“Zivilanten” consists of digital images taken surreptitiously of people believed to be working as undercover agents (in German: Zivilanten) in Berlin in 2005.
The portraits are the result of investigation into the working methodologies of former Stasi operatives—former communist secret service agents in East Berlin—and their contemporary counterparts working today.

Research was mainly undertaken at the Berlin archives of the ‘Ministerium für Staatssicherheit’, that contain study materials from the ‘Stasi Academy’. Focusing on the psychological training that undercover agents and unofficial employees—unpaid civilian spies in the former German Democratic Republic (DDR)—went through, the schooling and subsequent activities were collated and documented.

Among the archives was the transcript of a lecture from 1975, describing in detail the practical and psychological problems of observation methodology. In ‘Zivilanten’, an older Berliner reads extracts from this speech while a younger man reads from contemporary manuals for undercover security workers. Parallels between the old and new styles of work appear: DDR surveillance terminology seems to have been replaced by international security jargon. The word ‘colleague’, for instance, replaces ‘agent,’ and the word ‘target person’ replaces ‘object’.

The Stasi was dismantled in 1990 (a year after the Berlin Wall came down), when a ‘citizen committee’ of opponents of its cruel practises occupied the Stasi Headquarters. Some Stasi workers, finding themselves unemployed, started their own private security companies and academies, some of which still operate today.

The work was developed during a working period at the Project Studio Berlin in 2005 and translated to English for the exhibition ‘Supervision’ in 2006.