can’t remember anything, and then you continue saying a lot (laughs).
Franziska Von Stenglin: (Laughs) So this is like a small … So I don’t know. Yeah, yeah. Tina Modotti, also a Mexican photographer.
Diona Budima: Yeah. To conclude, maybe could you just tell us what you’re currently really excited about, be it personally or politically or artistically?
Franziska Von Stenglin: Politically? (Laughs) What’s politically exciting? It’s only depressing. I’m excited about the time that I spent here, with the people that I’ve spent here with. I’m really grateful for this time, even though it was extremely difficult sometimes or often. But, really, this is, again, the humanity, humanness, like just the gift of being in this place for three months and being with all of the other residences, the residents and the people who work here, like, it’s just so nice and it’s… and everybody, you know, this was the thing I was mostly afraid of, that people were not going to be nice or… and that it would be a weird group, but it was just really great.
Not without its difficulties, but like a gift to be able to spend three months having to deal with all of the difficulties also, you know? You you can’t just like go and leave it, but you have to come back every morning to see each other. So you have to resolve the conflicts and all of the differences. And the nicest thing, the memory I will have is that all of us sitting on a table, which happened a few times, or part of us, but anyway, like a group of us from, you know, and these conversations always go like, “Yeah, so,” about food, they’re like, “Oh, damn, this is really good. Like in our country, we do it like this, we cook it like that and we make it like this.” And then someone else was like, “Yeah, that’s really similar in our place. We do it like this.” And then someone else was like, “Yeah but us, no, no, we totally do a different…” like…
So it’s like this constant sort of trying to understand the other person who is so different from you and how they do it and stuff, and usually it’s like easier to not deal with people who are different than you and trying to understand them or where they come from. And in a place like this you are forced to do it. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Diona Budima: Okay. Well, thank you so much.
Franziska Von Stenglin: Thank you for letting me talk.
