Journal der Künste 10 (EN)

JOURNAL DER KÃœNSTE

THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS ON THE TOPICALITY OF DANCE HERITAGE FROM MARY WIGMAN TO JOHANN KRESNIK JUNGE AKADEMIE THE FELLOWS 2019

ENGLISH EDITION MAY 2019

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P. 32 DANCE AND MEMORY

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EDITORIAL

TRANSFORMATION INSTEAD OF RESTORATION: AN ATTEMPT TO TAKE STOCK OF THE HISTORY OF DANCE

THE CUBIST FACE

KUNSTWELTEN

Ralph Hammerthaler

Johannes Odenthal P. 4 THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ

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KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRIZE 2019 HITO STEYERL

BALLET CAN FIGHT: JOHANN KRESNIK AND HIS “CHOREOGRAPHIC THEATRE”

KUNSTWELTEN

Anke Hervol

Helene Herold

A DAISY BLOOMS ON THE PEENESTROM, ON THE PEENESTROM ...

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Constanze Witt and Katherina Seemann Villanueva

BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS THE ACADEMY AT PARISER PLATZ 4

MARY WIGMAN: THE EMBODIMENT OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST DANCE

Werner Durth

Stephan Dörschel

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A READING ROOM WITH A BEAUTIFUL VIEW: THE ARCHIVES AT PARISER PLATZ 4

KARIN WAEHNER: PIONEER OF MODERN DANCE IN FRANCE

Werner Heegewaldt

Stephan Dörschel

P. 64 KONTAKTE ’19

P. 20

THE FESTIVAL Gregorio García Karman

T.I.T.O. – THE INTERNATIONAL TURNTABLE ORCHESTRA A BRIEF PERSONAL HISTORY Ignaz Schick

THE BILDERKELLER Angela Lammert

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JUNGE AKADEMIE

SEARCHING FOR CLUES LICHT.BILDER BY CHRISTINA KUBISCH

DEEPFAKES & REGIMES OF TRUTH Lynn Takeo Musiol in conversation with Clara Herrmann

P. 66 FREUNDESKREIS

THE VALUE OF BERLIN CULTURE

Rosa von der Schulenburg

A guest contribution by Udo Marin P. 50 JUNGE AKADEMIE

THE FELLOWS 2019 P. 24 CARTE BLANCHE

VA WÖLFL P. 56 GRIPS: THE FIRST 50 YEARS

AROUND THE WORLD WITH GRIPS Volker Ludwig P. 58 FINDS

GRIPS (HE, SHE, IT?) Andrea Clos

EDITORIAL

Dear Readers, The latest issue of our journal offers striking images. Images that highlights is the “Erlesene Bibliotheken” exhibition, which presents provoke and surprise, perhaps even unsettle, and impressively an outstanding part of the collection. With the private book collconvey the diversity of artistic programmes and activities at the ections of over three hundred artists, the Academy holds a treaAkademie der Künste. They range from the astute installations by sure that not only includes valuable first editions, private prints, Hito Steyerl, this year’s winner of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, to the covert writings, and rare artists’ books, but also reveals artistic work of the choreographer, action and video artist, painter, and work processes and networks in quite a special way. photographer, VA Wölfl, who created the Carte Blanche, to photoAnother key focus of this issue is dance. How can the herigraphs of the expressionist dancers Mary Wigman and Karin Waeh- tage of the modern age of dance, which is often only tangible in ner, which never fail to fascinate all over again, each and every time. descriptions, photographs, notations, and reviews, be reconstrucA photograph of Pariser Platz is striking in a completely dif- ted and made usable for the present? This topic is to be addressed ferent way, showing the immense, surreal wasteland in front of the by the programme series “Was der Körper erinnert: Zur Aktualität exhibition halls of the Akademie der Künste. The viewer is suddenly des Tanzerbes”, which will be realised in late summer by the Acamade aware of the profound changes that have taken place (and demy together with the Federal Cultural Foundation. The installanot just structurally) over the last twenty-five years, including the tion Das Jahrhundert des Tanzes will be part of the programme, new Academy building inaugurated in 2005. In a contribution on along with current dance productions and discursive events. The Pariser Platz 4, Werner Durth characterises the history of the buil- featured archives of Johann Kresnik, Mary Wigman, and Karin Waehding as a paradigm for the upheavals of recent German history and ner have provided an important basis for this. the “debilitating and at the same time invigorating conflict between What does a bunk bed have to do with how theatre is receiartistic demands and political reality that accompanied this soci- ved internationally? Volker Ludwig, founder of GRIPS Theater and ety from the very beginning.” One of the few original parts of the a member of the Academy, shows how the idea of emancipatory previous building to have been preserved is the Bilderkeller children’s and youth theatre radiated out from Berlin and became (Picture Cellar), where the legendary carnival celebrations of the successful worldwide. Under the title “50 Years of Future”, GRIPS East German Academy’s master students took place in 1957 and Theater and the Akademie der Künste will celebrate the theatre’s 1958. They celebrated exuberantly here, and Manfred Böttcher, 50th anniversary and the transfer of its archive on 28 April 2019 at Harald Metzkes, Ernst Schroeder, and Horst Zickelbein left behind Pariser Platz. large-scale murals that they would never have been allowed to show in the exhibitions of the time. Angela Lammert describes how I wish you a very enjoyable read. the images now accessible to the public became a metaphor for the disputes of that time regarding art policy.

Yours, A year ago, after a long period of renovation, the exhibition Werner Heegewaldt halls and the reading room at Pariser Platz came into use once Director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste again, and the Archives moved into its rooms, workshops, and stacks.

Reason enough to present the Archives’ second central location to the public by holding an open day on 5 May 2019. One of the

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THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ Hito Steyerl, Abstract, 2012, two-channel HD video, sound, 7.30 min.

Installation view: Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019: Hito Steyerl.

Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 21 February to 14 April 2019

KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRIZE 2019 HITO STEYERL

Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2016, three-channel HD video installation, environment, 4.35 min. / Robots Today, 2016, one-channel HD video, 8.02 min.

Installation view: Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2019: Hito Steyerl.

Akademie der KĂźnste, Berlin, 21 February to 14 April 2019

Like virtually no other contemporary artist, Hito Steyerl has succeeded in provocatively and incisively intertwining physical, visual, and intellectual information into her artistic and theoretical work. Her discourse revolves around several socio-political processes: in a diverse panoply of media, Steyerl visualises postcolonial critique, abuse of power, violence, feminist representation logic, and the influences of globalization on the financial, labour, and commodities markets. She responds to the influences that affect a digital, global life using a montage and de-montage of images, texts, performances, multimedia installations, and documentary films.

The internationally resonant new perspectives she creates are consistently relevant to the contemporary art trade, as indeed was the work of Käthe Kollwitz, whose name the current prize bears, and who was admitted into the Prussian Academy of Arts a hundred years ago.

Questions surrounding the influence of virtual reality on users and recipients are realised in Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), in which steel dividers and walls with compiled video-audio sequences of humanoid robots contextualise the role of computer technology in war. The twochannel video work Abstract (2012) juxtaposes a military conflict in a Kurdish-populated region of eastern Turkey with mobile phone footage the artist recorded on Pariser Platz in Berlin – images that create profound site-specific associations between places far apart. But the prizewinner is also showing her filmic study Die leere Mitte (1998) (“The empty centre”), which captures the visions of passersby on the wasteland between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz, and punctuates them with almost forgotten documentary images from before the reconstruction of an entire district of central Berlin.

With her site-specific exhibition concept, as well as her historic, political, and/or urban dimension, she mediates between the past, the future, and the present in the centre of Berlin.

ANKE HERVOL is the secretary of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ

BETWEEN ART

THE ACADEMY AT PARISER PLATZ 4

Pariser Platz, with the Hotel Adlon and the Akademie der Künste, circa 1910

AND POLITICS Werner Durth

Connecting hall as the throne hall, circa 1910

Hardly any other place in Berlin bears so many traces of the changes that have occurred throughout the passing epochs of German history as Pariser Platz 4. In 1737, the “Schutz-Jude und HoffAgent Meyer-Riess” (Protected Jew and Agent of the Royal Court), who had helped to finance the army of the “Soldier King” Frederick Wilhelm I, was granted planning permission on a narrow plot of land on the east corner of the square. As a non-noble owner, he built a relatively modest house amongst magnificent neighbours, which was only registered in his name for two decades.

In 1903, after several changes of ownership and the addition of a facade in an elegant classical style, the building was taken over by the Prussian state in order to provide the Preußische Akademie der Künste, which was founded in 1696, with a prestigious location and better facilities than at the Alter Marstall (Old Royal Stables) at Unter den Linden, where the society of artists had been housed between stables and military buildings in quite miserable conditions for almost two centuries. The new state library was to be built once the Marstall was torn down, and the relocation of the Academy was to demonstrate the society’s enhanced status.

CHANGE OF LOCATION In retrospect, it would seem that, from its founding, the Academy was forced to live an artful double life, in that it persistently asserted the self-will of artistic practice and had to live up to the highest expectations, but was also constantly at the mercy of the arbitrariness and pretensions of the respective current ruler in terms of its shifting status. The debilitating and at the same time invigorating conflict between artistic demands and political reality was a given from the very beginning for the society. It presented, on the

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one hand, a means of gaining the desired royal status and of being on a par with the great academies in Paris and Rome, and, on the other, the challenge of having to maintain its international standing under modest conditions from the royal stables; “musis et mulis” quipped the great philosopher Leibniz, in reference to this memorable location with its “smell of horse dung” (Johann Gottfried Schadow), where art and science were supposed to flourish.

Frederick the Great sarcastically remarked that his grandfather had hardly set up the Academy out of pure enthusiasm, and noted that: “He was persuaded that it was befitting of his royal dignity to have an academy, just as one convinces a new noble that keeping a pack of dogs is the respectable thing to do.” It should be fairly presentable, but not expensive. This might well have been the grandson’s motto, as he withdrew the Academy’s resources to the extent that it only survived thanks to the inventiveness of the members and their commitment to giving private lessons at their homes. The art-loving king tersely responded to the urgent request to finance heating and light by saying that the artists “did not need any lamps to paint; because whoever wants to paint ought to do so by day and not at night.”

Even in the Academy’s heyday, the working conditions were miserable. Time and time again during his fifty years as director, the great sculptor Schadow appealed to the public authorities with pleading letters: “The unbound stock of elementary drawing work and similar items are stored under the roof, which has no windows, with dust and rain and snow and vermin getting in.”

In retrospect, it seems as though the Academy constantly had to reinvent itself, especially in the dark hours of its history, through the work, commitment, and presence of its members, in order to

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come close to the ideal expressed as follows by Daniel Chodowiecki in 1783: “Academy is a word that means a gathering of artists at an assigned location, who come together at certain times to cordially discuss art, to share their efforts, insights, and experiences, and to learn from each other, to try and draw closer to perfection together.”

With the official opening of the building at Pariser Platz in January 1907, new conditions were established. Ernst von Ihne, court architect to Emperor Wilhelm II, left the elegant facade of the neoclassical city mansion in place, converted the interior to suit the requirements of the Academy, and extended the building to the south along the elongated site by adding a series of exhibition halls, which were soon to be considered the most beautiful in Europe because of their layout and exposure to light using glass domes. In order to link the renovated old building to the series of halls with their skylights, the architect designed a high staircase tower and the Kaiser’s throne hall. Its presence was to add glamour to the exhibitions and lend recognition to the artists, particularly as the interest of the well-informed public had turned to other events such as the Berlin Secession exhibitions.

This new association of artists, which in addition to well-known painters such as Lovis Corinth, Walter Leistikow, and Lesser Ury also included Max Liebermann, who was a member of the Königlich Preußischen Akademie, had since 1899 been presenting the latest trends in art, which were purposely neglected by the Academy. Looking back on this conservative position, Liebermann attested to an “ossification and narrow-mindedness”, through which the “talent of youth that was storming ahead” had been alienated from this society.

After the crippling years of the First World War and the revolutionary turmoil of the political upheaval, the election in 1919 of Max Liebermann as president of a renewed Academy marked the transition to an era of free development of the arts. However, the many different currents that had emerged in contemporary art over the years were increasingly met with “völkisch” (nationalistic) and racist argument, and the attacks on “degenerate art” became polemically intensified. As a gesture to counteract the creeping resignation amongst the members, on the initiative of Liebermann, the Minister for Arts, Science, and Education nominated a group that included the artists Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, and architects Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Martin Wagner as members in order to revive the Academy. This caused the conflicts with conservative colleagues to intensify and come under public scrutiny: “The spirits are lining up for battle,” warned Völkische Kunstkorrespondenz in 1928. In the same year, the social-Darwinian pamphlet Kunst und Rasse (“Art and race”) was published by Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who was elected to the Academy in 1930.

The consequences of this political polarisation, driven primarily by the National Socialist “Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur” (Militant League for German Culture) from 1928, are all too well known.

On 30 January 1933, Hitler’s regime began and, just six weeks after the Nazi’s had assumed power, the competent Reich Commissioner

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View of the Spring Exhibition 1930

threatened to close the Academy. In order to prevent this decision, Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann, who had joined other members in protest at the exertion of political influence, resigned as members. After the resignation or exclusion of other well-known artists, the Academy lost its significance and, in July 1937, its statutes were repealed.

Just a few months earlier, the young architect Albert Speer, who Hitler had appointed “Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt” on 30 January 1937 at the age of 31, saw his opportunity to set up his office in the Academy’s premises, and to use the large exhibition halls for workshops and to present large-scale models of the proposed “Neugestaltung deutscher Städte”. In fact, Speer had already moved into some of the rooms at Pariser Platz 4 with colleagues in March, and from 1938 he expanded the exhibition halls by adding lateral extensions to provide additional offices and workshops.

The location of Speer’s office at Pariser Platz had a unique advantage: Adolf Hitler was able to get to the Academy building at any time without an escort from the nearby New Reich Chancellery on Voßstraße, because the route ran through the laterally secured Ministergärten along Wilhelmstraße. Now Hitler could meet with Speer even at short notice, and indulge his passion for imagining grandiose cityscapes through plans and models.

The ruins of the Academy building after the fire in March 1945

In order to make room for the new buildings of the future “Welt- THE BUILDING AT PARISER PLATZ hauptstadt Germania” and provide alternative accommodation for Badly damaged by air strikes, the building at Pariser Platz was the “demolition tenants”, in October 1938, on the plot once con- completely burnt down on 18 March 1945. However, the structures of the high staircase, the throne hall, and the series of exhibiveyed to the king’s protected Jew, the systematic acquisition and evacuation of “Judenwohnungen” (Jewish residences) began in tion halls remained intact despite some damage. After Germany Berlin. After the invasion of neighbouring European countries by was divided into two countries and the Akademie der Künste (East) German troops and a series of Blitzkrieg attacks, the plans for the was founded, the expansion of the series of halls, now called the “Neugestaltung Berlins” and other German cities were pushed for- “studio wing” (“Atelierflügel”), began in April 1952. In October that ward in order for the construction preparations to be as advanced year, the sculptor Fritz Cremer was able to set up his studio there. as possible in view of the “Endsieg” (ultimate victory) that was In the years that followed, Cremer and his colleagues offered their expected by 1942 according to the “Erlaß zur Sicherstellung des master students the greatest possible freedom in this building, Sieges” (decree to ensure victory). This also concerned the expan- which young artists such as Wieland Förster and Werner Stötzer, sion of the areas certified as “judenrein” (free of Jews) after the Manfred Böttcher, Harald Metzkes, Ernst Schroeder, Horst Zickelexpulsion of the Jewish inhabitants, while the people affected were bein, and others were able to use productively.

Despite increasing instructions to implement “disciplined study” brought to collection centres and sent to their deaths through and mandatory registration, an environment of collegial loyalty betdeportations.

Having been appointed Minister of Armaments in February ween teachers and students emerged in the ruins at Pariser Platz, 1942, Speer, who was already aware of the hopeless situation on which those involved remembered all their lives. The wall-tothe fronts from 1943, set up a working group for the reconstruc- ceiling paintings created spontaneously for the nightly carnival tion planning of cities destroyed by war, with the aim of establi- celebrations in the Academy’s cellar in 1957 and 1958 are a lasshing the foundations for the post-war period, which were realised ting document of the tensions between experimental artistic practice and attempts at state regulation. The cellar rooms became after 1945, both in terms of continuities in personnel and in the concepts developed, and made new careers possible for some of a meeting place for a small community of artists and their closest friends, where painting reflected a departure to other worlds his subordinates.

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Views of Pariser Platz with the exhibition halls and extensions, February 1992

beyond that of socialist realism. In the years of repressive state as possible in a location dedicated solely to art, right next to the policies on art, the Academy at Pariser Platz was both a protec- Wall, closely surrounded by the control apparatus of the state in tive space for the rebellious and a target of attack for the party the form of barbed wire and death strips. Meanwhile, the Akademie officials. der KĂźnste, which was founded in West Berlin in 1955, moved into For nearly four decades, the studio wing of the Academy buil- its own premises at Tiergarten in 1960, with the new building on ding, small parts of which were still in use, remained a popular Hanseatenweg designed by Werner DĂźttmann. In the surprising meeting place for the art scene, despite the fact that the neigh- diversity of forms, locations, and materials, and in the constant bourhood was changing dramatically. When the construction of interplay between interior and exterior spaces, both open and intithe Berlin Wall began in August 1961, the ensemble of the old stu- mate at the same time, this ensemble provided the opportunity to dio buildings fell into macabre isolation. Demolition of the building develop the artistic and political self-understanding of the memto the front at Pariser Platz, the neighbouring Hotel Adlon, and bers and to further appeal to the general public over the three decaother buildings in the immediate vicinity, left the series of exhibi- des that followed. tion halls, along with the throne room and staircase tower, as the last buildings to remain standing near the Brandenburg Gate. AFTER THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL Because of this and probably because of how close it was to the The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany in OctoWall in the emptiness of the border area, this precipitous, towering ber 1990 sparked controversial debates about the future of both building was the only one that could serve as accommodation for academies. Many members of the Academy in the West rigorously the guards patrolling the checkpoints along the border. In the for- opposed unification, and it failed to receive any significant support mer throne room, using a suspended ceiling beneath the remains from politicians at the federal level either, especially since German of the collapsed stucco, brightly wallpapered compartments were Chancellor Helmut Kohl made his opposition to such a proposal installed for the guards, along with a cell for border violators, while known. In the plenary assemblies, various paths to a shared new studios continued to operate next door in the series of halls. The beginning were discussed, including the idea of reforming the situation in this building over the years could be described as a Academy as an independent European society of artists. But soon, living paradox: as the pursuit of a life as distanced from the state a pragmatic solution emerged, also with a view to securing the

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legacies held in the many archives of both academies: to protect the treasures in the collections and estates in the long term and make these accessible to the public. In particular, it was thanks to the tremendous personal dedication of the two presidents, Walter Jens and Heiner Müller, who rejected all forms of “state paternalism”, that the merger became a reality in September 1993 when legislation was passed on the formation of the Akademie der Künste under the auspices of the States of Berlin and Brandenburg. In the process, some renowned artists did, however, resign from the Academy in West Berlin.

Looking back on the shared history of both academies, the decision had already been made in the spring of 1993 by means of an internal evaluation procedure in the Academy to invite tenders to design a new building on the site of the historic headquarters at Pariser Platz and proposals on how to handle the existing building stock. The aim was to obtain recommendations on how to proceed after evaluating the contributions, with two opinions commissioned by the Senate also to be considered. After further clarification of the room plans, a second phase of the evaluation procedure was initiated in October 1993.

After a thorough preliminary examination and evaluation of the nineteen contributions that had been submitted, on 25 May 1994 the jury unanimously adopted the recommendation to base further planning on the design proposed by Günter Behnisch and colleagues. Two days later, the recommendation was also unanimously approved by the General Assembly. On 29 May, Walter Jens was re-elected as president and emphasised his joy over the agreed construction project and the impending return of the Academy to its historic site. The architect then presented the design publicly for the first time to the press at the building on Hanseatenweg. He explained the design and the concept of opening the building out towards the square; he also addressed the foreseeable conflict

with the recently adopted design statute by making reference to the materiality and proportions of the glass facade at Pariser Platz.

Behnisch emphatically confirmed that, given the public significance of this building and its location in the constantly shaded corner of the square, parts of the plan consciously departed from the proposals of the design statute, which prescribed a pierced facade on a plinth and natural stone or plaster as the building material to be used. In all other respects, the design would comply in terms of dimensions and proportions with the development plan requirements announced in December 1993 for Pariser Platz, with due respect for the concept of “critical reconstruction”, which was bound by the dimensions and proportions of the pre-war state of the ensemble, but demanded contemporary architecture in its actual execution in order to establish a visible dialogue between the existing buildings and the new building.

DEBATES AND DELAYS The core and starting point of the design was the historic building stock, namely the staircase tower, throne room, and exhibition halls, as well as a public passage that would connect Pariser Platz with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The glass facade on the square was to make the old buildings visible with a welcoming gesture and signal their accessibility through the bright “joint” of the passage to Behrenstraße. On the basis of this approach recommended by the Academy, a preliminary draft was commissioned by the Senate and submitted with a cost estimate of 110 million Deutsche Mark in December 1995. In order to familiarise the Berlin public with the location, its history, and future reconstruction, in April 1995 the ruins were made safe and opened to a broad public. At the same time, with the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the causes and consequences of the Second World War, which had left their traces both clearly and on

Plan for the new Academy building, longitudinal section with the archive area on the right at Behrenstraße, May 1994

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many levels here, were to be remembered in the nearby exhibition to show that “one wanted to meet the challenges of the future and halls at Pariser Platz 4. In May 1995, the exhibition “1945: Krieg – not just preserve tradition.” In brief: “An academy of arts cannot Zerstörung – Aufbau” (“1945: War – Destruction – Reconstruc- merely be a notabilities club and should not look like one either.” tion”) marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. Materi- The public saw this opinion as significant support for the construcals pertaining to the redesign of German cities from the offices of tion project. And yet it was only in 1998, after a long struggle with Albert Speer were contrasted with the plans for the reconstruction the Senate Department for Urban Development, that an exempof West and East German cities after 1945. This presentation reso- tion allowing the construction project to go ahead was agreed, even nated worldwide and increased interest in the plans for the new though it unfolded quite differently to how it had originally been building, where the original building stock was to be preserved planned by the architects. This was because another delay in con“from the cellar to the roof”. struction resulted from the Senate’s decision to allocate the souWhile the reconstruction of the Hotel Adlon next door was thern part of the site for private use, which meant relocating parts rapidly taking shape, and a large building placard presented the of the seven-storey archive to the basement floors at Pariser Platz expected result with its richly decorated stone facade based on and integrating the reading room into the new building on the square. its historical predecessor, the start of construction works at the Even though the cost of the underground facility far exceeded the Academy was delayed over the next four years due to unresolved revenue from selling part of the site and doomed the concept of a procedural issues, despite the fact that an outline application for universally accessible archive with an open reading room and views building permission had already been approved by the Senate Admi- of the memorial site on Behrenstraße to failure, the decision was nistration under Building Senator Wolfgang Nagel (SPD). This enforced. Despite vehement protests from both the Academy and approval was revoked by Nagel’s successor Jürgen Klemann (CDU) the architects, the part of the property on Behrenstraße was sold in March 1996 because the glass facade of the new building did in order to allow for the extension of the Hotel Adlon, and the not comply with the new design statute in force since February Academy’s property was transferred to a Munich leasing company.

1996, which only permitted stone or plaster surfaces on the facaA general contractor was commissioned to execute the prodes of buildings around the square. While the perplexed architects ject for a fixed price of 76 million Deutsche Mark, which had not discussed the matter, Nagel changed jobs. In May 1996, he became been adequately calculated to cover the completion of the comthe managing director of the Bredero (real estate company), res- plicated building, as soon became apparent. After a series of addiponsible for the construction of the new Hotel Adlon, whose his- tional financial claims and further construction delays, the Senate toricising facade design was repeatedly recommended to the terminated the contract with the general contractor in 1999 and architects of the Academy as a model. took over the management of the project itself in November 2003.

Such expectations were also publicly contradicted by Fede- References were made in the press to a report from the Court of ral President Roman Herzog, who had been informed of the plans Auditors addressed to the Berlin House of Representatives, quofor the new building on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of ting that: “The granting of construction services at a fixed price of the founding of the Academy. He explained that the building had 38.35 million euros was completely unrealistic.” With the conclusion

Berlin as planned by Albert Speer, “1945” exhibition at the old Academy building, June 1995

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Throne hall with the layout of the removed fixtures, July 2003

The new Akademie der Künste building, September 2008

of the Capital City Cultural Agreement in January 2004, legal supervision of the Academy was transferred to the federal government. In the spring of 2005, the ensemble – mutilated by the sale of a site and the rescheduling issues – was completed, and the grand opening took place in May 2005.

Despite all the splendour of the events at this prominent location, and growing acceptance of the building by the public, the next few years were still overshadowed by the consequences of functional and technical defects that required lengthy expert assessments and further costs to rectify. Nevertheless, the overall operation of the Academy was almost seamlessly maintained, because the disruptions strengthened its ability to improvise. In particular, the building on Hanseatenweg, which in the meantime had been restored in keeping with its listed building status, helped to bridge the gaps with the plentiful range of spaces it offered – a familiar base camp compared to the permanent building site at Pariser Platz, which remained an experimental workshop for overcoming unforeseen events over the next few years. Nevertheless, the damages were repaired and the technology and facilities were adapted to new standards.

The archives and reading room were set up and the Academy has been displaying its treasures on different levels since 2018.

Management of the division of labour between the buildings at Pariser Platz and Tiergarten has proven effective. And yet, it is still disconcerting that while the unification of the academies succeeded under difficult conditions and amidst the turmoil of the post-reuni-

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fication period, the simple task of building a property according to the agreed plans did not. However, this building, with all its defects, remains a document of the self-assertion of the Academy against the backdrop of the still virulent tension between art and politics, which poses new challenges for every generation.

For detailed information on the history of the building, with numerous illustrations and forewords by Adolf Muschg, Walter Jens, and György Konrád, see Werner Durth and Günter Behnisch, Berlin: Pariser Platz 4; Neubau der Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Jovis, 2005). The quotations in the text and the accompanying images (except the frontal view of the Akademie der Künste) are taken from this publication.

WERNER DURTH was Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt until 2017.

He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Städtebau und Landesplanung (German Academy for Urban Development and Regional Planning) and has been a member of the Architecture Section of the Akademie der Künste since 1989. He designed the new Akademie der Künste building at Pariser Platz together with Günter Behnisch.

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THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ

There is an open day to present the Akademie der Künste Archives at Pariser Platz on 5 May 2019. Last year, the Archives were able to move into the offices, stacks, and workshops there. The extensive holdings of the library and the Architecture Archives can be accessed in the central reading room with its unique view of the Brandenburg Gate. Boasting over 600,000 volumes, the library holds one of the largest collections of books on modern art and culture in the German-speaking area. The wide range of special collections, including valuable first editions, literature on expressionism, covert writings, and rare exile editions dating from 1933 to 1945, are of particular significance.

The Architecture Archives offer an outstanding collection of resources on German and international architectural history and are home to 71 archives and 80 collections. The opening followed a long period of construction, numerous temporary arrangements, and a relocation that posed unique logistical challenges: 9,800 shelf metres of books, 637 shelf metres of archival material, 2,300 rolls of drawings, 574 blueprint drawers containing architectural drawings, 320 architectural models, and 73 paintings had to be transported; and twenty employees moved to the new location.

Pariser Platz 4 is now one of the main locations of the Archives, second only to Robert Koch Platz 10.

A READING ROOM WITH A BEAUTIFUL VIEW THE ARCHIVES AT PARISER PLATZ 4 The open day offers an unusual look behind the scenes of an art archive. The archivists and restorers can be observed at their work.

Guided tours explain the chequered history of the Academy building and show the otherwise locked stacks. Readings and lectures offer insights into the holdings. One special attraction is a fashion show by actors from the Ernst Busch Berlin Academy of Dramatic Arts. They are presenting theatre costumes from the extensive holdings of the Archives.

The exhibition “Erlesene Bibliotheken – Aus den Sammlungen der Akademie”, featuring special treasures from living legacy and estate libraries, opens on the same day. For many artists, their own private collection of books was a preferred workshop and source of inspiration. The surviving presentation copies and working copies with marginalia, comments, and inserts today provide an indispensable source for decoding ways of thinking, work practices, and artistic networks. The exhibition can be seen until 16 June in the exhibition halls at Pariser Platz 4.

WERNER HEEGEWALDT is the director of the Akademie der Künste Archives.

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 10

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THE HOUSE AT PARISER PLATZ

THE BILDERKELLER AT PARISER PLATZ Carnival and/or resistance: What role did Pariser Platz 4 play as a production site before and after the Berlin Wall was built? And how is it that the artists of the 1950s were criticised and rejected using similar arguments to those used after 1989? A contribution

by Angela Lammert on the Bilderkeller (Picture Cellar) under the Akademie der Künste at Pariser Platz, and on its art historical significance, from the “black period” to the utopia of a European society of artists.

Rosa von der Schulenburg follows the path taken by Christine Kubisch when she traced the visual clues in the Bilderkeller at the opening of the building in 2005.

THE BILDERKELLER Angela Lammert

RESISTANCE IN THE CELLAR? “Resistance in the cellar”, that’s what the murals in the aptly named Bilderkeller at Pariser Platz were called during Berlin Art Week in the autumn of 2018. Initially, however, it was “Fasching” (carnival) that was celebrated in the former coal cellar at the German Akademie der Künste in 1957 and 1958: members and master students from across the arts met up, from Fritz Cremer and Heinrich Ehmsen to Paul Dessau and Helene Weigel. In the post-war period, there was boisterous fun, “dancing on the volcano”, and letting loose on the walls. Wall murals

by Manfred Böttcher, Harald Metzkes, Ernst Schroeder, and Horst Zickelbein have survived. The sculptor Werner Stötzer was also among the main protagonists. Their decorations were “buried” twice in the cellar of the Academy. Even though the coal dust was removed from them in May 1989, allowing for photographic documentation which was then published, in 2000 the excavators were ready to tear down the building, and it was only with the help of the Office for the Preservation of Historical

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Monuments that the destruction was prevented.1 Now the rooms are open to the public again for the first time in thirty years. They are among the only three original remains of the historical buildings at Pariser Platz – along with the exhibition rooms of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Brandenburg Gate. At the same time they serve as evidence of the building’s longest chronological period of use: from 1950 to 1989, members and master students set up studios as well as photography and exhibition workshops in the building; later, it was used by the Literature Archives.

The building at Pariser Platz was a place of artistic production and encounters in the GDR: in addition to Fritz Cremer, who worked there until the end of his life, Waldemar Grzimek and Gustav Seitz, as well as Heinrich Ehmsen and Otto Nagel, met other young artists.

“This is bold!” Ehmsen is reputed to have said in regard to Metzkes’ black paintings, which were attacked by the press. Stötzer remembers placing the head for the Heinrich Heine monument on top of the clay torso again and again with Grzimek. John Heartfield and Gret Palucca, and later Konrad Wolf and Diego Rivera, also met at Pariser Platz – a place initially surrounded by ruins and unobstructed views of the Brandenburg Gate, then bordered by the Wall, then without the Wall, before the construction of the new building, which under the protective wing of Heiner Müller, the last president of the Academy in the East part of the city, became an exhibition venue of a different kind with Galerie Pariser Platz 4.

BLACK The so-called black period or the strict style of painting in Berlin – according to legend – was fed by a barrel of black pigment that was used for the carnival paintings in the cellar and, as a colour tone, crept into the oil paintings produced in the studios upstairs. They were met by the displeasure of the official art critics: the paintings were considered to be outmoded. The same accusation was levelled at the artists after 1989: the nudes, still lifes, and landscapes did not contain any of the narrative elements and political motifs that dominated the Leipzig School. A Western-socialised public associated art in the GDR with painters such as Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte, or Werner Tübke. This is symptomatic from the perspective of historical prerogatives of interpretation. The immense recent international interest in the Bilderkeller – from the Tate Modern in London, to Japan and Finland – and the success of films such as Gundermann (2018) by Andreas Dresen, may well indicate that the time has come for a different narrative about the GDR era.

For the generation of master students born around 1930, this work was about something other than the realism demanded of them. The pressure felt from the outside drew them closer together and caused them to react to each other in their work. The resulting “black paintings” correspond with trends in European painting, from Bernard Buffet to the abstraction of Hans Hartung – and are not merely to be located in an East German ghetto, as is often done. Following the chaos of war, there was

Akademie der Künste, Bilderkeller: murals by Manfred Böttcher

a powerful longing for vitality in the formal elements of art. Disrupting the nature of the subject matter while still being interested in it was what bound them together. The carnival of 1957 had no theme. Photographs show a wide variety of motifs: many-armed goddesses, topsy-turvy plaster figures, and symbolic elements. A year later, in 1958, the carnival paintings referred to a suggestion by Stötzer – to the ballad of Der Wilddieb (“The poacher”), in which the forester is associated with the power of the state; and the poacher, with the subversive. Figures hunched over in melancholy with bent heads and wrists surround a table that is tilted forward, on which stands the head of a wild boar, alongside empty plates and pitchers and a few uneaten dishes. No one is looking at anyone else; no one is looking out of the picture. In addition to the black colour tones that unify the paintings from this period, the two-dimensional outlining of the composition, the sharp drawing, and the symbolic elements give expression to a young generation of artists who were still searching, and to the immediacy of their fears and woes. Dried sharks, artistes, a lonely bed, barren landscapes, and dark interiors – these were the motifs that provoked the aforementioned displeasure of the official art critics. Böttcher’s symbolic human abbreviations – to a certain extent “Pencks before Penck” – bear no direct relationship to his other works from this time.

Nevertheless, they are connected through the use of the colour black. The black intensified his idea of an “enchantment of things”, the ambivalence of representation and coherent inner pictorial arrangement. The

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 10

expansive, Picassoesque female nudes – stretching beyond the corners with their bulging limbs – reflect the fact that the master students positioned themselves within the space of European post-war modernism. Their mature work was also to retain this sense of the political in the everyday.

“Is that truthful?”

BITTER FRUITS “Bittere Früchte” (“Bitter fruits”) is the title of a newspaper article on an exhibition initiated by Fritz Cremer called “Junge Künstler – Malerei” (15 September – 29 October 1961), in which the carnival painters also participated.

The Wall was built around this time – an unforeseeable event. This resulted in a cultural and political “witch hunt” against the Academy, and a heated debate on cultural policy at Robert Koch Platz on 19 October 1961, tape transcripts of which have been preserved. They bear witness to a harsh verbal battle. Fake workers’ letters were read out – and unmasked by Paul Dessau (according to Dieter Goltzsche’s report, Heartfield threw his jacket wordlessly into the air). Cremer repeated again and again in a broken voice “Is that truthful?”, referring to the cultural officials. The filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher

(Strawalde) – “I am the gangster painter” – gave a courageous speech, turned against the attacks, and called the art critic Horst Jähner a hairdresser, “but a hairdresser who no longer cuts hair, which is what he really should be doing.” Helene Weigel spoke about the arrogance of imitations – because the path of art goes beyond that.

Conflicts were also ignited in literature, regarding the writer and later president of the Akademie der Künste, Heiner Müller, and the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann.

The dispute developed into a vicarious cold war against the members of the Academy. Böttcher, Schroeder, and Zickelbein were master students of the classical modernist painter Heinrich Ehmsen, who co-founded the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1945 and was dismissed in 1950. Metzkes was a master student of Otto Nagel, who was a friend of Heinrich Zille and Käthe Kollwitz and president of the German Academy from 1956 to 1962. Stötzer was a master student of the sculptor Gustav Seitz, who was also dismissed in West Berlin. Some other members included: Bertolt Brecht, Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Waldemar Grzimek, John Heartfield, Helene Weigel, and Arnold Zweig (president from 1950 to 1953). Already in 1958, the following could be read in the press: “Schroeder’s barren, lifeless landscapes, Böttcher’s atrophied buffet waitress, and Metzkes’ Chinese trauma illustrate the allusions […] to existentialism, whose pessimism in questions of life the artists apparently feel drawn toward. The works created, as it were, from the can, the depressive nature of their human deflation, clearly demonstrate how marginalised

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Akademie der Künste, Bilderkeller: (in the foreground) mural by Harald Metzkes and Manfred Böttcher

their artistic position became during their time at the Academy.” Terms such as “marginal”, “French miserabilism”, and “canned art” are typical of the art policy debates and opinions of the time. The training of master students was temporarily suspended. Cremer defended this new generation, who were essentially loyal but also showed “a lot of genuine scepticism”. He was convinced that at that time the GDR needed the “so-called difficult young artists” and “not the poster boys, the bores, those who are complacent”. As a result of this debate, he resigned as secretary of fine arts and Otto Nagel had to do the same as Academy president – for “health reasons”, according to the official explanation. The overestimation of the political impact of art also specifically included the dispute regarding its forms. What is disputed, is controversial.

“We all know that the existence of this Academy is in question.

So it is even more important that it works”

Kriegsfibel by Bert Brecht, who had died in 1956. The painting, which was acquired by the National Gallery in the GDR in 1977, demonstrates the creaturely nature of defeated aggressiveness and is reminiscent of the war and post-war period. The need for decision can be seen as the “bitter fruit” of those years. The carnival paintings make the historical stratum of the building visible, and are unique testimonies to the confrontations that took place. In 1991, in connection with the newly founded Pariser Platz Society, such insight led to the recognition that the Academy in the eastern part of the city was not just the “shelter and refuge of understanding” or the “conformed state institution”, but rather that its character (as in the western part of the city) was defined by its ambivalence. The Society – which was formed from a free association of artists, craftsmen, and scientists of the Academy – organised the first public exhibitions at Cremer’s former studio. “We all know that the existence of this Academy is in question. So it is even more important that it works,” wrote Heiner Müller in reference to his unrealised plan for a European society of artists. But that is another story.

1 The back rooms of the cellar were in fact demolished in 2000. But at least the paintings in this area were removed by the RAO (Restaurierung am Oberbaum GmbH Mitte); see http://rao-berlin.de/akademie-der-kuens(te-in-berlin-ampariser-platz/)

ANGELA LAMMERT is head of the Department of Interdisciplinary Special Projects at the Akademie der Künste.

BILDERKELLER Guided tours of the Bilderkeller are available on Wednesdays at 6:00 pm and Sundays at

Metzkes’ dramatic and surreal-looking still life of a dissected shark painted in 1957 not only appeared at the same time as a motif among his painter friends and carnival decorators, but also found its beginnings in

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11:00 am. The number of participants is limited to twenty; advance booking is essential. Tel: +49 30 200 57 1000, e-mail: kunstwelten@adk.de. Admission: € 6/4 www.adk.de/bilderkeller

Christina Kubisch, n. T., from the series Licht.Bilder, 2005, photo with UV light, piezo pigment print on handmade paper

SEARCHING FOR CLUES LICHT.BILDER

BY CHRISTINA KUBISCH Rosa von der Schulenburg

Light in the cellar: for the opening of the new Academy building in 2005, Christina Kubisch was invited to respond to the premises. On the occasion of the exhibition “Raum.Prolog”, she sent the audience underground on an electromagnetic acoustic tour of discovery, which is a trademark of this multimedia artist. She found the fragmented remains of the murals of the Bilderkeller, which at that time were only partially visible and severely damaged by damp, blistering, and weathering, to be truly fascinating. Just as Kubisch is able to make the specific vibrations and rhythm of the electromagnetic fields of a particular place audible by using wireless headphones,

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 10

she chose the electromagnetic wave spectrum of ultraviolet light to literally bring something invisible or barely visible “into the light” in the Bilderkeller. According to the artist, this was not so much about hidden realities, but about our lack of ability to perceive these with the human sensorium. Using two powerful UV lamps, she lit up the walls and, with the help of these frequencies, made fluorescent organisms like mould, lichen, and efflorescence in the stone and other debris visible, which over the years had been deposited on the paintings and bonded with them. From these “time images”, she developed a series of analogue photographic works using time exposure.1 Kubisch was interested in the particular beauty of the moisture-related surface phenomena of the efflorescence and decay on the masonry, as well as the special charm of the artistic relics.

The radiant blue colour reminiscent of fluorescence in the piezo pigment prints on handmade paper, as well as their abstract, cutout-like forms, convey the condition of the place made visible by the UV light in a way that makes documenting the traces an aesthetic pleasure. The Licht.Bilder series, consisting of nine sheets, was printed in 2005 in an edition of five (plus an EA, épreuve d'artiste). One sheet cites a detail from a turbulent scene that fills two corner walls, which was probably jointly created by Harald Metzkes and Manfred Böttcher. Two lively, naked women and a Karl Valentinlike figure with a hat, a tailcoat, fashionable high-heeled shoes, and a thick cigar (or a long, unrolled carnival whistle) between his lips appear to have lifted off the ground in a lively dance of obvious revelry. The pivotal

point of the racy threesome in this cheerful male fantasy would seem to be the probing grasp of one of the ladies reaching for the phallic object in the man’s mouth. In her adaptation, however, Kubisch focuses on another telling detail: on the jauntily outstretched lower leg of the man, who is wearing fashionable footwear beneath tight trousers. With an assured hand, Kubisch turns the detail ninety degrees clockwise so that the gallant is no longer just unbalanced: pitched at a dizzying angle by this rotation, the dynamics of pleasure for the fellow reach their high point, but probably their turning point and end point too. Honi soit qui mal y pense (Shame on her who thinks badly).

1 I t was only in later years (continuously until 2014) that conservation and restoration measures were carried out in order to preserve the on-site remains of the GDR underground paintings of the late 1950s.

ROSA VON DER SCHULENBURG is the director of the art collection of the Akademie der Künste.

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RITTERS ABSCHIED VA Wölfl VOM FENSTERSCHLIESSEN Interview mit VA Wölfl von Jürgen Kramer (Maler) J.K. J.K. Gleichsam ein leerer

Schädel, voll von Erde und von Sinnen, von Sinnen, dunkler dankbarer Leichenschmaus mit ihr, übersät, von Wunden übersät, ach wie rührselig und welche Anmut, welche Anmut in Ihren vier toten Augen, in ihrem geöffneten Leib, in ihrem Blut, das Bad in ihrem Blut und der Hunger nach Fleisch. r VA W. Ritters Abschied (Ländler) Jodle J.K. Mit Wirklichkeit verhandelnd, schon entschwunden; oder mit sich verhandelnd, schon verloren.

Vier liebe Säulen, Löcher tragend, ein Alltag und ein Menschenschutt, Müllhalde der Kraftlosen, der Feiglinge, aber das Kostbare, es verflüchtigt sich; denn wie Säue in Beliebigkeiten suhlen.

VA W. Heißt das Gerinne des Sandes, das Verschütten (des Salzes) bringt ein Unglück?

Bringt nur. † es ist! (dieses Kreuz als »Und« gedacht - - - ein Plus?)

Durchblicke Die Minusse in den Säulen, verschüttet, und überhaupt, das Museum als verschütteter Mut! J.K.

CARTE BLANCHE

VA WÖLFL

J.K. Ist das Museum ein Ort

der Feiglinge, das Publikum eine Ansammlung von Betschwestern in Furcht vor Selbstentleibung? Aber, was ist das: Viermal misslungene Flucht, verwaiste Hölle, ein Leichenleben und in den Augen immer nur Asche?

VA W. Das Publikum, die Öffentlichkeit das Fragwürdigste.

Darein ein Bewerber, ein Sieger, ein Häuptling, ein Feigling, die Spitze das Tragischwürdigste: kein Unterschied.

Feigheit, Abfall der Macht.

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DUETT

VA W. Zur Frage zur Antwort:

J.K., J.K. Warum nicht

eine Kunst ohne den Anderen, eine ganz und gar tote Kunst, nicht einmal Selbstgespräche.

Es treten ab: die Lebenden.

Mehr als eine Kunst für die Kunst und dennoch die Kümmernis um alles in allem, eine ungebundene, unabhängige Kunst.

Nur Leichengeruch um sich verbreitend, nur noch Flair von Untergang (für Buchhalter und Connaisseurs).

W AV. Auch das Schweigen rufen?

Verlaß die Malerei - besser verlassene Kunst, sonst ist auf sie Verlaß So erfüllt sich in der Nähe, was in der Ferne gesucht wird: die Sucht sehnt sich todesfreudig dunkel in Schwarzem rührend, quacksalbernd bis an den Rand da - -. Darüber hinaus und sich freudig ja so jauchzend an die Hoffnungslosigkeit schmiegend ...

Endlich keine Hoffnung. oh - die Hoffnungslosigkeit ist.

Endlich sicher. Ohne Thema lallen, nur Sing Sang.

Endlich die feste Burg von Hoffnungslosigkeit.

Endlich dies stählerne Schwert von Hoffnungslosigkeit.

Der Maler an den Tod Stehend: „elegant“ Sitzend: „denkt“ Kniend: „Herbst“ „Gott gib mir die Würde Laub zu sein Trocken Nur Farbe" liegend: Liegend: „Leb mich und vergiß wohl“ VA W. Ja - sie fallen mit den Schattenfängern mit der Sekunde der Wahrheit.

Wahrheit kommt nicht ungeschminkt daher, von der Lüge erwartet, diese sich verkleidend

VA W. Vergessen!

Der Adler, die Schlange, Winter, Mittag, auf der Höhe, außer Sturz, welches Medium braucht der Künstler?

J.K. Überflüssige: Im Strudel der Verdrehung endlich einen Stillstand, Halt und nochmals Halt, mit jedem Bild hält der Maler die Welt an.

Totenstille, nun denn, nichts geht mehr, die Häme da capo.

Nicht das Übelste eines.

VA W.

(MONTÄNE ZEREMONIE - pah WELCH EINE ZÄHLSUCHT).

J.K. Aber warum Scheu

vor Liebe, dieser verkleideten Strassengöttin, willfährige Hure der Allgemeinheit, allerbanalst schickt ihre Strahlen in diesen dummen Raum, lachend die Schatten, billiges Theater der Bewegung für Scheinlebende, nichts sich wirklich ereignend.

Das heißt nichts. So ist es.

.J.K

VA W. - -

Endlich der vergiftetste, der tiefste Brunnen aller Hoffnungslosigkeiten

J.K. Keine Frage ob lebendes

Bild oder Totenacker.

Diese gähnenden Idioten sind selbst Ausstellung, Performance Die Hoffnung ist los! von Alltagsgrauen. Warum noch Antworten, wo keine Fragen J.K. Und wenn vier Bilder sind? wie die vier Seiten eines Grabes Kurzum, die Fenster im oberen wären ...

Stockwerk müssen nicht mehr VA W. Unverzug, Saat und geschlossen werden.

Ernte, universelle Wunde; das hieße den Rethor zum Klausner Der Delinquent fällt bereits. machen.

SOUFFLEUSE VA W. Alle flüstern machen. machen. »bodenlos« hieße den Rethor zum Klausner Ernte, universelle Wunde; das Der Chor: ... und da sein, wo VA W. Unverzug, Saat und man ist - wem gelingt das?

J.K. Es bedeutet nichts!

Woanders ist es anders und der Das Atelier. Friedhofszimmer, Abwesende ist nicht da. ist zu einem Asyl ungebetener Gäste geworden - aber doch: was für ein Fest!

Der Bufettier ist noch kaum 1st version: Published by Museum Folkwang Essen, 1987, ed. Ulrich Krempel, texts © by the authors erkaltet und ergab nicht ein Wort ein anderes.

2nd version: Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten, Marl, 2010 3rd version: Journal der Künste 10

= hilf – führe – fürchte

mich – Wort *

DANCE AND MEMORY

TRANSFORMATION INSTEAD OF RESTORATION Johannes Odenthal

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, 1982

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AN ATTEMPT TO TAKE STOCK OF THE HISTORY OF DANCE

Fase will be performed at the Akademie der KĂźnste on 24, 25, and 26 August 2019 at 8 p.m.

JOURNAL DER KĂœNSTE 10

We find ourselves in a period of restoration. One symbol of how memory is currently handled is the Humboldt Forum in the centre of Berlin, with its historicising palace facade that attempts to suppress the complexity of German history through its monumental lack of meaning, in sharp contrast to the exhibition concept of a cosmopolitan perspective on postcolonial dynamics in Europe.

Commemorative events in particular, which have become the draught horses of national and regional cultural policy, are a symbol of our present: Luther, Bauhaus, Beethoven, the end and the beginning of wars, anniversaries. Welcome to a present confined by the corset of a ritualised celebration of the past. Our memory structures are static and conservative.

The artistic and cultural forces in Germany and Europe are being pushed around by new right-wing movements imbued with nationalist concepts of identity. It is an attack on the very foundations of our society and its orientation toward an open and tolerant system of values. Home is becoming the matrix of exclusion and racism. Anti-Semitism and the denial or trivialisation of historical catastrophes as part of German and European history are obvious attempts to strengthen nationalist forces. According to Aleida Assmann, we have to read that which we call cultural memory as a selective process of identity formation characterised by politically charged narratives.

But how does cultural memory really work in individual experiences, in families, in communities? How does memory inscribe itself on our bodies and how can we manage to practise and live a critical memory that impacts the present? There is a theory that artistic approaches are of particular significance here: art as a stage for the debate between individual research and memories on the one hand, and social narratives that can be negotiated on the other. This is about the effectiveness of memory for the present. It is about a form of memory that, according to Joseph Beuys, only stays alive because it is constantly being transformed, reappropriated, and updated; in short, a living cultural memory that takes place in its fragments and interpretations in the social space.

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This also applies to archives. In reference to the Asian art scene, tory, memory, archives, or even a canon, in a manner as pointed out the curator and theatre director Ong Keng Sen identifies an “archi- by Aby Warburg or Walter Benjamin at the beginning of the 20th val turn” at the beginning of the 21st century. The archive as a star- century. In a series of performances, talks, performance lectures, ting point or an artistic method is becoming a creative factor in and discussions, the Akademie der Künste will address this contemporary art production. Archives are memory stores, but they thematic complex of a living concept of memory. This focused are dead as long as they are not used. They exist in tension with programme will be realised by the Academy together with the the ephemeral, with the performative, with the bodies of the artists. Federal Cultural Foundation, Sharing Heritage, and Tanzfonds Erbe What might the archives of artists in the future look like? What is from 24 August to 21 September 2019. a living, creative archive? These questions have to be addressed by archives and cultural institutions. And they concern the heri- DANCE HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF THE BODY tage of dance in particular and the performing arts in general, pre- In the process, a possible history of dance will be interspersed with cisely because these disciplines primarily live and can be experi- a different history, the history of the body – because the concept enced in the moment of performance. of a historical, changing body only became conceivable around A look at modern dance of the 20th century shows the explo- 1800, with the development of the theory of evolution. Up until then, sive development of new body images, forms of movement, and as God’s creation, the body had no history. Thus, one can only envilevels of perception. We see the emancipatory power of the new sage the development of the human body from about two hundred dance movements, liberation from gender roles and body images, years ago. Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin, the dynamics of utopian awakenings and political appropriation, the pioneers of the theory of evolution, human nature became part but also of resistance. Dancers such as Isadora Duncan, Mary of the structure of history at the beginning of the 19th century. As Wigman, Gret Palucca, Jean Weidt, or Valeska Gert are represen- a result, the body gained an entirely new potential for memory, and tative of this. We also see the awakenings of post-war modernism, the possibility of change was also acknowledged. with dance theatre in Germany, Butoh in Japan, or postmodern Our concept of the nature of humans had changed fundamendance in the United States. tally. This nature had now become historical and mutable. With the For eight years, the Federal Cultural Foundation has been sup- emergence of body histories, new body techniques also developed. porting projects that deal with this heritage of modern dance. How This field of the rediscovery of the body has been a significant drican a historical awareness be formed of these ephemeral and yet ving force in dance history right up to the present day. Memory is extremely influential and innovative social force fields, which are not only set in a cultural context, but also in the context of the funalmost absent as artistic practices in contemporary art. Despite damentals of physical humanity. Biological facts such as male or their immense significance for modernism in general – for the visual female can be read in the context of historical and cultural assumparts, theatre, architecture, or philosophy – key works of dance are tions, opening up a new creative cultural space. Fixed identities of only present in secondary documents. cultural origins and acquired body techniques are nullified by an increasing access to body images and teaching from all the diverse TRANSFORMATION INSTEAD OF RESTORATION cultures of the world. But above all, following an explosion in the The core of dance history, namely dance itself, is absent. As soon expansion of consciousness since the 19th century, the body is as dance is no longer in the present, it can only be recalled in made legible as a unique archive of cultural and natural knowledge memory, in the body memories of dancers and observers, in pho- that represents a significant creative medium for forms of movetographs, in notations, on video, or in reviews. The substance of ment and narrative. the dance, the dancing, on the other hand, is only present in the Because this new horizon of memory has opened up, we also moment of the movement. Seen in this way, the subject matter of have to redefine the concept of memory for dance. Questions about dance history, the dance as past, does not exist. Even if dances how choreographies are preserved, how dance history progresses and choreographies are reproducible, they update themselves in from body to body, how a historical choreography is updated in the the respective body and are charged with the present. In this res- movements of a dancer are just one side of memory. The other is pect, a concept of memory that questions the restorative tenden- the body history of the individual present on the stage, alongside cies of the culture of memory becomes effective in dance history, the collective history of communities that dancers update – these and in particular in the handling of dance heritage. Dance repre- are the evolutionary aspects of the modern body with access to sents a concept of transformation, through which the past mate- techniques and knowledge that did not exist fifty or a hundred years rialises in the present over and over again. ago. In this field of reference, contemporary dance becomes specModern dance of the 20th century is a strong statement in tacularly important for one’s own history. It is the most complex favour of an individual, physical, and emotional appropriation of field of research in cultural history, as it is inevitably located at the historical material, of a historically bound form of body art. In this intersection between the natural and cultural history of a society. fragility, a concept of living memory is suspended, a concept in For example, the American movement researcher Bonnie Bainwhich the past is always depicted as the present in a transforma- bridge Cohen finds the motives of biological evolution in the tive sense. This results in approaches for constantly rethinking his- development of human movement, from infancy to adulthood.

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According to her research, every human being goes through an evolutionary history of movement. The findings from body research connect to the practice of contemporary dance scenes.

Other modern dancers and contemporary art practices apply the knowledge of animistic cultures, which is essentially based on body memory, on an oral tradition that cannot be grasped by written cultures. In his dance, Kazuo Ohno evokes the cosmic memory of cells that he wants to bring to life. This transgression of biographical memories opens the body up to a relationship with the world that questions and redefines their nature. It is no longer an unreflected going back, as dreamt of by the utopians of the life reform movement, but rather a differentiated engagement with a large potential of consciousness, with the seemingly archaic knowledge, the ideology of origin being absorbed into contemporary positions.

Here, memory does not mean holding on to the past, but rather a perception and activation of the current physical and mental functions. So when we speak of memory, we have to identify different levels of remembering. One level is the history of the body in the sense of a natural history of humans. Another is that of socialisation within a culture and a time. Following on from Alexander Kluge, Gabriele Brandstetter speaks of a “chronicle of emotions” when attempting to interpret Pina Bausch’s dance theatre.1 A third level is that of art and dance history itself. Dance as a performing art has its own history, to which dancers and choreographers refer, moving within it or breaking away from it. On a fourth level, I see individual body history: the personal biographies that become the memory material of choreographies. Every movement, every choreography is charged with this biographical material, and transforms it with every performance.

DANCE HERITAGE: BETWEEN OBLIVION AND IMPROVISATION In On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (1873), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent.” For Nietzsche, in addition to art and religion, forgetting is an opportunity to overcome the ever-growing burden of the past. There is perhaps no other form of dance development that has taken this path of forgetting as radically as improvisation. Forgetting in invention. In this context, forgetting refers to the superiority of the existing forms, the learnt and the familiar.

Here, improvisation has an ambivalent relationship to memory, because other memory spaces come into effect in the process of becoming detached from learnt forms, something Steve Paxton developed as a method in Contact Improvisation. Here an intuitive knowledge of the body and between bodies is mobilised, and it takes the place of cultural traditions.

The reconstructions, re-enactments, and critical analyses of historical dance material have demonstrated one thing: All historical material on movement is transported to a current horizon of experience by the dancers, and its content is redefined. History is

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a process of appropriation that is repeated over and over again. At the same time, however, the historical material is an infinite source of aesthetic language: of form, conceptual questions, body images, and socio-political debates. This should be used, not as a preserve, but as a living archive.

1 Gabriele Brandstetter, “Fundstück Tanz: Das Tanztheater als eine Archäologie der Gefühle”, in Johannes Odenthal, ed., tanz.de. Zeitgenössischer Tanz in Deutschland: Strukturen im Wandel; Eine neue Wissenschaft (Berlin, 2005), p. 12–19, here pp. 14.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL is the programme director of the Akademie der Künste. In 1986 he founded the magazine tanz aktuell, 1994 ballet international / tanz aktuell (now tanz). Most recently he published PASSAGEN: Der Tänzer Koffi Kôkô und die westafrikanische Philosophie des Vodun (2018) together with Koffi Kôkô. Parts of the text published here originate from the article “Erinnern und Vergessen: Fragmente zu einer Körper-Geschichte des Tanzes”, in ballet-tanz (double issue 2005), pp. 28–30.

“What the Body Remembers: On the Topicality of Dance Heritage” 24 August to 21 September 2019 The extensive “Das Jahrhundert des Tanzes” installation will bring together materials from German dance archives and international performances. In a programme series of more than twenty current dance productions, the dance heritage of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, and Valeska Gert, right up to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Xavier Leroy, will be discussed as examples of contemporary art.

A campus will introduce international students to the topics of choreographic movement and body research. A discursive programme will reflect on the importance of dance heritage with regard to social and cultural policy, and examine this in the context of postcolonial debates and discourses on the theory of history. A film series and reader on “Das Jahrhundert des Tanzes”, the century of dance, will complete the overall programme.

For four weeks, the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg will become a research platform for dance heritage.

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DANCE AND MEMORY

BALLET CAN FIGHT JOHANN KRESNIK AND HIS “CHOREOGRAPHIC THEATRE” Helene Herold

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Programme covers: Macbeth, 1995; Ernst Jünger, 1994; Ulrike Meinhof, 1994, Volksbühne Berlin

When you look at the orderly rows of boxes that contain the Johann Kresnik Archive, you can hardly imagine the force they contain. And yet, the materials from the living legacy of Johann Kresnik constitute the basis of his work and bear witness to his successes with “choreographic theatre”, which brings resistance, anarchy, and social criticism to the stage and is always political. His productions are as powerful as they are brutal. The dancer and choreographer’s path is unusual.

Born in 1939, Kresnik grows up in Carinthia and trains as a toolmaker. He never attends a ballet school. His earliest passion is painting. Later, he will create vivid images on stage. At sixteen, he goes to the opera for the first time and experiences a whole new world that fascinates him immediately and will not let him go. He finds his way onto the stage in Graz, Austria, initially as an extra and soon after as a dance and drama student. He then transfers from Graz to Bremen with the choreographer Jean Deroc in 1960 and is engaged by Aurel von Milloss in Cologne a little later on. From 1962 he trains with Leon Wojcikowsky, one of the most influential training directors of that time, and is principal dancer within two years. It is not the traditional career of a dancer; it is not the typi-

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cal age to take up classical ballet. But Kresnik prevails. He works with George Balanchine, John Cranko, Maurice Béjart, and Agnes de Mille. After a few years, classical dance and its repertoire become too narrow for him, the pieces too boring. For him, ballet lacks content and is not up to date. This realisation goes hand in hand with the events of the 1960s: Kresnik also discovers the air of stagnation in the ballet hall. He bids farewell to the world of classical dance and develops his own individual stage handwriting. His pioneering first choreography, O sela pei (1967), is based on the writings of schizophrenics. In 1968, Kresnik produces Paradies? – in response to the adoption of the emergency laws by the federal government in Bonn and the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke. The piece is only performed once, because some of the audience members are red flag-waving APO members. The theatre does not want to attract such an audience. In the same year, Kurt Hübner brings Kresnik to Theater Bremen, where he becomes director of the dance theatre. There he creates Kriegsanleitung für jedermann (“Warfare for everyone”, 1970) in response to the Vietnam War, a political didactic piece with a clear message against the arms industry. He stays in Bremen until 1979 and then goes to

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1 Choreographic sketch for Wendewut, drawing by Johann Kresnik, 1993 2 Idea sketch for choral scene in Hannelore Kohl, drawing by Johann Kresnik, 2004 3 Scenery sketch and draft sequence for final scene in Hannelore Kohl, drawing by Johann Kresnik, 2004 4 Idea sketch from the workbook for Ulrike Meinhof, drawing by Johann Kresnik, 1990

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Heidelberg, where his Familiendialog (1980) addresses the Nazi tions go beyond dance theatre and stretch the language of dance period and the struggle of young people for self-determination. to an unprecedented degree. The dancer Regine Fritschi, who With Sylvia Plath (1985), Kresnik develops one of the first pieces played Ulrike Meinhof and worked with Kresnik for many years, describes the prerequisites for working with him as follows: the based on a biography. dancers have to say goodbye to the world of classical ballet and Countless other “biopics” like this are to follow, including Pasolini (1986), Macbeth (1988), Frida Kahlo (1992), Rosa Luxem- open themselves up to a world where physical and psychological burg (1993), Nietzsche (1994), Gründgens (1995), Leni Riefen- brutality, destruction and misery, suffering and grief are not taboo.

Political dance theatre has been further developed within the stahl (1996), Goya (1999), Picasso (2002), and Gudrun Ensslin (2005). Alongside political topics, murderers, suicides, perpetra- framework of the Tanzfonds Erbe project, with Friedensanleitung tors, and victims form the basis of the material Kresnik strives to für jedermann by the group Bodytalk, a piece based on Kresnik’s depict. The list of his productions is long – hardly anyone else has Kriegsanleitung für jederman and staged by former Kresnik danstaged so many premieres addressing socially critical subjects. His cer Yoshiko Waki together with Rolf Baumgart. Kresnik continues radical, highly intense, and sometimes even bloody pieces are to have an impact. On stage and in the archive. The Johann Kresnik Archive at the Akademie der Künste maps Kresnik’s work with famous worldwide and have won many awards.

In 1989, Kresnik returns to Bremen for a few years. There, he an abundance of material. The production documents relating to creates Ulrike Meinhof (1990). In Wendewut (1993), he deals with “choreographic theatre” are supplemented by Kresnik’s concepts, the division of Germany. From 1994 to 2002, he stages several rehearsal logs, procedures, notes, programmes, photographs, and pieces at Volksbühne Berlin, including the anti-war revue Ernst choreographic sketches. The documents date back to his work in Jünger (1994). From 2003 to 2008, he directs the Choreographic Bremen (1968–79; 1989–94), Heidelberg (1979–89), at Volksbühne Theatre in Bonn. There he develops Hannelore Kohl (2004), who is Berlin (1994–2002), and in Bonn (2003–08), and are available to presented as both perpetrator and victim, as someone who sup- interested users in the Akademie der Künste reading room at Robert ported her husband’s rise to become chancellor but could not cope Koch Platz, if you want to be convinced that ballet can fight. with the effects of power, either physically or psychologically. With Die 120 Tage von Sodom at Volksbühne Berlin, he staged his last major piece in 2015.

Kresnik is known for his blunt visual language on the stage.

He frees dance of taboos; painful confrontations are not left out, and the real, current problems of society become the subject matter of his productions. He even releases classical ballet material from its lack of content. For example, in his Schwanensee AG (1971), the little swans are factory workers in service to Red Beard, the factory owner. It is not without reason that Kresnik uses the term HELENE HEROLD is an archivist at the Performing Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste. “choreographic theatre” to describe his form of dance: his produc-

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DANCE AND MEMORY

Stephan Dรถrschel

THE EMBODIMENT OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST DANCE

MARY WIGMAN

Chorische Bewegung (Gruppentanz), 1929, photograph by Charlotte Rudolph

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Hexentanz, 1930, photograph by Charlotte Rudolph

“We dance the changing and shifting spiritual states that are alive in humans, in the form of a rhythmical up and down movement.”

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The artistic estate of Mary Wigman, which is held at the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, is one of the most sought-after holdings in what is the largest cross-genre artists’ and artistic archive in Germany. Three reconstruction projects by the Tanzfonds Erbe, a dance fund launched by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, related directly to her work. Mary Wigman, born in Hanover in 1886, spent the most important years of her life in Dresden. In 1920, having been prevented from continuing her tour by the Kapp Putsch and the general strike, she opened her Dresden school with the money of a wealthy student. This school, in addition to Wigman’s choreographies, was to shape an entire generation of dancers. But even this was not enough. Tatjana Gsovsky, the Russian-born moderniser of classical ballet in Germany after World War II, who was one generation younger, described her surprise – one might even call it horror – when she came to Berlin in 1924 and realised that her beloved classical ballet had become a thing of vaudeville, and that the modern dance created by Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, expressionist dance, had taken over the stages of Germany. Germany had not necessarily been considered a dance nation before that.

These were Russia, France, and the United Kingdom.

However, by the turn of the 20th century, the “life reform”

movement was taking hold, stripping off the stiff Wilhelmine corsets and seeing the future in nature and free, unaffected movement. As a result, a form of dance developed in Germany that caused a furore in Europe and the United States after World War I. In addition to Wigman and Laban, it was Wigman’s early student Gret Palucca and her student Harald Kreutzberg, along with Laban’s student Kurt Jooss, who took dance in new directions far beyond the development of expressionist dance. One no longer danced en pointe; instead, a completely new, unique, individual vocabulary of forms was developed for each dance, there were no “positions”, one no longer depended on classical ballet music but rather moved as required, accompanied only by rhythm instruments or without any music at all – and if music was used, then it was composed by young musicians specifically for the dancer in question. The lessons at Bautzner Straße in Dresden no longer focused on physical drills, but instead aimed to shape individual artistic personalities. The visual arts – and painting in particular – were of course part of the educational canon; Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were some of Wigman’s closest friends. Palucca was a close friend of the Bauhaus artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy, and performed in their circles.

Thus, at the beginning of the 1920s, Wigman was one of the revolutionary artists who defined the concept of the “Golden Twenties”. Many of her dances were accompanied by the in-house composers: from 1925 to 1928, Will Goetze; in 1929 and then for ten years up until the school was involuntarily handed over to him, Hanns Hasting; and after World War II, Ulrich Kessler. But she also danced to classical music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, and many contemporary composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg or Béla Bartók.

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times were moving in a different direction and classical ballet, promoted by the four occupying powers in Germany, who were also all great ballet nations, gained new popularity and succeeded in regenerating itself. Expressionist dance had become a nostalgic affair.

1 Mary Wigman, “Tanz”, in Rudolf Bach, Das Mary Wigman − Werk (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1933), quoted from Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, ed., Mary Wigman – Sprache des Tanzes, = publications series of the Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik No. 1 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1989), p. 9.

Filming of Hexentanz, 1930

In her last solo programme, Abschied und Dank, she dedicated two dances to women who had experienced great suffering: Tanz der Brunhild and Tanz der Niobe. By 1942, in the middle of the war, she had long been placed on a pedestal as a legend, and at the age of 56 she was active past the age expected for a dancer. She appeared even later in her own choreographies, for the last time in 1953 in Die Seherin in Chorische Studien II. Wigman also created group works, founded a dance company, and produced choral works, such as Albert Talhoff’s Totenmal in 1930 – up to her participation in the artistic fringe programme of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games in Nazi Germany. None of this contradicted the distinctive and constitutive individualism of expressionist dance – not even the use of de-individualised masks. Quite the contrary, they heightened the individualistic impression and added something programmatic to it. Wigman – as a dancer of her own choreographies – had many faces: demonic, lyrical, and dramatic. She took her inspiration from everywhere, and the 1920s, with their political and social upheavals and fractures, offered an abundance of material. In doing so, she avoided any allusion to everyday politics, with an approach still rooted in the artistic ideal of the previous epoch: because ultimately, it was about something greater, art was supposed to keep itself out of the day-to-day business of politics and address the eternal questions. “We do not dance ‘feelings’! These are already much too clearly outlined, too distinct. We dance the changing and shifting spiritual states that are alive in humans, in the form of a

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rhythmical up and down movement. The contents of the dance and the dance artwork are the same as those of the other plastic and performing arts: here, as there, it is about humanity and its destiny.”1 Mary Wigman actively – and over the course of time with increasing self-awareness – claimed to represent or rather to embody German modern dance or German expressionist dance. Her confrontations with Rudolf von Laban, and her commitment to the autonomy of free artistic dance, as was later to be represented by her student Gret Palucca in the GDR, were characterised by a high sense of mission and – one must forgive the word in this context – total devotion to her dance. She put this above everything else as a matter of course. This is the only way her dealings with the Nazi regime can be understood. Even if her appeals for a German dance that reflected the German spirit sounded like something else at the time, for her it was only ever about her dance, which was expressionist. Therefore, her liaison with National Socialism was only brief. After the Olympic Games, the expressionist dancers, whose international renown had been used to convey the image of a modern, cosmopolitan concept of culture in Germany, were increasingly curtailed in their efforts: schools were closed, especially the Wigman School and the Palucca School, and opportunities to perform became more difficult to come by.

Then the war ended, and this presumably allowed the protagonists of expressionist dance to continue their work in places where the fallen regime had previously obstructed opportunities for them to be active. But the

THE MARY WIGMAN ARCHIVE Mary Wigman, who had been elected to the newly founded West Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1955 – for the first time with a Performing Arts Section – bequeathed her artistic legacy to the Academy. It contains her choreographic sketches and notes, and her diaries and photo albums, which she filled not only with commemorative photographs but also with hand-drawn colour sketches and accounts of her travels to create very personal testimonies. In addition to the photographs, playbills, and reviews of her many appearances, both as a soloist and with her various dance groups, the estate also contains numerous lecture manuscripts and teaching notes (on international dance history through the ages and across cultures!). What is remarkable about the “high priestess of German expressionist dance” is her facility for self-irony, to which her students bore witness at numerous school celebrations – the preserved manuscripts and photographs reveal a highly amused Wigman. The family archive of Mary Wigman is held by the Deutsches Tanzarchiv der Kulturstiftung der Sparkasse Köln (German Dance Archive).

The special collection of the Tanzarchiv Leipzig at Leipzig University Library also holds a Mary Wigman collection.

STEPHAN DÖRSCHEL is the head of the Performing Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Gรถtzendienst, 1917, photograph by Hugo Erfurth

Wigman – as a dancer of her own choreographies – had many faces: demonic, lyrical, and dramatic.

Left: Zeremonielle Gestalt, 1925, photograph by Charlotte Rudolph Right: Totentanz II (Maskentanz), 1926, photograph by August Scherl

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DANCE AND MEMORY

KARIN WAEHNER PIONEER OF MODERN DANCE IN FRANCE

Stephan Dörschel

Karin Waehner, born on 12 March 1926 in what was then the German city of Gleiwitz (Gliwice), now in present-day Poland, was one of the expressionist dancers who started out when expressionist dance already looked back to a grandiose history but belonged in the past. She attended the Wigman School in Leipzig from 1946 to 1950, before the renowned teacher Mary Wigman went to West Berlin. In 1953, after spending some time in South America, Waehner began her career in France, the country in which classical ballet was experiencing a revitalisation after World War II – and today, she is considered one of the great founding personalities of modern dance in France. Exactly sixty years ago, in 1959, she founded her own dance group, Les ballets contemporains Karin Waehner, which performed over forty of her choreographies. In 1960 she was the first teacher of modern dance at the Schola Cantorum, a Parisian music school, and a whole generation of contemporary dance choreographers reference her pioneering work. It was not until the 1980s that Waehner managed to perform in Germany (both East and West) with her group. The occasion that led to this was the celebrations to mark Mary Wigman’s 100th birthday at the two Academies of Art in East and West Berlin. For this event, the East German Academy received not only the thirty-five letters and three

postcards that Mary Wigman had written to her student between 1949 and 1972, but also remarkably extensive documentation on Waehner’s choreographies and performances, as well as biographical documents such as identification papers and medical certificates, which are now also catalogued online for research purposes. This was to be the beginning of a comprehensive Karin Waehner Archive at the Akademie der Künste, with Waehner promising to add to the material. When she died in 1999 however, and the reunited Akademie der Künste approached the executors (who were previously unknown to the Academy), the request for additional material and the promise of completion remained unfulfilled.

Years later, the artistic legacy of Karin Waehner was donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and in 2017 a staff member of the Academy was invited to an international conference on Waehner held in Paris. Last year, Heide Lazarus remembered the ambassador of expressionist dance in France in the Tanzfonds Erbe project “Karin Waehner (1926–1999) – Eigensinnig in Zwischenräumen”.

STEPHAN DÖRSCHEL is the head of the Performing Arts Archives of the Akademie der Künste.

Left: Karin Waehner and Jean Bouffort in Poème, 1965, photograph by Jean Babout Right: Karin Waehner in Un et un sont un, February 1965, photograph by Jean Babout

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JUNGE AKADEMIE 48

DEEPFAKES & REGIMES OF TRUTH Are avatars really just puppets? What is the significance of theatricality when computer technology and theatre art meet?

Author and director Lynn Takeo Musiol, who is currently a JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow in the Performing Arts Section at the Akademie der Künste, explores new forms of theatre in hybrid digital-analogue structures. In her performative installation [hinterland-x], she combines text material from her refugee research with deep-fake avatars of known politicians – hyper-realistic videos that are generated by computers.

LYNN TAKEO MUSIOL IN CONVERSATION WITH CLARA HERRMANN

CLARA HERRMANN Technological components fundamentally alter narration, fragmenting and multiplying it. On the Net, there is hardly ever just one narrator or one truth. From the selection of your material to its production, how do you explore digital narration?

LYNN TAKEO MUSIOL For me, narration is a historical process based on biography, as defined by Annie Ernaux: narration is that which has passed through me and is outside of me. Understanding this “me” as a point of passage comes close to my understanding of digital narration. Digital narration is primarily spatial narration.

And this means: addressing the question as to how I can create a world that is rooted somewhere between reality and fiction.

CH Is theatricality lost because of the Net, by being put on the Net? LTM I believe that any attempt to bring new media into the theatre space, and to perform using these new media, brings up questions of form, and also raises questions of aesthetics, feasibility, and dramaturgy. I am essentially interested in interdisciplinary, eclectic thinking: to what extent can digital opportunities expand our theatrical understanding of space, time, and body? First and foremost, this is about the translatability of digital play into theatrical clarity. On the other hand, it is about creating new theatrical subjects such as avatars, for example, who in conjunction with actors, performers, or spectators open up a hybrid space between reality and fiction.

Where the contention of the play falters, where expectations and attributions liquefy, theatricality gains in meaning, regardless of whether we create this through purely spoken theatre or a mixture of a digital-analogue space.

CH You experiment with elements of games, such as avatars – graphic figures that are assigned to an internet user in the virtual world. This is also about the question as to how corporeality can be translated into a virtual world. How do you establish connections, including with the audience?

LTM Connections can be created through identification, but also through alienation. Emese [my colleague] and I use traditional dramaturgical points of reference in our work and, beyond that, we try to create a physical space that has the openness to interweave both aspects.

We are interested in the possible fracture, the fragility of the physical and digital components, as well as an aspect which the audience is unable to categorise. Among other things, we experiment with motion capture and lip synchronisation technologies. Here, human movements such as facial expressions are recorded and digitally processed. For instance, we have created a model of an actor, whose movements are based on real-time speech recognition. An algorithm tries to identify the syllables and allocate a facial expression that has been manually set up for this specific syllable in advance. This translatability of human attributes to avatars means they can act like sirens: they lure, because within the digital mirroring – human/avatar – moments of identification, as

well as confusion, of irritation, occur. Avatars have no sense of “inner self” (Foucault). But to describe them as mere puppets, however, would also be wrong, if we assume that humans will continue to be further modified by biotechnological progress. Perhaps avatars are accomplices, or perhaps no more than affective stimulated projections.

CH In your performative installation [hinterland-x], which you developed during your Academy scholarship, deepfake avatars and digital sensors are used.

Deepfakes stand for the combination of deep learning, a methodology that comes from artificial intelligence and falsification. Deceptively real images and moving images of prominent people can be created, for example. What is [hinterland-x] about, and who is being faked here?

LTM The initial situation of this performative installation, in the context of the refugee issue, is rooted in the post-colonial idea of hegemonic order: who is speaking about what, in what context, and who may not speak. In this respect, I ask myself how narratives are constructed and reinterpreted, in what instance is the prerogative of interpretation exercised over knowledge, practices, and actions, and what truths circulate in order to legitimise exactly that prerogative of interpretation. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for example, revitalised the symbol of St. Stephen’s crown as a political backdrop in order to legitimise himself with the signification of an ultra-conservative historical ideology. What interests me here is the aspect of seeing the future as a fulfilment of the distant past. History is thereby forced into a binarism that loses processuality. Emese and I use so-called deepfakes in the sense of a history-based production, and we play with temporality by cultivating the faculty of the imagination: what kind of play evolves when we generate the faces of well-known politicians as deepfakes and feed the narratives of refugees into them?

Can we speak of a utopian moment, because the deepfake or avatar reverses the strategy of the absent party?

The fake here is in the disrobing of language and physicality, and in the creation of an avatar that hauls historical significance into (what is actually) an absent present.

CH In the post-factual age, they say that everyone creates their own world. In [hinterland-x], you address the fluidity of truths and their presentation.

In what way, and what is it about for you?

LTM The deepfakes span the principle that truth never is (or was), but must always be fabricated, performed, and accepted. What interests me about the underlying concept of regimes of truth is the rules according to which things are presented and represented, as well as the question of how subjects are prompted to act in accordance with the truth. For example, one could mention the social credit system in China here, according to which all citizens will have a centrally managed points account from 2020, which can be used to demonstrate social trust. The simple system of rules has resulted in a social norm that is based on the strategy of self-control. A concept of truth where centralist contours are coupled with affective strategies can be found in the argumentations of individuals with right-wing political convictions. What interests me about this is the exclusive claim to truth that is no longer determined by empirical facts, see Trump, but rather affectively fabricated.

In her essay Slavery and the Trumpocene: It’s Not the

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Lynn Takeo Musil and Emese Papp, Walking

Lynn Takeo Musil and Emese Papp, Pitbull

End of the World, Claire Colebrook writes: “Once you question truth, the human, the enlightenment and the veracity of the news, there is nothing left.” What is this nothingness, this void, this standing without guardrails?

How am I to orient myself, if my reference points, which convey meaning for me, disappear or become absurd?

What language do I develop? The deepfakes raise precisely these questions and illustrate that truth is always debatable, must always be contestable, which is what constitutes its political nature.

CH Theatre, as a place of critical reflection, can not only include technical innovation, but also look at it critically and question it in terms of content as well as form. What stance do you take here as a writer and director?

LTM The obvious strength of theatre lies in its ability to shape, interpret, and reflect on discourses, knowledge practices, and positions, both critically and from an intersectional perspective in the course of social change. For me, theatres are places of connection that use experiments in order to be able to produce insights or truths using the imagination and research/probing. And, for me, this also means always having a connection to the queer, the utopian, the immaculate, in order to see the old in a new light without devaluing it.

The performative installation [hinterland-x] will be shown as part of “Agora Artes”, a presentation of work by the Junge Akademie scholars on 4 May 2019 at the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg.

CLARA HERRMANN is the director of the Junge Akademie of the Akademie der Künste.

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JUNGE AKADEMIE

THE FELLOWS 2019

ARCHITECTURE

ERIC LE MÉNÉ, PARIS Education Architecture and civil engineering degrees (Ecole nationale supérieure d’architecture ParisMalaquais; École Spéciale des Travaux Publics du Batiment et de l’Industrie, Paris) Work Inventor – somewhere between plastic arts, making, and pure research – with interests in energy preservation, ecological housing, and natural comfort.

Project “The residency will help Le Molding (the 3D sand formworks printer for concrete casting) to reach a broader level. Research will consider several aspects: defining a large scale and how to get to it, and thinking about the implications of a 3D-casted structure.”

3D print

EFILENA BASETA, VIENNA Education Architecture/engineering (National Technical University of Athens), Master in Advanced Architecture (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia), PhD candidate (University of Applied Arts Vienna) Work Exploring material behaviours, physically and digitally, in order to create shape-adaptable structures Project “I aim to use digital fabrication technologies to produce computationally designed structural elements which change their stiffness according to their curvature. The system can be used as a rapid form-giving strategy in static structures, or as a compliant mechanism for shape-adaptable structures.”

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Industrially manufactured lattice construction made of wood (production: Blumer Lehmann AG), 2017

VISUAL ARTS

CEMILE SAHIN, BERLIN Education Fine art (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London; Universität der Künste, Berlin) Work Moving between film, photography, sculpture, sound, and text, her starting points are found images, documentation materials, and texts, which she restages: How does history – and its narrative – change when it is constructed over the narrative of different perspectives?

Project “Video work in continuation of the miniseries Center Shift. I will lay focus on two texts written by me. The texts merge and deal with the relationship between word and image and the power of temporality.”

Film still from CENTER SHIFT #0, 2018

ROBERT OLAWUYI, DÜSSELDORF

Reflection, 2017

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Education Art history (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), video art (Academy of Media Arts Cologne; Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, with Prof. Marcel Odenbach) Work Video installations, often at the borders of figuration and abstraction, where perception becomes visible as a process of reflection; video loop as an extended moment of knowledge that breaks up the idea of linear time.

Project “Video work installation. Get to know Berlin’s diverse art scene.”

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PERFORMING ARTS ARTEMIY SHOKIN, VIENNA AND BERLIN Education Stage design (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with Prof. Anna Viebrock) Work Freelance scenic artist and stage designer, with an interest in the creation of closed theatrical installation spaces and the difference between the private and the public that goes along with this.

Project “Exploring the language and form of different kinds of prophecies – apart from esotericism. I am looking for signs, objects, and symbols of rites.

How does a sacred experience come about?”

According to Given Circumstances, 2018

Lavinia Room, 2015

REGINA FREDRIKSSON, COPENHAGEN Education Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, with Eva Hess Thaysen and Hanna Hjort as singing teachers Work Soprano (e.g soprano part of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle) Project “Work with the German dramatic soprano Katrin Kapplusch on the repertoire and roles that I have the ambition to present in the opera. Hopefully I will have the chance to work with the director Arila Siegert.”

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FILM AND MEDIA ARTS

JOHANN LURF, VIENNA Education Fine art (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) Work Experimental filmmaker. His more formally orien-

ted films are always accompanied by strong narratives that, however subtly, examine society, codes, norms, perception, and the history and development of cinema itself.

Project “The research in Berlin will tie in with my found footage film (2017), which collects starry skies from film history and compares them with each other.”

Cavalcade, 2019

“Earth Series”, with Laura Wagner, 2019

FRANZISKA PFLAUM, VIENNA Education Fine art (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), directing (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, PotsdamBabelsberg) Work Director and screenwriter.

Currently working on the completion of a medium-length feature film, and on the implementation of several feature film projects, she also writes a German-Austrian television series.

Project “Meet people through the camera and interview them. The documentary level is to be broken by means of a fictional storyline in the form of off-texts, staged photos, and found footage material – a collage that moves between film, photography, and audio drama.”

Film still from So schön wie du, 2014

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LITERATURE ANNA WEIDENHOLZER, VIENNA BARBARA DELAĆ, KOTOR/MONTENEGRO Education Comparative literature (University of Vienna, Uniwersytet Wrocławski) Work Writer; publications include Der Winter tut den Fischen gut (2013), shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and Weshalb die Herren Seesterne tragen (2016), longlisted for the German Book Prize.

Project “In Berlin I want to find a beginning. I’ve just completed my third novel and I’m somewhere between this and the next one, with an idea in the back of my head about what might come afterwards, so tender it would be too early to name it.”

Education Studies in modern and contemporary theo-

ries of art (Faculty of Arts, University of Donja Gorica, Podgorica/Montenegro) Work Writer; laureate of the 32nd Festival of Young Poets in Zajecar, where she published her first book Tomorrowland (May 2018).

Project “I want to catch the register of thoughts, worries, and desires that are in the subway – set in the rhythm and directions of the U-Bahn, at the place where the outsider point of view is driven with electrical language adventure. Within the simulacrum this sounds like poetic and political rhapsody.”

MUSIC

Computer Music, 2016, Ensemble Tzara

KAJ DUNCAN DAVID, BERLIN

Up Close and Personal, 2018, Daniel Gloger

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Education Studies in music, composition, and electronic music composition at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the academies of music in Aarhus and Dresden Work Composer, working somewhere between notated composition, electroacoustic music and audiovisual performance – often incorporates light, exploring the possibility of a point where interrelated visual and sonic materials become a single musical gestalt.

Project “I will be working on an audiovisual electroacoustic music-theatrical situation for two performers, light, and video. Electronically modified voice and video-projected text are central elements. A tentative title for the piece is “Excerpts from conversations with a supercomputer”. Thematically, the piece explores the existential ramifications for humanity of advanced artificial intelligence.”

KRISTINE TJØGERSEN, OSLO Education Composition with Prof. Carola Bauckholt (Anton Bruckner Universität, Linz, Austria); clarinet with Prof. Hans Christian Bræin (Norwegian Academy of Music, Oslo) Work Composer, with works performed by the Arditti Quartet, Mimitabu, BIT-20, Bruckner Orchester Linz, et al.; clarinettist in the award-winning ensembles asamisimasa and Ensemble neoN. Project “I will compose the following pieces: a piano concerto for Ellen Ugelvik and the Trondheim Sinfonietta, and an orchestra piece for the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. For me, music is in contact with something outside of it, and through this contact it can be changed and developed through interaction. Connection with something different always entails a certain risk, and that I find exciting, because you risk that music changes to something you do not yet know.”

Mistérios do Corpo, 2017, Arditti Quartet, Only Connect Festival of Sound, Oslo

SEBASTIÁN SOLÓRZANO, MEXICO CITY

WERNER-DÜTTMANN-STIPENDIUM

Education Disciple of Jennifer Tipton through the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2014–15); recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores FONCA grant (2016) Work Light artist, with a practice focused on live art, lighting design, and expanded cinema. Current research involves machines and light as choreographic presences to create transdisciplinary performances.

Project “I want to continue the research that I started this year, in which I am using my body combined with lighting devices and mechanisms, for a new series of performance pieces.”

Artificial Horizons, 2017

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GRIPS – THE FIRST 50 YEARS

AROUND THE WORLD WITH GRIPS Volker Ludwig

In 1969 children’s theatre in West Germany offered nothing but Christmas fairy tales.

Bella, Boss and Bulli. Volker Ludwig, GRIPS Theater in Japan, 2009

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Theatre”, in order to show the people of Berlin that our children’s theatre, demonised by the CDU since 1975, had long been the norm in Europe. Greece, Croatia, and Turkey were represented with early GRIPS plays – Mannomann from Ankara toured forty Berlin schools.

As early as 1973, Mugnog-Kinder caused a sensation in Athens: Under the military junta, the wooden box the children in Berlin called “Mugnog”, and in Athens “Mormolis”, became a symbol of resistance, and every performance a demonstration. This anarchic fun for children suddenly became the most political theatre play of its time. Even today, Athenians still rave about the legendary performances to me. After forty-five years, Vassilis Koukalani has now brought Mormolis back to the stage.

GRIPS has invited the production to its 50th birthday and will be showing it on 8 June 2019 – at the Academy’s studio!

In 1975, the Goethe-Institut had the brilliant idea of making theatre people in the “Third World” familiar with the GRIPS method. Rarely has an experiment been so successful. This was first tried out in Brazil, still under military dictatorship. The idea of theatre with a social

The Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg and GRIPS Theater at Hansaplatz have been neighbours for fortyfive years. Visitors appreciate this. And we at GRIPS have gladly availed ourselves of this proximity and filled the Academy studio with special performances when necessary. Including the unforgettable guest performance by the legendary Werkteater Amsterdam, who we became friends with at the Holland Festival in 1980 and were able to present to Berlin theatre fans at the Academy in 1981. At that time, we were touring a lot across Europe, with Trummi kaputt around Italy, with Max and Milli around Scandinavia, with the youth plays in London and Nanterre, and with seven plays at one stroke in the Netherlands ...

When we, a small troop of leftist cabaret artists, began producing anti-authoritarian children’s theatre in 1969, children’s theatre in West Germany offered nothing but Christmas fairy tales. When the wind turned after the student revolts and the left suddenly became chic, GRIPS was the only alternative. The municipal theatres were vying for our cheeky plays and each one was played twenty or thirty times over, outside of the Christmas season it should be noted, and went abroad soon as well, where realistic children’s theatre had long been the rule. In 1979, GRIPS and the Berliner Festspiele organised the festival “10 Years of Emancipatory Children’s

Max and Milli. Volker Ludwig, GRIPS Theater in Greece, Athens, without date

function was met with huge interest. For the Brazilians, GRIPS was a subversive weapon. Our method of exploring the problems facing our audience – and putting those problems on stage – made theatre a voice of the oppressed in Brazil. My six-week visit and a production

by Wolfgang Kolneder triggered a wave of GRIPS productions and adaptations that continued for many years.

On a journey through India in 1983, GRIPS was met with similar interest, particularly in Calcutta and Maharashtra, where there is a long tradition of popular theatre.

The famous actor and psychiatrist Dr Mohan Agashe, who was also director of the Theatre Academy in Pune at that time, discovered in GRIPS the “form of theatre

India needs today”. After a long stay in Berlin, he developed a complex GRIPS strategy for India, consisting of seminars, workshops for actors, directors, and authors, and productions. In 1986 (four months after Linie 1), Kolneder put on a production of Max and Milli in Pune, and in 1989 his assistant Ranga Godbole, who is now a major film producer, staged Mannomann. GRIPS fever spread quickly throughout the whole of India. At the “10 years coming to Grips with India” festival in Mumbai in 1996, I saw GRIPS plays in four Indian languages. Mohan’s GRIPS movement also spread to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. His agency, by the way, was called D.A.T.E: “Developing Awareness through Entertainment”. Is there a better way to describe the essence of GRIPS theatre?

In the beginning, faithfulness to the original, reverence for the original text, was a problem. Our plays are written for our Berlin audience and should be adapted to the respective audiences in other countries. The bunk bed, for example, in which Max and Milli sleep, was an unknown object in India. Nevertheless, the director in Calcutta insisted on keeping it. And rightly so: The audience loved the bunk bed so much that it became a fashion in Calcutta.

Today, our plays have largely played out in India. Their GRIPS scene is now dominated by original Indian plays developed according to the GRIPS methodology. We have made ourselves superfluous, as was our goal. What has remained is an intimate friendship.

We learned that the old-school Berlin characters in our play were, in truth, typical big city personalities that could be found in every major city around the world.

The language barrier had always been a problem for me in the case of GRIPS guest performances of plays for small children. Where possible, we preferred productions of our plays in the language of the children in the audience, something that was made possible all around the world thanks to the Goethe-Institut. One stroke of luck was the play Vorsicht Grenze! (1997), about the futility of barriers, which ended up containing almost no language at all. For eight years, Axel Prahl played a border guard alongside Uli von Lenski, including in the Baltic region, in Warsaw and Krakow, in Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Omsk, in the Czech Republic, and in Turkey ...

The international guest performances hit the big time with the musical revue Linie 1. Five months after the premiere, the long-promised guest performance of a “musical” was to take place in Dublin in 1986, and Rod Lewis, who had put on GRIPS productions in London and Liverpool, rehearsed the piece in English with our ensemble.

The successes in Dublin and then London were overwhelming: We learned that the old-school Berlin characters in our play were, in truth, typical big city personalities that could be found in every major city around the world. After winning the Mülheim Dramatist Prize in 1987, it toured all over Western Europe and, in 1988, was even shown in Dresden, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and Halle; it was made into a film by Reinhard Hauff and went to

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soul of the piece shines through and yet it is a thoroughly Korean creation. Kim Min-ki's Seoul Line 1 rightly became the biggest success in the history of Korean theatre, as well as the most successful German theatre play ever. It was performed more than four thousand times from 1994 to 2008, with guest performances in Berlin, Hong Kong, China, and Japan. Seoul Line 1 has been running again since September 2018 and will congratulate GRIPS Theater on its 50th birthday in June. Don’t miss it!

The GRIPS plays have experienced over two thousand subsequent productions in over fifty countries, some in cooperation and many in close contact with GRIPS. Lifelong friendships have emerged, from Canada to Australia, Stockholm to Athens, Seoul to Pune. The GRIPS Archive, which to our delight has now been taken under the wing of the Akademie der Künste, tells of countless adventures on our travels around the world.

Pani Phir Gaya Pani Par – water in the bucket. Reiner Lücker, Stefan Reisner, GRIPS Theater in India, New Delhi, without date

festivals in Jerusalem, New York, Brisbane, and Melbourne, where it was most celebrated, then back to Moscow (together with Ab heute heißt du Sara) and Prague, and, in the new millennium, to South Korea and India, now with surtitles. The enthusiasm in Mumbai and Pune was indescribable.

Even more exciting than these guest performances were the subsequent productions abroad. In addition to the many theatres that continued to set the play in Berlin, we were particularly interested in the producers who transferred our story to their respective cities. It began with Island Line in Hong Kong and Linea Roja in Barcelona. Chord Line in Calcutta, which appeared throughout the city for years, produced by the well-known singer and actor Anjan Dutt with George Kranz as musical director, was particularly exciting. A touching declaration of love by the poorest of the poor for their city, instead of a suicide with five deaths and a birth ...

There was a wonderful underground version from Vilnius, which also made a guest appearance in Berlin; as well as the sensational versions from Namibia and Yemen, which conveyed the story in shared taxis. In Namibia, a German girl was searching for her lover; in Yemen, a girl forced into marriage was chasing the man who had bought her as a tourist and left her behind.

But it was in Seoul that I experienced the high point of all the Linie variants around the world. Kim Min-ki, highly revered today in Korea, a composer and charismatic singer-songwriter, a kind of Korean Bob Dylan, whose song Morning Dew became the national anthem of the protesting students under the military regime, received a German Linie 1 cassette from the GoetheInstitut. Without understanding a word, he was so fascinated by the piece that he had it translated. He felt a great closeness between the people of this divided city and those of his divided country, and he developed a Korean reinterpretation that took my breath away. The music of Birger Heymann remained – as it had in all the other versions. The characters are all recognisable. The

Seoul Linie 1. Volker Ludwig, Kim Min-ki, GRIPS Theater in South Korea, Seoul, 1000th performance in Seoul

VOLKER LUDWIG, a playwright, is the founder and long-standing director of GRIPS Theater. He has been a member of the Performing Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2010.

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NEWS FROM THE ARCHIVES 58

FINDS – GRIPS (HE, SHE, IT?) Andrea Clos

It’s a thing in a box, one might think, a face with an oversized nose or perhaps an animal. That’s what it looks like, this GRIPS creature. It is the theatre’s logo, created in 1972 by Jürgen Spohn, a German graphic artist who was mainly known as an author and illustrator of children’s books. The occasion was the relocation of the theatre for children and young people from the “Reichskabarett” on Ludwigkirchstraße in Wilmersdorf to the Forum Theater on Kurfürstendamm. A change of name had also been planned, and GRIPS was the name decided upon.1 The term was to symbolise “having fun thinking”, and the children and young people who attended the GRIPS theatre took this literally. According to the theatre’s founder Volker Ludwig, they always really wanted to know what it meant and what he, she, or it could look like, this “GRIPS”. And so, this little black GRIPS creature came about, usually peeking out of the famous GRIPS box.

There is a little clockwork key on the side, which implies recurring fun – what child doesn’t love to wind up a spring-powered frog over and over again? It is precisely this same continuity, coupled with endless fun, that has enabled the ensemble to delight its international guests, both young and old, for fifty years – with more than one hundred premieres – and this is obviously one of the secrets of its success. The theatre is not intended to enchant, but rather to make its audiences strong for tomorrow, telling realistic everyday stories without pointing the educational finger, with the aspiration not to see the world as immutable but above all to think ahead.

Since 1974, GRIPS has been based in Berlin’s Hansaviertel district and the theatre’s educational work has been second to none. The GRIPS box has even been integrated into the learning processes in school classes: this compilation of creative methods and materials referring to the living environments of the pupils is intended to encourage creative school lessons. Over the years, the GRIPS logo has appeared in a wide range of designs and variants drawn by Rainer Hachfeld, a cartoonist and playwright who is one of the in-house stage designers at GRIPS. It can be a duck or a snail, a spider or a helicopter. Anything at all. Just as the GRIPS Theater has long been a theatre for everyone – and every generation!

The GRIPS audience from that very first day have grown old, many of the original actors have moved on to other places, and the third generation of spectators, who are almost grown up now too, attend the performances. The plays have not lost their topicality. The legendary Linie 1 by Volker Ludwig and Birger Heymann is still regularly sold out. With guest appearances in numerous countries, it is, according to the press, the most performed German musical in the world.

Now, in 2019, the GRIPS Theater Archive has found a new home at Robert-Koch-Platz. Approximately 180 files pertaining to productions from the 1960s to the present have been included in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste, as well as a great many cases, photographs, programme materials, and posters. Even the things you wouldn’t always expect to find in an archive: for example GRIPS himself. The black cuddly toy was, by the way, a premiere gift for the production of Ludwig’s Julius und die Geister directed by Frank Panhans in 2002.

GRIPS is celebrating a milestone birthday this year.

It is turning 50, which offers a double incentive for the Akademie der Künste, as it does for the ensemble. The database will soon go online, initially making over one thousand data records accessible for research.

1 GRIPS is a colloquial German term that describes the ability to understand or grasp (come to grips with) ideas.

ANDREA CLOS is an archivist at the Performing Arts Archive of the Akademie der Künste.

“50 Jahre Zukunft”, Grips Theater Archive handover and book presentation: On the occasion of the archive takeover, GRIPS Theater and the Akademie der Künste will be celebrating together at Pariser Platz on 28 April 2019. The archive opening and the presentation of an anniversary publication will be attended by Philipp Harpain (director of GRIPS Theater), Werner Heegewaldt (director of the Archives of the Akademie der Künste), Volker Ludwig (GRIPS founder and long-time director), the Millibillies (with songs covering five decades), Rüdiger Schaper (features editor, Der Tagesspiegel), Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobsen (former Minister for Youth and Family), and Ilona Schulz (Maria in the original cast of Linie 1). On 8 May 2019, the “berliner kindertheaterpreis” (Berlin children’s theatre prize) will be awarded. From 6 to 19 June 2019, GRIPS will be staging a grand festival programme to mark its 50th anniversary with the title “ON THE CHILD’S SIDE”.

KUNSTWELTEN

THE CUBIST FACE The book Baba, wie lange fahren wir noch? Erzählungen (ed. Akademie der Künste), published in February 2019, is the result of an unusual project by the Literature Section and the KUNSTWELTEN teaching programme, together with Larissa Boehning. Teenagers and young adults who came to Germany as refugees joined forces with eight German-speaking writers. The youths told their stories and the writers listened to them and formed literary texts based on these personal accounts. The “narrative tandems” are to visit schools in Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania over the course of the year and present their stories to the pupils. On 12 March 2019, Ralph Hammerthaler and Ahmed read passages from “Jenseits von Gaza” at the Käthe Kollwitz School in Anklam. Further readings will be given by Kerstin Hensel and Daniel, as well as Larissa Boehning and Somaye at schools in Köthen and Berlin.

“JENSEITS VON GAZA” – MY EXPERIENCE OF ANKLAM WITH AHMED ALJAZARA AND HIS STORY OF FLIGHT Ralph Hammerthaler

He is called Yakoub in my story, and with Yakoub, the character in the book, and him, Ahmed Aljazara, I take the train to Anklam, the town up in the East just before the island of Usedom, certainly out of Gaza, as indeed everything that Ahmed has experienced over the last few years is out of Gaza. The history of his escape to his mother in Sweden and then, on a second attempt, to Berlin, crosses the length and breadth of Europe and is rife with hardship, danger, and setbacks that would have brought a weaker person than Ahmed to their knees. That is why “Jenseits von Gaza” – surreptitiously and in general terms – tells the story of someone who made up his mind to do something and then persevered against all the odds, someone who doesn’t give up. When Ahmed met his brother-in-law in Malmö, the words he was greeted with were: You are a lion. We want to impart some of this strength to the pupils in Anklam, something they may well need.

On the train I say to him: It may go well, or it may not. In any case, we can’t expect all of them to be as open-minded

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as we would like. They may even reject you. Anklam does not have a good reputation in terms of tolerance and open-mindedness.

I can handle it, says Ahmed.

I say nothing of the “brown stronghold” yet, of rightwing extremist cronyism, of marches up until not so long ago, because I have always been suspicious of labels applied rashly. Nor do I say that the NPD sit on the municipal council, having received 9.2 per cent of the vote in 2014. Despite receiving 23 per cent of the vote in the last federal election in Anklam in 2017, the AfD recently announced that it would not be contesting the municipal elections in May due to a lack of candidates. I wonder what the high percentage means for the pupils, for orientation and socialisation. I prefer to be prepared for anything and that’s what I say to Ahmed: Let’s be prepared for anything.

In addition to this, Zeitmagazin had published a long report on Anklam a few weeks earlier titled “Eine rechte Hand wäscht die andere” (“One right hand washes the

other”). This referred to a loose network of right-wing extremists known throughout the town, who were trying to establish themselves as part of the middle class by opening a restaurant, a pub, workshops, and construction companies, because even extreme right-wingers have to earn a living. The research was carried out in collaboration with the TV station WDR; there is also a television film, with a slightly less alarming title and presentation, called Heimatland – Oder die Frage, wer dazu gehört (“Homeland – or the question of who belongs there”). In the town and in the local Nordkurier newspaper, they are anything but pleased with the reports. The commentator rants about the clichés, the gloomy photographs, and the inflated hunt for hidden Nazis, without concealing his resentment of West German magazines and their West German readers. And anyway, it’s old news, just as everyone knows that the town’s right-wing scene has been shrinking rather than growing for years, so stop going on about it.

I have been familiar with East German towns and cities for a long time. I spent a few months living in Rheinsberg, Beeskow, Jena, and Dresden respectively. There was a time in the mid-nineties when I preferred to have my medical bag with me if I was walking around the town alone at night, as in Naumburg, where it protected me, earning me respect, even from the teenage skinheads. With my tendency to overdramatise, I asked myself how I could actually dare to go to dangerous Anklam. I briefly thought about the medical bag, but then I went to my Turkish barber and had my hair shaved to six millimetres, practically a skinhead, commanding respect; they should know that I am not to be trifled with.

As Ahmed and I make our way around Anklam at night, I keep pointing out beautiful buildings to him, including the Steintor. He says: All of this reminds me of Hungary.

The whole tenth-grade class at the Käthe Kollwitz School hangs on his every word. I was prepared for anything, but not for this interest and concentration. The one thing I notice is that only the boys ask questions, while the girls are listening carefully. Ahmed has translated “Jenseits von Gaza” into Arabic and reads the beginning in his mother tongue; then I read the same part in German, followed by a longer section. The pupils ask Ahmed about experiences with the police, whether he has ever had a gun pointed at him, they ask about his residency status

Have you ever been attacked in Germany?

He was deported there by the Swedish authorities because the Hungarian authorities had registered him by fingerprint when he first set foot in the European Union; the Dublin Regulation is what this loud argument is called, but in very many cases it is spoken very quietly or not at all. In fact, the town centre looks good, a lot of it has been renovated or newly built; there are shops, a pub, and a restaurant around the market square, no vacant buildings, and apparently more people are moving to Anklam than are leaving the town. This makes it more difficult for extreme right-wingers, and it is understandable that the rebellious wings have retreated to the security of an economic livelihood. Nevertheless, our tour feels a bit spooky because there is hardly anyone on the streets, perhaps because it is Monday. In any case, the pubs and restaurants are closed, everything is in darkness, as if set up for a Zeitmagazin photo shoot.

Ahmed has the idea of asking someone at the brightly lit fitness centre where we might find an open pub. So we go in; a fat skinhead, a young woman, and an old man at the counter. Where can we still get a good beer in this town, I ask, and all three have to think about it. But then the skinhead has two good tips and gives us directions.

One of his tips is closed, so we head for the one at the market. What I don’t tell Ahmed is that I already know of the bar and restaurant from Zeitmagazin, that its owner is supposedly linked to the right-wing extremist scene and bears the relevant tattoos on his body, the Black Sun and so on. The woman at the bar is not particularly friendly, but that’s a familiar experience from Berlin and nothing to get worked up about. The place seems new and chic, the guests appear to be younger and more middle class.

And they have Lübzer beer, my favourite brand. Then I ask Ahmed about Gaza, and he talks and talks, for example, about how marriages are arranged by the

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parents, or that a pub like this would not be permitted in Gaza. We are toying about with the idea of a utopia for the region, which I for one can only imagine under international administration. Ahmed says: Israel would have to agree.

And Hamas?

Hamas too.

Well yes, a utopia.

and whether he can imagine returning to Gaza, how he handled the cold when he was fleeing and whether he has ever been attacked in Germany. He answers: Yes, lots of experiences with the police, yes, threatened with guns, no, no permanent residency, yes, if the situation changes in Gaza, no, in December he had shivered with the cold and couldn’t go to sleep, no, he has never been attacked. The last answer seems to amaze the students, as if they knew better.

Afterwards, we sit down with the principal Marion Laue. She says that her school has had classes with refugees and that the students are familiar with the subject; that the teachers are trying to handle difficult cases.

Incidentally, she remembers Frank Castorf at the theatre in Anklam, in the early eighties; banishment, I say, and she smiles and agrees.

Marion Laue exudes competence and kindness, to the extent that I would gladly go to school again in Anklam.

She and her students also shape the face of the town.

It would not be easy to draw. Everything I had heard, read, and seen could at best only be depicted in a Cubist portrait. Just as Ahmed’s history gives courage, so too do the pupils of the Käthe Kollwitz School. Nothing is lost yet.

The woman at the bar is not particularly friendly, but that’s a familiar experience from Berlin

In the meantime, Ahmed has been training in Berlin as a software developer for medical devices, I know that he is good at it – he is far more clued in than me –and that the job and his skills could help him to overcome his uncertain residency status, and perhaps even secure permanent residency. He is now in his mid-twenties and thinks that he has lost a lot of time: two years of fleeing, arriving in Germany, learning the language. I imagine a right-wing extremist being rolled into an operating theatre and thanking Ahmed for his technical skills, but that would never happen, because the right-wing extremist wouldn’t know anything about Ahmed.

A year ago, Ahmed described his future in Sweden to me, but not today. He has moved into his own apartment in Steglitz and when he parks his bike outside the building after a long day, he says: I feel like a native of Berlin.

RALPH HAMMERTHALER, born in 1965 in Wasserburg am Inn, lives in Berlin. His publications include the novels Alles bestens (2002), Aber das ist ein anderes Kapitel (2007), Der Sturz des Friedrich Voss (2010), and Kurzer Roman über ein Verbrechen (2016). He has been a writer-in-residence in Dresden, Rheinsberg, Prishtina, and Split. His libretto Die Bestmannoper, about the Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, was set to music by Alex Nowitz; his plays have been translated into several languages and performed in Munich, Berlin, Mexico City, Prishtina, and Omsk, among other places. His most recent publication is the Künstlerroman Unter Komplizen (2018).

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KUNSTWELTEN

A DAISY BLOOMS ON THE PEENESTROM, ON THE PEENESTROM ...

Constanze Witt and Katherina Seemann Villanueva

Ten years ago, when we first came to Lassan, a small town in the district of Ostvorpommern, to make an animated film with pupils of the local primary school as part of the KUNSTWELTEN programme, we were astonished at the sight that greeted us after we had passed through a fairy-tale forest. Fishermen’s houses with colourful wooden doors line the two main streets of Lassan, one of which leads to the harbour on the Peenestrom that borders the tract of land to the east. As you stand by the water, you wonder, just as Wolf Biermann did in his ballad dedicated to this place, “whether we are still in Germany” – with all of the contradictoriness that implies.

Because Germany’s history and its effects are clearly visible here: in the magical charm of the townscape, in the reminders of the division of Germany – right up to current political developments. In any case, Lassan is a town between soothing tranquillity and oblivion, a place where you can pretend the world has stopped turning – and, more recently, a magnet for alternative ways of life that even include a “freie Schule” ( alternative school).

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However, most of the children attend the primary school on Schulstraße, which has been a place of learning and growth for schoolchildren from Lassan and the surrounding area since 1990. The more than 100-year-old schoolhouse, with its decorated windows, looks like a fortress in which one can feel protected. In fact, you really do get the impression that Marianne Köhn, who has worked there for forty years, first as a teacher and then as the principal, does watch over “her” children. You can trust Ms Köhn, ask her for advice, give her a hug.

When you realise that unemployment is still high here, that there is a lack of future prospects and hardly any culture on offer in the area, you get an idea of how important she is. Ms Köhn is the “good soul” of the school. A town so small that the (voluntary) mayor runs a painting business and the school secretary is also the harbour master needs a principal who feels connected to the local people. Marion Neumann, director of KUNSTWELTEN at the Akademie der Künste, and Annett Freier from DemokratieLaden Anklam, an institution of the State

Centre for Political Education, made the decision to come here every year – not least because of the dedication and down-to-earthness of Ms Köhn and her colleagues.

This is unique within this programme of cultural education. The workshops we hold here are also a very special part of our work, because they have come to be characterised by friendship and trust.

Perhaps this unique position was precisely why we never doubted that it would be possible to make a film about tolerance and exclusion, freedom and death with the children of Lassan; and to base it on a story that began on a morning “that encompassed half the world”.

Thomas Rosenlöcher’s short story Das Gänseblümchen, die Katze und der Zaun (“The daisy, the cat, and the fence”), on which the children’s book – the template for our film – is based, tells the story of a daisy that blooms in a garden where it is seen as a weed and is therefore not tolerated. The cat and the fence bear witness to its growth and death, which they cannot prevent. The dandelion demonstrates how fences can be overcome by flying, so that in the end there is a morning “that encompassed the whole world”, where everything is allowed to blossom. Rosenlöcher also came to Lassan to develop an understanding of the story with the children and us.

He reads and walks amongst the children, asking them questions: What does it mean to see the light of the world for the first time? Is a tidy garden boring? And how would you describe a fence’s look? This is how we learn important things about the imaginations of the children in Lassan. We are surprised when we ask them about death.

The pupils speak of a soul that leaves the body, of rebirth, and also of nothingness. But Rosenlöcher’s question about a garden where everything can coexist leads to confusion; even after the concept of paradise is explained, they remain more or less silent.

This is one of those unpredictable moments that make our work so exciting, because thought processes are set in motion that essentially determine the work with the children. We are now faced with the task of bringing the various interpretations and perceptions, and above all the children’s ideas, together to make a single, uniform film. Moments like this make the responsibility we have taken on palpably clear. On the evening of the first day, we sit in the hotel room with Thomas Rosenlöcher. It is

his voice that is to be heard in the film. With the wind from a long walk across the flat landscape still in his hair, he sits on the edge of the bed reading his text for the recording. The various versions force a decision. We felt that the children’s book lacked the sorrow of the cat and the fence: How could they not miss the daisy? The ending also causes us headaches, the “morning that encompasses the whole world”. In the book, this is interpreted as the worldly conversion of the stuffy gardeners into free spirits who dance naked in the garden. But this is not enough for us. The idea of a paradise, on the other hand, was unfamiliar to the children. Does it therefore have to be excluded from the film? Is the text not captivating precisely because it gives the reader the freedom (and the task!) of giving the ending a meaning? But we are not just readers; we have to make an animated film of the story – with third-graders. We choose the “paradise” option. The children have, in the meantime, been familiarised with the concept. The fact that their education clearly is not defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition gives them the freedom to come up with their own interpretations of this idea.

They each make a cat, the world is full of cats and they can all be seen in the film. A main cat crystallises based on the possibilities of its facial expressions. The other cats are not disappointed. At the end of the week, exhausted but satisfied, we drive back to Berlin to finish the film.

At the final presentation a few weeks later, the school auditorium is packed; every generation is represented,

even the mayor has come. The atmosphere is festive, you could hear a pin drop in the room. The “paradise” ending was the right decision – as the credits roll, everyone is happy. And somehow moved. Ms Köhn approaches us from the back row: “That was so beautiful,” she says. “So beautiful.” She actually has tears in her eyes.

We are also happy. And relieved. We are convinced that children can handle any topic that concerns them, even if it is very serious or sad. Death is also something that draws the generations together through the questions, fears, and hopes that surround it. It is precisely at this point that I would situate our responsibility: in the way we talk to children. In his book, Rosenlöcher demonstrates wonderfully that humour does not have to be left out of a story where injustice, loss, and death occur. We laughed a lot when making the film: about how different the cats looked, about the people’s big feet, about the fence’s eyes ... This may be because we did not just force the children into a mere analysis. We were making something, and the process of making also includes dealing with difficult questions that are not made taboo as a result. Perhaps the “morning that encompasses the whole world” is the space where there is room for everything: for all questions, for all memories, experiences, and feelings, both the beautiful and the ugly ones. Where everything, be it ever so small and tender, may bloom.

Where one can grieve. And laugh.

The world is full of cats and they can all be seen in the film.

We have to consider again and again where scope for joint decision-making, for experiments, for the pupils’ spontaneous ideas opens up. You cannot plan this in advance and the naturalness with which the children tackle their shared tasks is quite often surprising. One of the boys is unhappy with his drawing. In the animation, however, he has no trouble splitting large movements into the smallest and running them continuously.

His pride is obvious. So each chooses their task, and the children’s joy at finding something they are particularly good at or like doing is tangible in the classroom. They are all motivated, and you can hear from every corner: “What can I do now?” Then the big question: Who gets to make the cat?

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 10

Filmmaker CONSTANZE WITT studied under Alfonso Hüppi

KATHERINA SEEMANN VILLANUEVA studied philosophy,

at Düsseldorf Art Academy and was an Akademie der Künste

Romance languages, and English at the University of

fellow in 2007. In her documentary Juan y Medio (2008),

Heidelberg. She has lived in Berlin since 2015, where she

she deals with the deep rift in her Chilean family since the

has been working on her PhD about María Zambrano

military coup in Chile in 1973. CLAUS LARSEN studied

with Gerhard Poppenberg, a Romance studies professor in

sculpture at the Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark.

Heidelberg. She is also a freelance writer and translator.

Since 2010, the artist couple have been inviting the children of Lassan primary school in the district of Vorpommern-Greifswald to film workshops.

63

KONTAKTE ’19

THE FESTIVAL The third edition of KONTAKTE (26–29 September 2019) exami-

Gregorio García Karman

trilogy Stadt Land Fluss by Daniel Kötter and Hannes Seidl, a con-

nes performative opportunities in electro-acoustic music. It does

cert project from the sphere of the Shanghai Conservatory of

so by exploring the instrumental, physical qualities of music-

Music; as well as the T.I.T.O. turntable marathon curated by Ignaz

making (with modular synthesizers, turntables, etc.), but also

Schick, which will close KONTAKTE ’19 on 29 September, the day

other forms of musical practice that open up for the performa-

of the Berlin Marathon.

tive in various ways. The historical backdrop is Feedback Studio in Cologne, founded in 1970 by Johannes Fritsch (whose legacy

GREGORIO GARCÍA KARMAN is the artistic director of

is held in the Music Archives of the Akademie der Künste), Rolf

the Studio für Elektroakustische Musik at the Akademie

Geelhaar, and David Johnson. The Feedback group, like many ini-

der Künste.

tiatives that emerged from the international centre of gravity that was Cologne in the 1970s, was distinguished by the search for new forms of self-organisation and diversification of intellectual interests – against the backdrop of an increasingly expanded, complex, and pluralistic world. This setting is contrasted by current productions, such as the third part of the music theatre

T.I.T.O. THE INTERNATIONAL TURNTABLE ORCHESTRA A BRIEF PERSONAL HISTORY

Ignaz Schick

64

Since my first experiments with electronic music, record players have played a key role, along with tape recorders and effect devices. I started experimenting as a teenager in about 1987 with the four-track cassette recorder of a visual artist I was friends with, at his recording studio on a farm in Lower Bavaria. Inspired by role models from various fields (musicians, composers, and Fluxus artists like John Zorn, Heiner Goebbels, Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer, and John Cage, as well as Milan Knížák and Christian Marclay), I began to incorporate

found or borrowed materials from vinyl records and radio into my collage-like pieces. I made recordings on and around our farm, in the stables and workshops, in the cheese dairy, or of my mother at her knitting machine, of thunderstorms or our neighbours, and I worked these everyday sounds into my early attempts at composition.

Live, however, these experiments presented me with a dilemma: how could I intervene in this material both directly and physically instead of just playing it back?

And so, in addition to multi-track tape machines and found objects, manipulated records and record players also found their way into my arsenal. A further key experience was seeing images of Milan Knížák’s Broken Music, which I discovered in an art magazine. The record is not just used in its original form as a mechanically playable storage medium, but the surface or the object itself has also been manipulated. I began processing cheap vinyl records with emery paper, drilling holes, sticking on paper and adhesive tape, or breaking records and continuing to work with the broken pieces, or even assembling new objects from them.

Starting around 1993, my first live performances using dual turntables and four-track cassette recorders took place in Munich. Later on, I added samplers, MiniDisc recorders, Discmans, computers, laptops, objects, and effect devices. The continuous thread that ran through all of these instruments was working with tonal found materials and samples: sound objects, either physically as sound generators or in the abstract as quotations and source materials, to be subjected to countless transformation processes. Following a period when the record player had almost entirely disappeared from my set-up, from about 1998/99 I increasingly began to reintegrate it into the instruments I used live. The reason for this was a growing frustration with the cumbersome nature of digital samplers and computers in practice when improvising live electronic music. Above all, when playing instruments I missed the ever so important haptic and direct access to the material. With the smallest gesture, a musical situation can be responded to in a fraction of a second; abrupt changes can be generated, for example through minimal manual interventions on the rotating table, the tone arm, or through extremely fast record changes.

From about 2002/03, the record player became the key instrument of my work. By then I was no longer using discarded hi-fi systems but rather directly operated DJ turntables that had powerful motors. Meanwhile, I had also heard of turntablists like Otomo Yoshihide, Martin Tétreault or Philip Jeck, eRikm and Claus van Bebber. I once again addressed the history of turntablism, with its beginnings in musique concrète, but also early pioneering works such as John Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960), or the beginnings of cut-up and plunderphonics, to finally become a protagonist of one of the most extreme waves of turntablism myself: playing without records, using just the device and its own sounds. Inspired by the Canadian pioneer of turntablism, Martin Tétreault, and the

JOURNAL DER KÜNSTE 10

Japanese Onkyo movement,1 from 2003/04 until about 2012 I was working exclusively with objects on the rotating turntable, amplified by a microphone and processed through a looper and pitch shifter.

And so the idea for T.I.T.O. (The International Turntable Orchestra) came about, which thanks to the support of Evelyn Hansen and Erhard Grosskopf was realised as a four-day festival at the Akademie der Künste studio at Hanseatenweg in 2009. Fourteen of the most important experimental protagonists from Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United States came to Berlin in order to rehearse in the morning and present their idiosyncratic and fascinating art from noon until late into the night, in solo, duo, trio, quartet, and tutti performances. For four days, the tables turned, records were cut and scratched, spun and manipulated, broken, chewed, or tenderly caressed. From the most delicate cracking, repetitive and hypnotic drones, fast cut-ups and scratches, to eruptive walls of noise, the invited and, at that time, most important artists of the genre went through a wide range of musical as well as physical states.

I am delighted to have been invited by Gregorio García Karman as part of KONTAKTE ’19 to curate a new edition of T.I.T.O. in the form of an all-day T.I.T.O. marathon ten years later. Instead of inviting the same musicians as in 2009, we decided to put together a completely new line-up and above all to attract those turntablists who were unable to be there the last time, as well as to present new trends and young protagonists. For me personally, it is a great honour, in addition to the outstanding line-up this year, to be able to tell you that we have invited the legendary Czech Fluxus artist Milan Knížák to the T.I.T.O. marathon, among other things to give a performance of Broken Music with The International Turntable Orchestra.

At the same time, around 2003, I started to play in a duo with Tétreault. He was also the one who encouraged me to begin researching approaches beyond purely vinyl techniques. And I had the opportunity to get to know some of my esteemed colleagues in person at appearances at international festivals and various thematically structured slots on the topic of “experimental turntablism”. I noticed that, in addition to similarities in the use of the given and even somewhat limited tools, everyone had developed their own sound, their own approach and methodology. Many of my colleagues come from a non-musical or auto-didactic background, are not classically trained musicians, and often started out in the visual arts or on the club scene. At the beginning of the 2000s, the more interesting artists I got to know from this still quite young genre, the more I wanted to organise a focused event to bring all these people together.

1 A form of free improvisation that developed in Japan at the end of the 1990s.

IGNAZ SCHICK is an improvisation musician (alto saxophone, turntables, bows, gongs, cymbals, objects, loopers), sound artist, and composer.

65

FREUNDESKREIS

Sexauer Gallery, winner of the VBKI-Preis BERLINER GALERIEN 2017

THE VALUE OF BERLIN CULTURE A guest contribution by Udo Marin

Berlin is constantly being voted on as a centre for art and culture – and quite literally so. Because people vote with their feet: following big names like Olafur Eliasson or Katharina Grosse, artistic and creative minds from all over the world are drawn to the city in droves. More than ten thousand artists have found their field of experimentation and their home port here. The city evidently offers ideal conditions – despite the increased rents for workshops and studios. And, as if any more proof were needed, one of the biggest music corporations in the world is returning to the Spree. So why are they coming here?

“Berlin is the cultural and creative epicentre of Germany,” wrote Sony Music CEO Patrick Mushatsi-Kareba.

The knock-on effect is huge; as a creative location, the German capital no longer has to hide behind New York, London, and Paris. Together and in interaction with a tremendous number of cultural institutions – listing all of the concert halls, theatres, museums, clubs, art colleges, and so on, would take pages – the creative element is shaping Berlin’s image and making a significant contribution to the growing attractiveness of the city.

The unique cultural palette and creative atmosphere are

66

local factors that impact many areas – it’s not just global music corporations that find promising (raw) material here; the city’s creative attitude to life can also be an asset when competing for investors, companies, and clever minds.

However, the delight over this “stronghold of artists” is also mingled with tones of disquiet. As a trading venue and marketplace for art, Berlin exercises polite restraint, while the big deals are done elsewhere. A slightly outdated figure from the Institute for Strategy Development illustrates just how great the gap is. According to this, the contemporary galleries in Germany collectively generated a turnover of about 450 million euros in 2013. One single American gallerist, Larry Gagosian, who runs a global empire of seventeen branches – though unfortunately none in Berlin – took almost 700 million euros in the same year.

Anyone who knows these figures and is aware that Berlin represents only a relatively small share of German gallery sales can figure out the economic situation of the approximately five hundred galleries in the capital city, especially the smaller ones. These are still utilising a total area of around fifty thousand square metres throughout the city, with almost 2,500 exhibitions per year – with the emphasis on “still”. Because the cake that is available to go around may be too small to provide everyone with a living in the long run – especially as costs such as rent keep increasing.

Some time ago, in a discussion with the Association of Berlin Merchants and Industrialists (VBKI), Christian Boros, a collector, patron, and one of the pioneers of the art metropolis of Berlin, warned that, “We have to ensure that the market is not taking place elsewhere.” The global market needs occasions, venues, points of contact – and in this regard, the typical diversity of Berlin is more of a downside than an advantage. It can become impossible to see the wood for the trees, as the saying goes.

In order to lend Berlin’s galleries greater visibility, we – the 2,200 entrepreneurs associated as the VBKI – decided two years ago to further expand our commitment to art and culture. For example, the VBKI cultural committee, under the direction of Bernd Wieczorek (who is also chairman of the board of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste), launched “Hauptstadtkulturgespräch”, a series of discussions focusing on cultural topics of key importance for Berlin, with relevant stakeholders from the fields of culture, politics, and business, creating what has now become a well-established sounding board.

In collaboration with the Regional Association of Berlin Galleries (lvbg), the idea emerged to offer a prize for Berlin galleries. In 2018, the VBKI-Preis BERLINER GALERIEN, an endowment of ten thousand euros, was presented for the second time. Following the decision in favour of Sexauer Gallery at the premiere in 2017, last year the jury chose Galerie Daniel Marzona – two worthy winners, who lend the Berlin art market a little vision and profile.

As artistically minded citizens, we enjoy the enormous cultural palette of our city; as entrepreneurs, we recognise the inestimable value of culture for the further development of our location. So there are at least two reasons why we want Berlin to continue to be the place to be for artists and creative people from all over the world in the future.

UDO MARIN, Managing Director of the Association of Berlin Merchants and Industrialists (VBKI), is a member of the Society of Friends of the Akademie der Künste.

CREDITS pp. 4/5, 6/7 © Hito Steyerl, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019, photos Andreas FranzXaver Süß, courtesy: the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin | p. 8 Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; p. 9 Akademie der Künste, Archives, photo Roman März; pp. 10/11 Bundesarchiv Koblenz; p. 11 Akademie der Künste, Archives, photo Fritz Eschen; p. 12 Werner Durth; p. 13 Behnisch & Partner; p. 14 (on the left) Albert Baustetter; (on the right) Restaurierung am Oberbaum; p. 15 Jürgen Schreiter | pp. 16–19, Akademie der Künste, photos Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk, except p. 19 (top) Roman März ; p. 18 (top) Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, Inv.-Nr. KS-Gemälde MA 311, © Barbara Döhl; (bottom) Restaurierungswerkstatt; p. 19 (top) Akademie der Künste, Nachlassbibliothek Kurt-Jung-Alsen; (bottom) Landhaus Schminke in Löbau, Akademie der Künste, Hans-Scharoun-Archiv, Modellnr. 28 | pp. 20–21 © Manfred Böttcher, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019, photos Andreas FranzXaver Süß; p. 22 © Harald Metzkes, Manfred Böttcher, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019, photo Andreas FranzXaver Süß | p. 23 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung, fol.-no.

KS-Foto 1010.8 © Christina Kubisch | pp. 32–33 photo Herman Sorgeloos | p. 36+37 Akademie der Künste, JohannKresnik-Archiv 61, 60 and 62 © Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; p. 38 (above) Akademie der Künste, JohannKresnik-Archiv 63_001, © Johann Kresnik; (bottom left) Akademie der Künste, Johann-Kresnik-Archiv 64_001, © Johann Kresnik; (bottom right) Akademie der Künste, Johann Kresnik-Archiv 64_002, © Johann Kresnik; p. 39 Akademie der Künste, Johann-Kresnik-Archiv 57, © Johann Kresnik | p. 40 Akademie der Künste, Mary-Wigman-Archiv 292_312, photo © Charlotte Rudolph, VG BildKunst, Bonn 2019; p. 41 Akademie der Künste, Mary-Wigman-Archiv 636_467, photo © Charlotte Rudolph, VG BildKunst, Bonn 2019; p. 42 Akademie der Künste, Mary-Wigman-Archiv 626; p. 43 Akademie der Künste, MaryWigman-Archiv 264_003, photo Hugo Erfurth; p. 44 Akademie der Künste, Mary-Wigman-Archiv 642_024, photo Charlotte Rudolph, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; p. 45 Akademie der Künste, MaryWigman-Archiv 246_001, photo August Scherl | p. 46 Akademie der Künste, Karin-Waehner-Sammlung 200, photo Jean Babout, © Jean Masse; p. 47 KarinWaehner-Sammlung 201, photo Jean Babout, © Jean Masse | p. 48 portrait © Lynn Takeo Musiol; p. 49 image of CARTE BLANCHE Texts and pictures: VA Wölfl Page 25: Woodstock Page 26/27: Cemetery N.Y. Page 28: Malerei Page 29: Selbst Page 30: Aquarell Page 31: Christine + Judith Back cover: Izaskun VA WÖLFL, artistic director of the ensemble NEUER TANZ, has been a member of the Performing Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste since 2007.

COLOPHON artwork © Lynn Takeo Musil and Emese Papp | p. 50 (above) portrait and image of artwork © Eric le Méné, (below) portrait and image of artwork Efilena Baseta; p. 51 (above) portrait Paul Niedermayer, image of artwork © Cemil Sahin; (below) portrait and image of artwork © Robert Olawuyi; p. 52 (above) portrait and image of artwork © Artemiy Shokin; p. 52 (below) portrait © Regina Fredriksson; p. 53 (above) portrait © Marcin Lewandowski, image of artwork to the left © Johann Lurf and Laura Wagner, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; to the right © Johann Lurf, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; (below) portrait Paula Faraco, image of artwork © Franziska Pflaum; p. 54 (above left) portrait © Barbara Delać; (above right) portrait Otto Reiter; (below) portrait © Kaj Duncan David, image of artwork © Kaj Duncan David, (left) photo Armin Smailowic, (middle) photo Rudolf Stoll; p. 55 (above) portrait Wolf James Photography, photo performance Jenny Berger Myhre / Only Connect; p. 55 (below) portrait © Bart Michiels, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; image of artwork © Sebastián Solórzano | pp. 56–57 Akademie der Künste, Kunstsammlung, fol.-no. KS 27706, 27793, 27795, 27803; p. 58 GRIPS Theater, © Rainer Hachfeld; p. 59 Akademie der Künste, Archiv GRIPS Theater, photo Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk | p. 61 photo Philip Euteneuer | pp. 62–63 film stills © Claus Larsen and Constanze Witt | pp. 64–65 © Ignaz Schick | p. 66 photo Marcus Schneider, courtesy SEXAUER We thank all owners of image usage rights for kindly approving the publication. If, despite intensive research, a copyright holder has not been considered, justified claims will be compensated within the scope of customary agreements.

The views offered in this journal reflect the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Journal der Künste, Edition 10, English issue Berlin, May 2019 Print run: 1,000 Journal der Künste is published three times a year and is available at all Academy locations. Members of the Academy, the Society of Friends of the Academy, and subscribers will receive a copy.

If you would like a single edition, the German edition, or a subscription, please contact info@adk.de © 2019 Akademie der Künste © for the texts with the authors © for the artworks with the artists Responsible for the contents Werner Heegewaldt Johannes Odenthal (V.i.S.d.P.) Kathrin Röggla Editorial team Nora Kronemeyer & Martin Hager (edition8) Marie Altenhofen Anneka Metzger Translations Laura Noonan, Sprachwerkstatt Berlin Copy-editing Joy Beecroft Design Heimann + Schwantes, Berlin www.heimannundschwantes.de Lithography Max Color, Berlin Printing Ruksaldruck, Berlin English edition ISSN (Print) 2627-2490 ISSN (Online) 2627-5198 Digital edition https://issuu.com/journalderkuenste Akademie der Künste Pariser Platz 4 10117 Berlin T 030 200 57-1000 info@adk.de, www.adk.de akademiederkuenste

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