Berliner Ensemble: Mit Blitzeinschlag

Thomas Oberender: Philippe Parreno is the artist whose exhibition is currently on view in the atrium and the ground floor of the Gropius Bau. Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and professor based in Paris and the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018). When Philippe approached me with Coccia’s books, I was particularly fascinated by Goods: Advertising, Urban Space and the Moral Law of the Image (2018). This short book offers an unusual perspective on capitalism, and specifically on how it creates a morality through advertising. Emanuele, before we discuss your new book about Philippe’s work, what are the ideas behind Goods? Emanuele Coccia: The book starts with the location where advertising normally appears, that is on walls in public. For much of civilisation’s history, at least European civilisation, these were actually the places where the city gave expression to its own voice. In formal terms it is about systems of ethics, about gods and history, about the plague and the dead. The question that occupied me while I was writing it was what does it mean that we now only see images of commodities in the places where a city normally projects its own...

The Exhibition as a Film Without a Camera

Emanuele Coccia and Philippe Parreno in Conversation with Thomas Oberender

Since the end of the 1950s, visual and performing arts have been characterised by many interconnections. That is not only the case for concepts like space, audience or authorship, but also for time, process and institutional framing. How would you describe the situation at the beginning of the 21st century? What kind of similarities and differences are constitutive for both art forms? The event-oriented neo-avantgardes of the 1950s and ’60s were very much driven by an oppositional stance to the conventions of both visual art and theatre. They were carried by the utopian belief that it is possible to create something that exists outside of these conventions, outside of the market and the museums, but also outside the framework of theatre. The phenomenon we witness today is very different. Visual artists are interested in theatre, choreographers work in museums. Art exhibitions situate artworks in theatrical terms, exhibitions become scripted spaces in which a series of events unfolds and theatre events experiment with modes of individualising their viewers. We are dealing with hybrids between visual and performing arts, hybrids between exhibition and live enactment. When you mix something, it’s good to know your ingredients. That’s one lesson to be learned...

Modes of Addressing and Economies of Attention in the Visual and Performing Arts

When You Mix Something, It’s Good to Know Your Ingredients

Businessman des Living Theatre

Von der Sonne in den Swimming Pool und zurück 

Thomas Oberender: Gabriele Stötzer is a writer, artist and activist. She was born in a village near Erfurt [Thuringia, then in East Germany], began vocational training as a medical lab technician, later did her school-leaving certificate and studied German and art education at the Pädagogische Hochschule. In 1976, her last year of studies, she and two other students were expelled from the university on political grounds because of a solidarity campaign for a fellow student, and that same year she was imprisoned for collecting signatures for Wolf Biermann. She went to Hoheneck prison, and later ran one of the few independent galleries in the GDR, the Galerie im Flur. She became a visual artist herself and founded a women’s group which staged underground exhibitions, performances and films. Gabriele Stötzer is distinguished by her irrepressible individuality, her multifaceted oeuvre of texts, films, photography and objects, as well as her gift for gathering a constantly revolving group of free agents around her over many years, and—in the face of intense repression—her unwavering determination not to go to the West but to stay and struggle for a different life in East Germany. Ms Stötzer, in 1976 you organised a petition to protest Biermann’s...

“I Wanted to Change the Image”

Gabriele Stötzer in Conversation with Thomas Oberender

Theater und Orchester der Stadt Heidelberg: Liebe lässt die europäische Eiszeit schmelzen 

Berliner Festspiele Publications 2012–2021

Schwein gehabt

Thomas Oberender: For us, Down to Earth is a “little organum” in the Brechtian sense—a practical tool, a guide for behavioural change. This comes very close to our intentions regarding the exhibition of the same name in Gropius Bau. Considering our collaboration, I am very interested in your and Frédérique’s fascination with theatre. In your book, you keep speaking in theatre metaphors. You write: “Today, the decor, the wings, the background, the whole building have come on stage and are competing with the actors for the principal role.”<a id="rch31fn1"></a><a href="#ch31fn1">1</a> I like this idea very much: today, conflicts are no longer bound to the human sphere but can also take place within the realm of all the things that inhabit a stage—thereby enabling those things to take on agency of their own. This idea reminds me of James Lovelock’s “systemic” perspective on the earth. His so-called Gaia Theory poses a change of worldview that is as fundamental as the one Galileo brought about approximately 400 years ago. Bruno Latour: When Galileo Galilei turned his telescope towards the sky in 1609, he discovered mountains on the surface of the moon. Thus, the moon became another earth and earth a star among many...

Theatre, Climate and a Shift in Awareness

Frédérique Aït-Touati and Bruno Latour in Conversation with Thomas Oberender Staging Gaia.

Was macht das Theater, Anne-Cathrin Lessel?

A lot has changed at Gropius Bau in the last four years, and we have been able to change along with it, adapting to new artistic themes. Together we have established new formats, curated more than 15 exhibitions and renamed the institution—the name “Gropius Bau” (“Gropius Building”) represents, in part, the decision to break away from a reference to one specific individual, in this case the architect of the former “Martin-Gropius-Bau”, in a gesture that makes way for other narrators’ accounts of the institution’s history. For all of the reflection that we have dedicated to contemporary themes and what an institution of the future should look like, many of the aspirations with which I started here have remained the same. For many years now, I have been fortunate enough to have repeated opportunities to work in close cooperation with artists designing exhibitions that invite dialogue, inspire, allure and challenge us. In light of the building’s eventful history, we regard Gropius Bau as an open framework for dealing with a wide range of artistic viewpoints and their social implications. Early on, we made some architectural enhancements in order to let more light into the building and to open it up while...

Making Kin

On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely”, he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and DJs announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of pre-recorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanour, even when their web sites lead one to expect something more uproarious. The Swedish dancer and costume designer Björn Ivan Ekemark, for example, gives no sign that he also performs under the name Ivanka Tramp and leads a “sticky and visceral cake-sitting performance group” called analkollaps. We are, needless to say, in Berlin, witnessing the...

The Sonic Extremes of the MaerzMusik Festival

In his book Kultur der Digitalität (published in English under the title: The Digital Condition), Felix Stalder describes how shortly after Conchita Wurst won the Eurovision Song Contest, Facebook increased the number of gender identity options its users were able to choose between from two to 60. For Felix Stalder, it is not the apparently immaterial nature of the datasphere nor the perfection or virtuality of its products that characterises digital culture, but rather its vast multiplication of cultural possibilities. These processes began back in the 19th century, and since the 60s of the 20th century, according to Stalder, they have accelerated enormously, which has led to more and more people participating in cultural processes. “The number of competing cultural projects, works, reference points and reference systems has been growing rapidly. This, in turn, has caused an escalating crisis for the established forms and institutions of culture, which are poorly equipped to deal with such an inundation of new claims to meaning.” (Felix Stalder: Kultur der Digitalität, Suhrkamp Verlag 2016, p. 11)<a id="rch9fn1"></a><a href="#ch9fn1">1</a> Many of these processes are embedded in complex technologies and around the year 2000 they combined to form something that in Stalder’s words...

Digital Culture

Stiller Abbau?

1, 2, 3 10 DAYS OF IRANIAN CINEMA Berliner Festspiele took a look at the Iranian cinema landscape with this online programme of short and full-length films, including historical works and current feature and documentary films. The series was accompanied by discussions with filmmakers such as Bahram Beyzai and Rakhshan Banietemad. Curated by Afsun Moshiry. 10ER AUSWAHL 10er Auswahl (Top 10 Selection) features ten remarkable productions each year selected by an independent jury of critics from around 400 theatre works from the German-speaking world. Presented in May at Haus der Berliner Festspiele and other venues throughout the city, the 10er Auswahl is the heart of the festival, and an invitation to the Theatertreffen comes with widespread recognition. With the 2020 edition of the festival, Theatertreffen introduced a quota which determines that women should make up at least 50 per cent of directing positions in the top 10 productions. A ANTHONY BRAXTON’S SONIC GENOME This immersive durational performance by composer Anthony Braxton kicked off the JazzFest Berlin 2019 with over 60 musicians from the USA, Berlin and Australia. In parallel and over a period of six hours, up to 15 ensembles took on as many as 300 compositions from Braxton’s “Ghost...

A List of Formats and Format Inventions

Formats 2012–2021

Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen/Theater Münster: Ein Krieg führt immer zum nächsten

Samtener Schutzraum

Leere Bühnen  für volle Köpfe?

Schau mal einer an

Das Nest sauber halten

Romeo und Julia in der Cadillac-Welt

Abwehr gegen nackte Nonnen

Theater an der Ruhr Mülheim: Lost in Weirdness

There are few places as immersive as planetariums. A simple star projection alone can make the construction of the theatre, with its walls and devices, seem to disappear. It replaces the space in which the guests are seated with another, a cosmic space. In this setting, the planetarium audience is in two spaces at the same time—a physical one and an imaginary one. Planetariums are exemplary places for a reality substitution—the physical world slides almost imperceptibly into a virtual one, which feels entirely “natural” in the case of projections of constellations although it goes far beyond a typical cinematic experience in terms of how we perceive visual stimuli and spatial sound because we are sitting in the centre of the image, inside the same space that is generating the images. Since the Sixties, generations of artists have been interested in the planetarium as a site of aesthetic experience. For them, the excellent infrastructure for projection and sound that the fulldome offers has turned the planetarium into a prime venue for artistic experimentation. At a time when we need to develop a new relationship with our planet based on connection and holistic thinking, their planetary perspective as well as their potential...

The Planetarium as a Gallery of the Future

Architecture That Blurs Boundaries.

Neue Berufsfelder erfinden

Ich arbeite einfach gern

Erst der Wald, dann der Boden

Mit der Pfeilspitze ins Herz hinein

DREAMING IN FOREIGN —after Caliban Give your throat to everything, not the word but the thing of it. What the body speaks is untranslatable, how always some unpeopled aching, our mouths closed around the past like knives. Jah, mind our words, our wound. Our runaway climbed deep into these cockpit hills, kissed his good memory into limestone, into blue fern-gully, built that same fire combusting these stolen margins, our sacred double gaze, shantytowns slashed black from ear to ear. Circumstance has made us strangers here, wild dance we are slowly forgetting; what home. The Mobay sky a lingering torch to mutiny. Rebellion. Here I conspire with fish-monster, ignite and riot with sugarcane, with shame-a-ladies, brush palms in solidarity with each thorn, each shy tentacle, our bodies opening and closing eager, breathing the dark impossible. How time holds me under a shadow I cannot name, the bush-music and its sweet bangarang. Do not wake me. Downtown I’ll roam wild with the improbable goats, window-cleaners careening through traffic, ripe urchin bartering his endless hope: Each day is usable, I want to tell them. Our hunger is...

So What Can Jazz Do? or If Jazz Died in Berlin Could Berlin Also Be a Point of Revivification

Sonic Compasses in Dire Times!

Bewegen, Zeichnen, Überzeichnen

Was macht das Theater, Jörg Hartmann?

Nancy Pettinicchio: I wonder if you could describe the space you’re currently sitting in. Thomas Oberender: At the moment I’m working from home, in an untidy workroom that you can’t see because of my virtual background. What you can see is some wallpaper that was designed by David Bowie. NP: Do you usually work from home now? TO: For the last year and a half, yes. But we’ve also put on exhibitions since the regulations were relaxed a little. NP: The situation is the same in Canada. Most people have the opportunity to return to work in a hybrid form but the majority is still done from home. I’d like to ask a question about your own background. Your principal media were originally performance and theatre. Maybe we can talk about the strengths of performance and theatre, their connection with the audience and the way they encourage them to think. TO: When we talk about the theatre, we’re talking about quite specific forms of Western theatre. There are certain rituals and conventions linked to this, the fourth wall for example, the expectation that theatre will have something to do with texts, constructing repeatable events, actors presenting characters and so on....

Worlds Without Exteriors. Immersion 2016–2021

Thomas Oberender in Conversation with Nancy Pettinicchio

Dear colleagues, I’ve been asked to provide food for thought for you here today. I have the honourable task of encouraging you to be excessive. At times like these I have to cling to writers like Georges Bataille and recognise that (I quote) our defining characteristic is abundance, a glut of energy, and our starting point is the sun, which is nothing but squander. In my imagination, art demands an absence of boundaries. In the face of this demand, I feel puny, because boundlessness has no master and its work is never complete. It is utterly uncomfortable to desire the impossible, but the possible pales by comparison. Creation through excess is an unhealthy obsession, no matter on what conditions, and yes, our passions exploit us and will ultimately devour us, but aren’t they a more appealing predator than the beasts that will prey on us otherwise? So here are 36 points on creating our work through excess: 1.We must construct our work at the most distant front. Boundaries are to be violated. 2.We must expect losses because harmful elements cannot be banned. Anyone who licks the knife will cut their tongue. 3.Our vision must extend beyond a mere overview...

36 Points on Creating Our Work Through Excess

St. Pölten:: Peter-Turrini-Dramatiker*innenstipendium für Paula van Well

Looking back at the programme of Berliner Festspiele between 2012 and 2021, “long-term themes” emerge across the years in numerous performances, exhibitions and discursive events that constitute a kind of continuous debate. In addition to issues like sustainability, the relationship of work to form or of East to West Germany thirty years after reunification, identity politics is also an instructive filter for forming a better understanding of the changes in the profile of events over the last ten years. A range of programme elements as well as internal measures within Berliner Festspiele, such as courses and workshops, considered themes of identity politics that have been the subject of critical debate in Germany for around ten years, particularly in the cultural sector. These aim to increase diversity in programmes and institutions, facilitate the representation of minorities and those who are marginalized, and question the West’s colonial legacy. These debates are embedded in battles over cultural policy and political arguments that take on a life all their own, turning into conflicts over identity in which the political right and left each have different concepts of homeland and culture. After a brief sketch of what is meant here by the phrase identity politics,...

Five Areas of Identity Politics in Ten Years of Festival Programming

Voices of Dissent.

Publikumserregung mit Extradimension

“Politics proposes to make us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”<a id="rch20fn1"></a><a href="#ch20fn1">1</a> (Stefano Harney &amp; Fred Moten) Speaking about his decision to acquire the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, Theaster Gates is clear that he doesn’t think of himself as an archivist in the conventional sense: “My collections are still active raw material, I’m still messing with them. … The set isn’t finite, it’s not retrievable always—it’s a bunch of stuff.”<a id="rch20fn2"></a><a href="#ch20fn2">2</a> What interests him is “the power of organising everyday things so that people understand the preciousness isn’t always in the thing—the preciousness is that a society, a nation, a people or a person cares enough to organise it.”<a id="rch20fn3"></a><a href="#ch20fn3">3</a> What gets placed in an archive or institution and why? What has value and futurity and what ends up devalued, displaced, submerged in the basement? These questions are deeply bound up with power, authority and a lineage of command, as Derrida showed when tracing...

To Not Be a Single Being: Otobong Nkanga and Theaster Gates

Arrival in No-Man’s-Land

Leipzig: Auswahl fürs Festival Politik im Freien Theater

Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar: Drei Fiktionen für dreizehn Millionen Schicksale

Der Notfall als Prinzip

Neue Dramatik trifft Figurentheater

Dober Dan, Ljubljana

How has the internet become a race for domination? Where did this centralism suddenly emerge from? Why, just a few years after a world of transparency and participation seemed possible, are we faced with the revival of a political term which in world history represented a total, unparalleled lack of communication: the term “Cold War”? As we know, Chancellor Merkel couldn’t accept that among friends. But nobody can fail to see that Germany’s government is doing to its own population exactly what we remember from that era: remaining silent. Not out of bad faith, no; much worse—because for them the discourse is over, because there is no counterparty for them to confront, neither in America nor in Britain, probably not even in their own apparatus. It is a silence that is supposed to make the young Edward Snowden appear as though he had betrayed NATO’s deployment plans during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But what he actually revealed was that civil society and the Chancellor’s mobile phone, the chief communicative means of her politics, were being monitored. So, the question that explains the government’s silence and affects every individual is: how do you actually become an enemy or—in the language of...

Invisible Forces: Machinery, People, Utopia

RambaZamba Theater Berlin: Riesenspaß mit Hintersinn

Heidelberger Stückemarkt: Das schreckliche Geschwür der Vergangenheit

Solidarität und Waffen

“Dear Necati, thank you for the invitation to write about ‘unlearning’ for Theatertreffen’s magazine, and yes, it sounds very interesting and I will be happy to do it. Would you maybe like to send me some examples of essays from the last few years, so I’d get the context? Honoured! Sivan” I realise the absurdity of my message right after typing it. I am being invited to meditate on the topic of “unlearning” and my first response is to check on the dress code?! This fear of appearing naked to a well-dressed event. And at Theatertreffen it’s not only about the dresses and the ties—this is the red, red carpet of the German theatre, “the internationally most renowned industry festival … [during which] the ten most remarkable productions of the season are selected annually by an independent jury”. Not the first place where one wants her unremarkable cellulite and bare skin too exposed. Looking at the words of my unsent message, I note the silent undercurrent of the immigrant’s fear of being unknowingly “out of tune” or “out of context”. It is always part of the picture, too. Just four years ago, I got directions to an event, and googled...

The Mess of Self-Revolting

Gegen Willkür hilft kein rationales Argumentieren

Lego meets Ikea

Ruhm den Kleinen!

When I started developing video games as an extension of animation, I realised that this new medium works according to a completely different set of rules. Video games are about real-time interaction, interactive simulations or whatever you want to call it. It’s a totally different paradigm. It’s not recognised by the art world yet, but the video game is truly the most fascinating form of contemporary art. The basis of this art form is systems—it’s mathematics. The typical approach of using software to make games is that you have systems that are used to describe objects. I started to turn that around and became very interested in doing the opposite: having objects describe their systems. Particularly, the systems of nature. The systems of nature are always there, but they are usually invisible to us because they are so close to us. We organise the world through language. It’s essentially a process of separating things—distinguishing things from one another—by cutting reality into little slices. The smarter you get, the greater variety of words you use, the less you see the congruity—or, rather, community—underneath things, the interconnectedness beneath the surface of visible life. If I wanted to depict a tree, I would...

The Art of Realtime

Thüringer Befund

Bastian Zimmermann: Rebecca, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy has inspired a number of your works over the last twenty years. Why is that particular text so special to you? Rebecca Saunders: What really fascinates me about the monologue of Molly Bloom is a certain aspect of its structure—there are so many different strains of ideas and surfaces of speech, which every now and again rise above the surface of this constant flow and then disappear again. It also has an extraordinary energy, which is so unrelenting. The way in which certain ideas, passages, memories, single words or phrases reoccur is an astonishing structural process. There are certain words, not just “yes”, but also “oh”, “ah” and “no”, a lot of “no’s” actually. This kind of formal punctuation I found intriguing. For me this translates into a kind of musical polyphony. When I read the text to myself, I hear the polyphony: how the different voices, guises, ideas, perspectives, characters, the different emotional states are constantly intertwined, creating new and astonishing perspectives. I was also fascinated by the brutality and crudeness of Molly Bloom’s language. BZ: Ed, what impact does this soliloquy of Molly Bloom have on you? It seems that Joyce has...

Opening a Possible Wound

Ed Atkins and Rebecca Saunders in Conversation with Bastian Zimmermann

Bodyhorror/Tarantino

Bilder im Takt eines Textes

In the beginning, there was him: HE. Man as the measure of all things, made to rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all creatures that creep upon the ground. He separated himself from the dancing and reciting of the Greek chorus and spoke: “I”—the birth of the tragic hero. From there, he went out into the world to conquer it and all its inhabitants. He appointed himself as the “I” and deemed all the rest “others”. He declared himself a rational and intelligent being and took to the stage to tell of his adventures: conquering the savages and slaughtering the animals. The imperialist’s monologue on the condition humaine was excellent: he told us how he was created in God’s image. HE made him a subject—a tragic Adam, expelled from paradise, seduced by Eve. Our protagonist shouts, he weeps, he pleads, he moves the audience to tears. They recognise themselves in him! The applause is endless. The critics kneel before him. But now! In the middle of his performance, our protagonist’s face distorts, his words become thin and mushy, incomprehensible. His movements, which just...

Exorcism

R Ä U M E

Ästhetische Selbstreflexion

Our sustainability project “Down to Earth” took place within a larger programme series that began in 2015 and since then has been devoted to the phenomenon of immersion—a word that has no true equivalent in German and was previously very rarely used. A little of the hype around this term in this country has also been caused by us and this programme series. But also, of course, because so many changes were in the air and could be explained well by this term. For us, from the beginning the theme of immersion was associated with more than VR tools or online culture. From our point of view, immersion was defined by two things: one was the particular moment in an aesthetic experience when the medium vanishes. Because wherever something becomes immersive, we forget the entity that communicates it and are completely absorbed by the thing itself—love and horror may break down boundaries but a moving film will ensure that something gets under my skin and I laugh or cry along with the characters. A different kind of knowledge is connected with this: one that is intuitive and holistic, one that is familiar from states of intoxication and meditation. The...

Lessons from the Sustainability Project “Down to Earth”

Pioneers of Change.

Schauspiel Stuttgart: Was witzig ist und was nicht

It is hard to know which came first—a new worldview, that is, one that was at least seen as contemporary, formed along with the emergence of a digital age at the beginning of the 60s of the last century, or a new practice by artists who developed new forms of work, thereby changing the ways that classical institutions operated and, in many places, redefining the way audiences encounter the art work. What had initially been heralded by cybernetics and computerisation led to a technical and media revolution comparable only to the invention of the printed book. With the arrival of the first post-internet generation, not only the existence of the internet became regarded as a natural state of affairs but also a way of thinking characterised by networking, feedback and environments designed in correspondingly intuitive ways. A generation that grew up with computer games not only built interactive worlds in digital playrooms but also carried this way of thinking over to old formats such as performances and exhibitions. Even before the term “immersion” was used in German-speaking countries to describe a development, which had migrated from technology-based media arts to all other artistic fields by the 90s at the...

“Every Message Was Meant for Me”

sogar theater Zürich: Easy said, but schwer getan

Das Ährenfeld als stille Utopie

Minorities such as East Germans or migrants often exhibit a striking allegiance to their particular group. The paradigm of normality in this country is West German—and there is competition for second place in this hierarchy of paradigms. I do not believe that the East Germans were always part of the German narrative, and I am not even sure whether there was ever a place for them in it or not. The German narrative is so dominantly West German that East German stories have never genuinely been included in what we now call “German”. Many third-generation immigrants experience something similar: for example, my parents settled here 50 years ago and I was born here 40 years ago—I consider myself German. However, that kind of story is not reflected in the narrative that is often used to describe Germany. I believe this also applies to the common representation of reunification with the narrative of “what belongs together shall now grow back together!” According to that narrative, the two parts that were always imagined as one are finally growing together—but, ultimately, that has never really happened. If I replace the term “East German” with “Muslim” then I soon recognise analogies between the two...

What Do Migrants and East Germans Have in Common?

Home is Not Always the Answer.

Berufsbild: Digitaldramaturg

Cave About 45,000 years ago, a new consciousness of humanity began to manifest itself in the form of drawings on the walls of caves. The ability to project inner images outwards, to be able to share them with others over a longer period of time and thus to shape the world through imagination, has one of its origins here. If you enter one of the caves today and illuminate the drawings with a burning torch, it almost takes your breath away. Along with the incomprehensible beauty and three-dimensional presence of the images, the creeping feeling of being less in a cave than in the minds of the people who created these works of art is very difficult to grasp. One of these caves is called Chauvet. It is actually located in south-eastern France, but can now be experienced directly inside your own skull with the help of a virtual reality headset, the controller acting as a virtual torch in your hand. Due to a rockfall, the Chauvet Cave was sealed in a time capsule, untouched, for almost 20,000 years and was only rediscovered in 1994. To protect it from human aerosols that would endanger the cave’s climate, the cave remains...

Mind in the Cave

Ja, er lebt noch – oder: Brecht is back!

Dramaturgie der Solidarität

This book is an attempt to pass on inspiration. It has emerged from the activities of a cultural institution that comprises all genres of contemporary art. And at the same time, this book is an attempt to transcend these last ten years of activities and to distil from them a few key thoughts and documents that highlight the most significant changes we have undergone during this period. On the one...

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Belgrad: Nikita Milivojević nicht als künstlerischer Leiter von BITEF verlängert

Thomas Oberender: One consistent aspect of your work is the shift from an object-based understanding of art to a more process-oriented interest in art. And this shift changes a lot: it affects both production methods and presentation styles and alters our understanding of what the artwork actually is. It opens the experience of art a lot more towards the agency of the audience. Works of art are no longer regarded as finished products, but rather situations in a constant state of flux. Everything began, I would say, with your education at Ipswich Art School. What kind of art school was it that you attended in the late 60s? Brian Eno: I had a very lucky choice of art school. In fact, I originally chose another school, because the well-known art school in my part of England was in a town called Colchester. But my parents didn’t have any money and I couldn’t get a grant from the local education committee to go to Colchester. So, I rather reluctantly ended up going to this other art school, called Ipswich Art School. I went there in 1964 and I was there for two years. It was a very small college and it...

Infinite Music

Brian Eno in Conversation with Thomas Oberender

To experience art is usually to experience an encounter with works. But often we do not encounter the works directly, but rather mediated by formats. As a form of organisation, formats mediate works—whether exhibitions or performances—as a means of transmission. Formats are always containers for diverse works, and the sum of the different formats results in a programme. A structure becomes a format when it accommodates different works, either in combination or successively. Formats therefore have a constitutive relationship to works as well as to institutions. Since formats are the form of encounter between the work and the audience, they have often become synonyms for the art forms themselves, for example when people say “I’m going to the theatre”, or “to an exhibition” or “to a concert”, by which they mean the event rather than the building. Formats can therefore merge with institutions and become almost invisible, but they can also break away from their habits and form temporary alternatives. These creations are often given their own names, as if they were works in themselves. They develop their own narration which links them to their title and their inventors. Institutionalised formats, on the other hand, have ostensibly become neutral over...

New Formats—Formats of the New

Zerbrochene Familiengeschichten

Chemnitz und sein Schauspielhaus – ein Trauerspiel der Stadtpolitik

Rede zur Entgegennahme des Kurt-Wolff-Preises 2025

Das Thema Hitze  wird in Zukunft  auch dazugehören

I think for me one of the key meanings of “decolonizing time” is a coming to inhabit multiple temporalities, coming to inhabit enfolded and entangled times that are ontologically complex—a kind of being slow to come to ontological conclusions, a kind of slowing down of category work, so as to open up the contact zones of thinking. Marilyn Strathern taught me that it matters which thoughts think thoughts, that it matters which categories categorise categories. A kind of opening up the dangerous contact zones of ways of thinking and being that truly come from different kinds of experiences of living and dying. The contact zones that come from taking responsibility for and with each other, inheriting the trouble of colonial histories, inheriting the troubles of exterminations and extractions, but also inheriting the inventions of precious things—for example many of the things in the Enlightenment must never be lost from our planet again—inheriting the precious as well as the terrible and opening up categories. Learning to listen. “Decolonizing time” involves the cultivation of the capacity to be still, to listen and not to be self-certain. It is to understand that colonial time might be defined as Plantationocene time, as the time...

Decolonizing Time

Die Rache der Königinnen

Wir gehen rein

Die Signatur unserer Zeit

Die Grenzen der Freiheit

Stück Labor 2023/24

Kunstfreiheit, Kürzungen und Ukraine-Unsolidarität

München: Auswahl für Radikal jung Festival

Mit nachhaltiger Kunst  die Menschen berühren

„Sie wollen Institutionen, die sie kontrollieren können“

Schauspiel Stuttgart: Überleben in der Karaokebar

Die Unsterblichkeit des Theaters

Die Schauspielbühnen Stuttgart: Die Eiseskälte der Erben-Generation

Was macht das Theater, Alexander Scheer?

Wenn die Unis Trauer tragen

Economics and dance—why did you want to study these two particular subjects? I started both subjects the same week and for the same reason. I was motivated by the question of whether there are other forms of production than transforming natural resources into commodities. Economics seemed to be a subject that would give me the theoretical tools to deal with such a question. Dance, on the other hand, I viewed as a kind of solution or answer to this question, since it follows a different production mode per se: it composes and decomposes at the same time, yet it is there and makes an impact. Is there an anti-capitalist impulse behind it? We live in a distribution system that can be called the “market”. It is subject to a mode of production that has been the driving force behind the process of civilization, namely the transformation of natural resources. These are two separate things, but they are often mixed up. I have been looking for a different mode of production for many years now, but not for a different distribution system. And in doing so, I ponder whether another mode of production within our distribution system is even feasible. So,...

A Conversation with Tino Sehgal

Climate change challenges us both collectively and individually to discard old patterns of behaviour, tread new paths and seek out alternative courses of action. Often the focus of climate debates is on a broad political level or on the individual level of everyday activities, such as meat consumption or travel choices. Rarely do climate debates discuss the scope of institutions, even more rarely that of cultural institutions. Yet it is...

Sustainability at Berliner Festspiele

Measures for Our “Fellow World”.

Was macht das Theater, Franziska Werner?

Das Problem mit der Apokalyptik

In the beginning I was an elephant. My first play-through of David OReilly’s computer game “Everything” started inside the skin of a trunked animal. Shortly after that I slipped into the body of a beetle, I transformed into a grain of pollen and back again. I guided tufts of grass and turned into a palm tree, an island, but also a billiard table, a guitar, the sun and the galaxy in which I was everything simultaneously, embodying all the things it contained. One aspect of OReilly’s “Everything” is its playing with this constant change of perspective, observing things and the world with the eyes of other things. Another is that the game plays with changes of scale, so that the previously embodied object becomes the measure of the next. It is a voyage from small to large, from micro- to macrocosm and back again, just like in the famous experimental film Powers of 10 (1977) by Charles and Ray Eames. The essential difference to the film is clearly that “Everything” is a digital game, an interactive work through which no one passage is the same as another and which is received individually depending on which path the player chooses through...

The System of Everything

Kampf im Käfig

Feminismus neu ausrichten

Zug: Sélection fürs Schweizer Theatertreffen bekanntgegeben 

Das große Plus an Menschlichkeit

William Kentridge in Conversation with Christiane Peitz In 2016, an extensive showcase of the versatile work of the artist William Kentridge was presented in Berlin for the first time by the Berliner Festspiele: at Martin-Gropius-Bau (12 May to 21 August 2016) and at Haus der Berliner Festspiele as part of the festival Foreign Affairs (5 to 17 July 2016). Kentridge is not only a visual artist, but also a filmmaker, director and a great storyteller. For over three decades now his work has shifted between different artistic disciplines. His thinking revolves around his visual work. This was the starting point for a major exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau curated by Wulf Herzogenrath entitled “NO IT IS!” with drawings ranging from the famous animated films of 2003 dedicated to Georges Méliès and Drawings for Projection (1989–2011) to the monumental filmic frieze More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and the installation The Refusal of Time, first seen at documenta in 2012. The 45-metre-wide film projection More Sweetly Play the Dance was not only displayed at Martin-Gropius-Bau, but also on the façade of Haus der Berliner Festspiele. More of the artist’s film installations could be seen inside the Festspielhaus, and he performed his transdisciplinary...

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