Marta Górnicka’s Grundgesetz: Challenging Community by Enacting the Public Louise Décaillet

MARTA GÓRNICKA’S GRUNDGESETZ CHALLENGING COMMUNITY BY ENACTING DE PUBLIC

LOUSE DÉCAILLET

ABSTRACT

In her performance Grundgesetz (2018), the Polish singer and theatre director Marta Górnicka directed 50 amateur and professional singers from various social backgrounds to recite the text of the German constitution, first in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and then in front of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Described as a “choral stress test”, the performance aimed at asking on whose behalf the constitutional text speaks, that is, what political community it can represent. This question was frontally articulated through the very form of the choir, taking the shape of both a political action in the heart of the public space and as a collective performance that blurs or even erases the boundaries between performers and audience and, indeed, the audience was actively invited to sing along. Consequently, the choir seems to enact an ideal form of political community that stands for itself and, unlike the theatre assembly, is not divided into actors and spectators – a Platonic opposition incidentally discussed by Rancière in his essay “The Emancipated Spectator” (2008). However, this proposal suggests addressing the question of community in Grundgesetz not through the participation of the spectators/listeners, but, instead, by highlighting the communal potential of the audience itself. Rather than erasing the division between singers and audience by merging both in a unified choir, the performance, staged in front of official monuments and institutions, enables the audience, as a heterogeneous and unpredictable collective, to materialize itself as a potential “Public”, thus regaining its explicitly political meaning.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1994, she studied French and German Literature in Geneva and graduated in Cultural Analysis at the University of Zurich. Her master thesis focused on the concept of body presence and its aesthetic and political potential in contemporary theories of theater and performance. In 2018-2019, she worked as a tutor and an assistant at the department of French Literature and co-translated the Swiss theater director Milo Rau’s book Global Realism (Verbrecher Verlag, 2018). Since September 2019, she is part of the SNF Project Crisis and Communitas. Performative Concepts of Commonality in the Polish Culture since the Beginning of the 20th Century led by Prof. Dorota Sajewska, where she writes her PhD thesis under the provisory title Public as communal dream. Politics of the audience in contemporary performative practices. Her centers of interest are concentrated on performative practices and contemporary arts, politics of spectatorship and participation, cultural studies and aesthetic theory.