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.
The video Postludium is an obituary for the former gasworks area in Augsburg/ Oberhausen. It shows a ghostlike dance in the empty rooms of the building especially of a historical disc-type gasometer, built in 1915, and another recent disc-type gasometer (“Gaskessel”). This work raises the question of whether a building has a memory and thus also an identity.
The sound piece “Echoes of Industry” is a production by Gerald Fiebig and Christian Z. Müller. It was recorded in the “Gaskessel”.
Dancer: Alessandra La Bella
“In almost all societies where infanticide is practised, female children are particularly affected. Female infanticide usually occurs in patriarchal cultures where there is a strong preference for men and a devaluation of women.” (Wikipedia) Conversely, the exaltation of male offspring as a social consensus does not always come exclusively from men. Mostly it is women themselves who shape their children’s self-esteem through education and thus keep the vicious circle going.
For me, the symbol of the traditional mother-son relationship is the subject “Mary with the Child Jesus” – a manifestation of male power fantasies of chastity, submissiveness, selflessness and unconditional loyalty – qualities that still shape the image of women in almost every patriarchal society today.
In 2015, I worked on a postcard of “Mary with the Child Jesus” every day in my own way. In the end, there were 365 collages about motherhood, childhood and memory.
This was an annual project initiated by Antje Fischer, realised together with Antje Fischer and Marlies Achermann-Gisinger. All the works of this project with more than 1000 postcards were presented to the public in the joint exhibition “Point of Opinion” in Münsingen.
Virtual tour through the exhibition.
“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)
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.
“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
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“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.
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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