Wailing Song

StartKooperation
2022, Animation, 7:28 min

Countless small will-o’-the-wisps buzz in this artificial underwater world. They symbolise all the people who drowned between 2014 and 2022 on their flight to Europe. At the bottom of this sea, we listen to the stories of five young refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Gambia. They talk about their families, their flight from violence, their hopes and dreams.

The audio material was made available with the kind permission of the Junges Theater Augsburg.

Mothers and Sons

StartKooperation

… we can easily recognize many religious motifs, images of saints and depictions of the Mother of God and the infant Jesus. The artist begins to interweave these with photographs from her own past. In a fascinating way, she combines living people she herself knows, such as her own mother, and interweaves them with the Mother of God, placing her in the center or putting a different, larger head on the depiction of the saint, which is irritating and leaves me amazed at the ease with which this seems to succeed. (…) The child, the infant Jesus, is exchanged with perhaps the brother or someone else and it becomes comprehensible for all of us that the infant can only develop with trust in its mother. (…) The artist also shows us that this cannot always succeed by allowing robotic demons to emerge, by completely blackening and veiling the mother, by building a multitude of disturbances into the relationship and we sense that we ourselves carry an enormous number of disturbances within us.Helm Zirkelbach on 24.04.2016, opening speech for the exhibition “Ansichtssache”

Can a mother love her son more than her daughter? Is there a special relationship between a mother and her son? The exaltation of male offspring and the devaluation of female offspring takes place primarily in patriarchal societies, but here too, albeit subliminally. What is remarkable, however, is that it is often the mothers themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.

In 2015, I worked on a postcard from my collection every day – most of them with the motif “Mary with the baby Jesus”, the archetype of all mother-son relationships. In the end there were 365 collages about motherhood and childhood.

This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with her and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition Ansichtssache (Point of View) in Münsingen.

Virtual tour through the exhibition.

Utopia Lives Next Door

“25 years after the end of the Cold War, the political distance between Western Europe (e.g. Austria) and Eastern Europe (e.g. Romania) seems to be increasing again in many respects. But this distorts the fact that there is a lot of shared history, which already becomes evident when looking at the parallels between the cities of Vienna and Timisoara. For their piece Utopia lives next door, the authors move through both cities, inspired by the situationist concept of psychogeographical examination of urban environments by means of “dérive” the deliberately drifting walk through a city. The starting point of the excursions are the quarters Innere Stadt and Josefstadt – due to the shared history, both Vienna and Timisoara have districts with these names. From the field recordings thus collected, the authors compose the soundscape of a utopian city in which the difference between West and East has been erased. Woven into the composition are voice recordings from interviewees recalling instances of lived solidarity under difficult social and political circumstances in Vienna and Timisoara during different phases of the 20th century. Based on shared thematic motifs, the quotes are arranged into a quasi-dialogic relation to each other that offers a glimpse of the possibilities that were at hand, but were missed in the actual history of Austria and Romania. The speakers are Friederike Brenner (born in 1923 in Mödling near Vienna) and Johann Kassnel (born 1932 in Jahrmarkt near Timisoara).” (Gerald Fiebig)

The Leporello Project

This booklet was created as a “dialogue” between two artists. It was sent back and forth several times by post for further processing. In this way it underwent constant changes through pasting, painting and other techniques. “Mine” and “Yours” became more and more blurred until they finally merged into one.

In the same way, a “twin” (not identical) was created, which remained with the artist Antje Fischer.

Local Shiftings

An exhibition by Eri Kassnel, Jakob Krattiger and Gerald Fiebig

27.01. – 28.03.2017, New Gallery in the Höhmannhaus Augsburg

“Contrary to popular usage, places are not only determined by their location in space, but also in time. This exhibition presents three artistic positions that start from the (photographic or auditory) documentation of real places. What all positions have in common is that they integrate the spatially clearly defined place into a process that shows: the place has different identities depending on the time in which one perceives it.” Gerald Fiebig

https://kunstsammlungen-museen.augsburg.de/ortsverschiebungen-eri-kassnel-jakob-krattiger-gerald-fiebi

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Flee Immediately!

“Flee Immediately! attempts to research a world in-between design, art, technology, culture, offline, online… and it constantly redefines itself along the way.”

Renée Carmichael

In 2016 I participated in an experimental online event initiated by Renée Carmichael – artist, programmer and dancer with a focus on dance & code. The release of the website, programmed by Renée, took place online. The visitor himself became part of the concept of Dance & Code, as he followed a given “choreography” with his fingers on the tablet. In this way, he became a dancer himself. The works on the website came from different artists and dealt with dance in the broadest sense, including my work: a preliminary version of the video “Patterns”, which at that time still consisted of three individual videos.

www.fleeimmediately.com

Renée’s idea fitted my concept exactly – or was it exactly the other way round? In any case, I don’t need to add anything to what she said:

After all, rhythm is the repeated pattern itself – the code and the looping. And we all dance to that. We dance to a choreography that is pre-programmed into the interface. This choreography has power: it is the planned moves of control.(…) But really we are just making the same old moves that everyone else on the dance floor is pushing out of their (seemingly) free flowing limbs. We dance, and we are part of the choreography of control.”

Renee Carmichael/ fleeimmediately.com

https://blog.fleeimmediately.com/yes-to-body-thinking-yes-to-dancing-e54500a817bc

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