“The Devil’s Garden” (2019 -ongoing) explores how colonial violence is engendered through both the material and immaterial occupation of future realities. Examining narratives relating to the German Afrika Korps and their lingering presence in northern Egypt, this project observes how — during the WWII campaign in al-Alamein — millions of landmines were planted by Erwin Rommel’s army. Through her research and fieldwork in what remains one of the most landmine-infested regions in the world, Amin came across a peculiar pyramid built by the Luftwaffe to commemorate the WWII German fighter pilot Hans Joachim Marseille. By creating a replica of the Nazi-era memorial and bringing it back to Germany, the artist inverts the historical framing of these events and focuses on how European propaganda — perpetuated by mainstream films, in particular—continues to disavow responsibility for the techno-fossils that remain in the aftermath of colonial violence.

Mathew Letuku and “Der Stern von Afrika”:
Interview with Roberto Blanco, 2019

Shot in front of Amin’s replica of a WWII German fighter pilot’s memorial in Northern Egypt, this interview with Cuban-German celebrity Roberto Blanco addresses his role in “Der Stern von Afrika”, a controversial biopic about Hans Joachim Marseille for whom the monument is built. While mostly recognized for his success in schlager music in Germany, Blanco’s film career began as the apparently fun-loving butler to Marseille in this 1957 film. In reality, his character “Mathias” was an actual person, Corporal Mathew Letuku, who was a prisoner of war from South Africa fighting for the British army. Not surprisingly, Letuku’s reports differ greatly from those in the German media at the time and how he came to be represented in the film was, likewise, at odds with his personal recollections. In a further act of epistemological violence, Letuku’s experience of the years spent in captivity until 1945, alongside that of 14,583 other South African soldiers taken as prisoners of war in Germany and Italy in 1942, were effectively written out of the film’s narrative.