Magazine #23 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Autumn / Winter 2014–15

ANIMAL

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Editorial In this issue of our Magazine, we present a number with nature in a ­human-friendly way. According to of projects which address the themes of nature and Burnside, we must approach nature both “rigorously ­animals. No, the Foundation is not about to establish a and generously” to an equal extent. “In the course of special funding programme dedicated to nature, but history,” he says, “our regard for ‘nature’ has never the relationship between nature and art, and especially been very deep or long-lived, while our capacity for animalistic nature and art, seems to have sparked sentimentalising o­ urselves, even as we have cheerfully ­renewed interest everywhere. Not only have we ­noticed decimated so many of our fellows, has never dimmed.” this in the project applications we receive. Perhaps ­this We also present two new poems by the American poet new interest in nature is due to the fact that our Allison Funk, translated into German for the first vigilance and sense of responsibility toward our time, which highlight our relationship to nature in an ­ ­environment has increased and global interweave has ­original, poetic manner. The ­illustrations by Laetitia become more prevalent. The disappearance of honey Gendre also offer a very unconventional angle to this bees, for example, is not a regionally limited, ­ecological theme: organic and natural forms are counterpoised footnote, but a sign of change, the extent of which we by s­cientific representations, the micro- and macro-­ can hardly estimate. What we do know is that human cosmos interweave with one another. beings are the ones who are shaping nature. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that our relationship to nature Hortensia Völckers, Alexander Farenholtz is being expressed in culture and art and is forging Executive Committee links to new areas. The old distinction, the strict German Federal Cultural Foundation ­contrast between nature and art has become obsolete.

This causes Srećko Horvat to ask whether we should truly be surprised at the genocide of animals, “when human beings are still incapable of treating other humans humanely.” As a Marxist philosopher, Horvat has no intention of putting ethics above eating, but he does argue that our manner of interaction with one another determines how we treat animals. The legal expert Anne Peters points out that it wasn’t so long ago when we put non-Europeans on display in zoos.

This practice would be unimaginable in Europe today because our attitudes toward human dignity have evolved. Could it be that in several decades we will think the same of the animals on display in zoos and the stuffed animals in natural history museums? Will we make progress in safeguarding the animals’ rights to liberty and dignity? According to Peters, a divide separates human rights and animal rights, a divide which makes a mockery of the biological continuum between humans and animals and their common traits.

Cord Riechelmann also makes an appeal for an ­alternative view of the animal world. Artists must be aware that they can and should create a door to the cosmos of the living, as advocated by the industrialised Life Sciences, especially as they increasingly influence our view of nature. The American artist Mark Dion has ­examined the collection and exhibition practices of natural objects for many years now. He attempts to counter the “suicidal relationship with our planet” and reflects on the role of artistic interventions in ­natural-historical situations. For centuries, nature has been a source of inspiration almost like no other in the world of music. The instrumentalist Jeremias Schwarzer and concert designer Folkert Uhde discuss the naive belief that nature can be imitated through music. On the basis of various compositions – from Vivaldi to today’s electronic music – we can trace how humans, as the composers of their times, have ­expressed their specific relationship to nature. But in order to perceive it, we require new forms of reception. And finally, we asked Scottish writer John ­Burnside, who is also wellknown in Germany, for r­ecommendations on dealing

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Focus: The Animal How culture and art shed light on our relationship to animals and nature The Disappearance of the Bees, or the Singularity of the Animal — Srećko Horvat

LAETITIA GENDRE In the first series of graphite drawings, Laetitia Gendre combines film stills from Stanley Kubrick’s ­ “2001: A Space Odyssey” and photos of minimalist and post-minimalist sculptures. In the film Kubrick uses the monolith as a recurring symbol (an icon that does no less than trigger the birth of humankind). Gendre juxtaposes the monolith with the aesthetics that ­ ­characterised sculpture at the time the film was made.

Another series of drawings pursues the concept that complexity is made up of elementary shapes. These compositions of geometric and organic forms e­voke ­objects in a state of metamorphosis. Gendre’s con­ ception­of nature does not yield biological or p ­ hysical images, but absorbs these images in an ­idiosyncratic process of reframing and rearranging.

Laetitia Gendre’s primary medium is drawing, which she approaches with an eye informed by her early work as a painter. There is a great sensitivity to her large-scale 3D drawings and paper sculptures from the past several years, but she does not limit herself to the materiality of drawing. The premise with which she works is more complex, not only because she also uses media such as slideshows, video, printed material, text and sound, but also because her works generally feature collage effects and associations. She juxtaposes such ­divergent elements as the history of perspective with roller coasters or shooting targets, early cinema and CCTV, Warburg’s atlas and B-movie posters. Her art consists of erased, folded, found, scrambled or hidden images. The cross-references yield multiple p ­ ossibilities for interpretation and often reveal a tongue-­in-cheek humour.

Thomas Fischer Born in 1973 in Chinon, France, Laetitia G ­ endre lives in Paris and Brussels. Her work has been ­presented at La Maison Rouge, Paris; TENT, Rotterdam; Samsa, ­Berlin; Wiels, Brussels and ­Galerie ­Thomas Fischer, Berlin.

We humans exercise violence against animals the moment we begin to classify them. Instead of ­viewing animals as entities in their own right, we put them into a precisely ordered system. ­Classification serves the purpose of rationalisation, and ratio­nalisation serves the purpose of mass ­murder.

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Liberté, égalité, animalité — An Appeal to End the Slaughter

by Anne Peters

Animal rights have lagged behind human rights throughout history. The well-being of animals, their needs and rights are not only a matter of ­social justice, but of global justice. It is time to regard human rights and animal rights as belonging to one and the same cause.

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In View of Animals — Cord Riechelmann

Natural history shouldn’t serve as an excuse to ­offer more or less academic forays into the world of imagery and curiosities of natural history. Instead, it must provide the public an opportunity to become familiar with real creatures.

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7 New Projects Incubators or Crypts — An interview with Mark Dion

The American artist Mark Dion creates ­inter­ventions which reveal surprising relationships among objects in natural history museum ­collections. Christine Heidemann spoke with him about the so-called “order of things” and how artists shouldn’t leave the interpretation of nature solely to researchers.

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Learning to Walk, Beginning to Fly — John Burnside

The Scottish poet calls on us to sanctify our ­relationship to earth once more and celebrate our communion with nature without reverting to kitsch. His recommendation: Travel the country as a saunterer – not as a speculator.

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Wonder Rooms and Virgin and Child with a Dragonfly — Two poems by the American poet Allison Funk

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Musical Notation of Birdsong — The musicologist Bernhard Schrammek ­interviews the flutist Jeremias Schwarzer and concert designer Folkert Uhde

Composers and musicians have attempted to express nature through music since the ­Baroque period. To what extent can music instil life in the acoustic realms of nature?

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After Premature Death / Animals Dressed / William Forsythe / Disorder / Ha-fra-ah / I Got Rhythm / Artefacts and Traces from the Theresienstadt Ghetto 1941–1945 / BUVERO – Roma Woman Live Network Project / LINA BO BARDI 100 Freedom of form and radical independence — The works of architect Lina Bo Bardi The Song of the Earth / sounds & clouds / The Unleashed Gaze / European Literary Activist Conference and Pan-European Omnibus Reading Tour / I Shall Not Remain Silent – The Jürgen Fuchs ­Project / 10th Anniversary of the Osnabrück Morgenland Festival / Berlin Atonal Festival / When Things Are Hopping – New Instruments, New Sounds / Les robots ne connaissent pas le blues / The Abduction from the Seraglio / Kafka Goes to the Movies — Went to cinema. Cried. — Hanns Zischler on some of the films Kafka saw – films that fascinated and moved him / Fire and Forget / africologne 2014/2015 / EIGHT BRIDGES / Music for Cologne 2015: Music and Politics Straight White Men / Indonesia LAB / We Aren’t Ducks on the Pond. We’re Ships on the Ocean / Making Africa / The Trisha Brown Dance Company in Berlin / Banned DEFA films 1965–1990–2015 Movies of a Political Thaw — How the GDR nipped its New German Film in the bud /

p. 32–43 Committees & Imprint p. 44

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The Dissapearence of the Bees,

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Singularity of the Animal

by Screćko Horvat

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A Wie kann ein Wal mit einer Fliege vergleichbar sein?

A woman reading on a bench in Central Park takes her silver chopstick-style hair pin out of her hair and stabs herself in the neck with it. Meanwhile on a building site, workers on the ground are chatting when all of a sudden a body falls. Thinking the worker just fell off the roof by mistake, they rush over to his dead body, but then another worker falls down, then the third, and yet another and another. As in the famous Magritte’s painting “Golconde”, where identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky fall down like drops of heavy rain, this scene is catapulting us into the universe of the surreal paranoid science-fiction thriller “The Happening”, directed in 2008 by M. Night Shyamalan. At the same time, a school teacher, still not aware the disaster is already happening, explains how Albert Einstein once said that without honeybees mankind wouldn’t survive more than five years.

The dissapearence of the honeybees is no news any­ more. As we all know by now, it all started in 2006 when the United States was hit by an abrupt dissapearance of whole bee colonies. Since then, it is happening in all parts of Europe, in Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, ­Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, etc. Many theories and a wide range of possible causes have been presented, including pesticides, parasites, viruses, environmental changes, and even radiation from cell phone towers. It seems there is still no common agreement among biologists or scientific confirmation what is the real cause for the now called “Colony Collapse Disorder”.

But it seems that everyone by now agrees with the prophetic Einstein warning that mankind will not survive honeybees’ disappearance. Why? Because one third of the food we eat comes as the result of bees as the most important pollinators of our fruits, vegetables, flowers and crops.

To fully understand the problem of the extinction of any animal species, including the bees, we should turn to Jacques Derrida and his understanding of the Animal.

In his address “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” at the third Cerisy-la-Salle conference devoted to his work in July 1997, Derrida says he would like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular and even goes so far to call every act of categorisation that posits the Animal in plural, as “animals”, nothing more than – violence. “Among nonhumans and separate from nonhumans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in a way be homogenised, except by means of violence and willful ignorance, within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general”.

In other words, what for Derrida is of utmost importance is to avoid speaking generally about animals.

For him, there are no “animals”. When one says “animals”, one has already started to not understand anything, and started to enclose the animal into a cage. Why? Because there are considerable differences between different types of animals.

Derrida returned to this question just two years before his death, in the documentary film directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering in 2002: “There is no reason one should group into one and the same category monkeys, bees, snakes, dogs, horses, anthropods and microbes. These are radically different organisms of life, and to say ‘animal’ and put them all into one category – both the monkey and the ant – is a very violent gesture. To put all living things that aren’t human into one category is, first of all, a stupid gesture – theoretically ridiculous and partakes in the very real violence that humans exercise towards animals. That leads to slaughterhouses, their industrial treatment, their consumption.

All this violence towards animals is engendered in this conceptual simplification which allows one to say ‘animals’ in general”.

Violence begins not with the slaughterhouse, but with categorisation. Each time I try to classify, I already

determine. Each time I determine, I assume I know a particular nature – although the opposite is the case: I define and classify according to my own nature. How can a monkey and a bee fit into one and the same category called “animals”? How can a whale be comparable to a fly?

The best – at first glance completely absurd – answer is given by the fictious taxonomy of animals described by Jorge Luis Borges in his famous tale “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. The alternative taxonomy of “animals”, taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia (“Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”), divides all animals into one of 14 categories: Those that belong to the emperor Embalmed ones Those that are trained Suckling pigs Mermaids (or Sirens) Fabulous ones Stray dogs Those that are included in this classification Those that tremble as if they were mad Innumerable ones Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush Et cetera Those that have just broken the flower vase Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

What Borges succeeded to show more than any other critique of classification, is the arbitrariness of any attempt to categorise the world. Why would the fictious taxonomy where animals can be “those that belong to the emperor” or “those that, at a distance, resemble flies” be more fictional than, for instance, Aristotle’s animal classification or Linnaean taxonomy?

It is not by chance that Michel Foucault used Borges’ celestial taxonomy in his preface to “The Order of Things”, admitting how he was amused yet also shaken by it. “In the wonderment of this taxonomy”, he says, “the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the able, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own”.

This is the paradox we have to face: it is in the very moment of creation that we limit our own system of thought. “So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam no suitable helper was found” (Genesis 2:20). Genesis tells us that Adam named the animals even before Eve was created. Before the “animals”, there was already language. The Bible classifies the animals into four classes, according to four different modes of locomotion: walking, flying, swimming, crawling. On the one hand, the naming of animals is an act of authority and domination, on the other – it again proves a limitation of our world.

We could give a detailed overview of the evolution of classification – from the religious texts, to ancient philosophy including Plato and Aristotle, to Linnaean taxonomy. And no matter how advanced and sophisticated a new classification might be, Borges’ fictional classification would not disappear before our eyes. To really understand the “Animal”, it is not enough to name, classify or define it. To understand the “Animal” we should be able to understand its suffering.

And this brings us, inevitably, to one of the most famous episodes from the history of Western philosophy, which is not only marked but determined by the figure of the Animal. It is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in Turin on 3 January 1889. There are many interpretations of the well-known story of Nietzsche lying unconscious on the pavement of Piazza Carlo Alberto. The most famous says he witnessed how a cab driver was having trouble with his horse and began

10 to whip the poor animal. Nietzsche was so immensely shocked by the scene that he ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed.

Are his short writings known as Wahnbriefe really a manifestation of “madness” or are they a product of the unbearable scene of the suffering animal? Was the suffering horse really just a trigger, as most of the interpretations claim, or was it the case that Nietzsche was able to hear the plural of animals in the singular? As long as we conceive the “animals” in the plural, it is impossible to hear their suffering. Once we are able to understand the singularity of an animal – the world it carries, the world that is opened by its very existence and the world that is closed by its death – it is impossible not to become silent and even mad like Nietzsche. That is the reason why most of us are still “sane” and living as if the animals around us are not suffering.

How can a whale be comparable to a fly?

Paradoxically, the very attempt to find the singular in the plurality of “animals”, namely classification, was the first step towards the elimination of the singularity of every Animal. Instead of abstract “animals” (“walking”, “flying”, “swimming,” “crawling” animals, as in the Bible), now we have precise classifications, but at the same time we are even more distant from animals than before.

Classification served the purpose of rationalisation, and rationalisation served the purpose of mass-murder.

Is there a better proof than the following one? In his biography My Life and Work from 1922, Henry Ford reveals that his inspiration for the production on an assembly line came when he, as a young man, visited a slaughterhouse in Chicago. Slaughtered animals, hanging down from a moving chain or ribbon went from employee to employee and each performed a particular procedure in the entire process. This introduced a radical novelty in our modern industrialised civilisation – for the first time neutralisation of killing and a new level of disengagement was introduced. For the first time m ­ achines were used to accelerate the progress of mass ­slaughter.

On the one hand, it was the slaughterhouse that brought the assembly line to capitalism – with numerous consequences that we still feel and experience today. On the other hand, it is no wonder that Adolf Hitler held a life-size portrait of Ford next to his desk in the office of the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. When in 1931 he was asked by a journalist of Detroit News what does Ford’s portrait on the wall mean, Hitler replied: “I perceive Henry Ford as my inspiration”. Ford soon became the first foreigner who received The Order of the German Eagle and Hitler soon transformed his inspiration into reality. Where else could the rationalisation of killing, characteristic of slaughterhouses using assembly lines, be better used than in concentration camps?

Not only were Jews were transported to concentration camps in cattle wagons, but the guards at the camps came directly from the meat industry. As Charles ­Patterson showed in his book Eternal Treblinka: Our ­Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust it might be just a coincidence but Rudolf Höss, the commander of ­Auschwitz owned a butcher shop; Kurt Franz, the last commander at Treblinka, was a butcher; Karl Frenzel, who fueled the ovens first at Hadamar and then at Sobibor, was a butcher and last but not least, Heinrich Himmler, conducted eugenic testing on his chicken farm.

And ­Hitler’s personal bodyguard was also a ­butcher…

Apart from these historical curiosities and potential contingencies, much more important is the argument drawn by Patterson: the domestification and subjugation

of animals was the model that served as the inspiration for converting people into slaves and the cultivation of domesticated animals has led to eugenic measures such as forced sterilisation, euthanasia, and, ultimately, genocide. Although Patterson’s book raises many new questions, it shows how the industrialised slaughter of cattle cleared the way, at least indirectly, to the “final solution”.

Just as the assembly lines for the slaughter of animals or the production of Henry Ford’s cars, served the basic principles of effectiveness and efficiency, so did the ­assembly lines of Treblinka. Just as the assembly line in slaughterhouses created a more efficient way of killing that was less stressful for the murderers, because from now on everyone was just doing their own job, so did the “humane killing” create a new layer of officers such as Adolf Eichman. Killing was now institutionalised and objectivised.

Only when the Jews started to be treated as animals, when a group of people instead of being treated as ­singular were treated as a “plurality” that in its very ­plurality was transformed into a false singularity (“the Jew”), it was possible to organise the “final solution”. But it should be noted that comparing Jews with animals certainly was not a Nazi invention. For instance, it was Martin Luther who already compared the Jews to “mad dogs” and “pigs”, and it was Hegel who believed that Jews can not be assimilated into German culture because they lived an “animal existence”. And there is no need to go back in history if our present is full of similar examples.

After his visit to the Gaza Strip, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said in 2009 that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being “treated more like animals than human beings” and in 2014, just after the new “ground invasion” of Gaza started, a Norwegian doctor treating wounded Palestinian children, Mads Gilbert, said the Palestinians are “once more treated like the animals”. So, if a whole population is being treated “less than human”, how could we expect human will treat animals differently? If humans are still not capable of treating other humans as humans, should we really wonder nobody is speaking about a genocide of animals?

Of course, we should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor consider it explained away, but as Derrida shows in his address “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” things get more complicated here: “The annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but is occuring through the organisation and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organise the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or by fire.”

What we face today is a step further from the traditional assembly line. Our classification of animals didn’t only create the preconditions for their annihilation. It lead to a nightmare already present in Derrida’s prediction of artificial survival. Let us take a recent two-minute Greenpeace activist fiction film which presents a near future where bees have gone extinct completely. No ­reason to worry. Fields that were a barren wasteland are recovering again. Because bees are back. You might think these are ordinary bees, but these little marvels of advanced robotics are second generation NewBees. Far superior to their nature counterparts, they have been successfully implemented all over the world. Completely solar powered, a NewBee requires very little downtime to recharge. Using realtime triangulation technology, each NewBee knows which part of the field has been pollinated, maximising efficiency and yield. Unlike

standard bees, NewBees are fully equipped to fight their natural enemies. As soon as a predator approaches, the NewBees are alerted and release a fast-acting insecticide, neutralising the threat in a second. Nothing can harm them. NewBees do not tire, require minimum maintenance, and are produced for a fraction of the upkeep cost of normal bees. They are easily recycled, replaced, and activated. NewBees blend in perfectly with nature, and are programmed not to harm us…

Luckily, this is – so far – only science-fiction. The idea is based on artitificial pollination. However, fiction can soon turn into reality. A research robotics team, specialised in micro-robotics, at Harvard University is already developing so called “RoboBees”. The “RoboBee” project, launched in 2009 to investigate what it would take to create a robotic bee colony, already succeeded in creating artificial muscles capable of beating the wings 120 times per second and scientists are now figuring out how to get power supply and decision making functions.

During the summer of 2012, the researchers solved key technical challenges allowing the “RoboBee” to take its first controlled flight.

Although it seems we are at least 20 years away from the possibility of artificial pollination, we should pose the following question: if robotic bees really succeed to pollinate fields and keep our ecosystem in balance, what will it mean for humanity? OK, we might survive bees extinction despite Einstein’s prophecy, but what does the disappearance of the Animal mean for humanity as such? What does the death of one animal mean and what does it mean when a whole species goes extinct?

Some scientists estimate that up to half of presently existing plant and animal species may become extinct by 2100. Yes, we could of course be cynical and ask what is the human-caused extinction compared to at least five mass extinctions in the history of life on earth? For example, what is the current Holocene extinction compared to the “Permian-Triassic extinction event” about 250 million years ago, which is estimated to have killed 90% of species then existing? Can we even imagine what sort of life existed in that period and how insignificant our own existence might appear from that perspective?

Technically speaking, there is life after people, or as Alan Weisman put it in his non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared – there is a “World without us”.

In this case, even we, the human, are a species that could easily disappear and already after 500 or thousand years there would be little evidence (radioactive materials, bronze statues or ceramics) or none at all that we ever existed.

When it comes to our current relation towards Nature it is ambivalent. On the one hand, we really do live in the so called “Anthropocene”, a period in which human activities have significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystem. Our influence on the behaviour of bees is the best illustration of this. And maybe we need to go even a step further from the thesis of the “Anthropocene” and take into consideration what Timothy Morton called “Ecology without Nature”. According to Morton, the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the idea of nature itself and we need to accept this denaturalised character of nature itself. It is not so much that the humans put nature out of joint, nature itself is not in balance. Or in other words, it is exactly this chaotic character of nature itself – huge catastrophies, storms, floods, etc. – that is natural. (Of course, the consequences of “natural disasters” are not natural but are already marked by human interventions – there is no such thing as a “natural disaster”!)

And here we come to the other side of this coin. ­ ature is not always an innocent victim and it is not only N human influence that changes Nature. “Eyjafjallajökull”, no matter how many times we heard this strange name, is still not easy to pronounce. Neverthelless, t­his volcano from Iceland completely disrupted human “business as

11 usual”. As a consequence of its eruption, the European airlines were paralysed for almost a week, with more than 64,000 flights delayed or cancelled, ­affecting millions of travellers. So, what to us humans looks like a catastrophy, nature out of balance, is precisely the opposite – it is “Eyjafjallajökull” and not our ecological struggle that succeeded in lessening the airlines’ carbon footprint by an amount equal to the annual ­output of several smaller states combined.

What their death doesn't make us mad These two sides of the coin open up an unexpected reversal. It is not only the animal, but the very human species that could disappear soon. Whatever the reason for the disappearance of bees might be, it seems that the official tagline of Shyamalan’s “The Happening” perfectly describes the matter: “We’ve sensed it. We’ve seen the signs. Now… it’s happening”. What is happening in “The Happening” is a cataclysmic disaster, people around major cities on the east coast of the United States begin to die mysteriously and it seems the cause is Nature. Soon it turns out that plants, trying to defend themselves from threats, began to release a cryptic ­neurotoxin that causes anyone exposed to it to commit suicide.

The disappearance of humans would, everyone would agree (at least anyone who is human), signify the disappearance of a world. It would still be a “world without us”, but it wouldn’t be the same world. Let us now imagine the “animals” watching the dying human ­species, perceiving us only as a plurality (“the humans”). If the dissapearance of one human is the dissapearance of a whole world (just take the very last speakers of some rare human languages as an example), why is the suffering of one animal not perceived as suffering or disappearance of a singularity, not only the death of an animal but the disappearance of a world? Maybe the time has come to turn the usual thesis around: “animals” may not be so dependent on us (because they would probably continue to exist even if we would have disappeared as a species), how much we depend on them, their very singularity.

Just think about that next time you encounter a bee.

Srećko Horvat, born in Osijek, Yugoslavia in 1983, spent the first seven years of his life living in exile in Germany. The philosopher and writer Horvat is regarded as a central figure of Croatia’s and the Balkan’s new Leftist party. In 2008, Horvat co-founded the annual Subversive Festival in Zagreb. His most recent books published in German, include “Nach dem Ende der Geschichte” (After the End of History) and “Was will Europa? – Rettet uns vor den Rettern” (What does Europe want?

The Union and its Discontents) with Slavoj Žižek, both published by the Laika-Verlag, Hamburg in 2013.

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Liberté égalité animalité An Appeal to End the Slaughter

by Anne Peters

13 Gawking at people in the zoo

O

ur legal system c ­ urrently permits ­widespread violence against animals, but it also has the potential to combat the exploitation and destruction of animals – and not just here, but worldwide. If we ever desire to draft an ­“animal bill of rights”, we need only to follow the course of human rights.

Between 1879 and 1935, residents of Basel found entertainment at so-called “People Shows” at the Basel Zoo. At these events, non-Europeans were put on ­display in traditional garb. The shows attracted even larger crowds than the zoo animals. The organisers of the “People Shows” were usually animal merchants and zoo directors. Those on display were often recruited from Sudan, a region in which most of the African zoo and circus animals were also captured. The organisers made sure that the people on display could not speak any European languages, which made verbal communication impossible between the zoo visitors and the ­ displayed individuals. Births and babies were ­crowd-­pleasers and especially welcome. The business­ corre­ ­ spon­ dence referred to the exhibition of these ­human displays (in particular, their transportation by ship) in the same terms they used for animals. A zoo poster ­advertised the “endangered Female Lip Negros”.

On 18 June 1887, the daily paper Basler Nachrichten wrote: “Huddled half-naked in front of their huts are several brown creatures whose physical development, ­surroundings and drapery are strongly reminiscent of the apes.”

Most of us today are shocked to learn of this ­recreational activity of the not-so-distant past. But why ­weren’t people shocked to see other human beings put on display in zoos 75 years ago? And why do we hardly question the practice of putting animals on display in zoos? Our views regarding human dignity have ­apparently undergone dynamic development in recent ­decades. A “People Show”, as described above, would be unimaginable in Europe today; it would be forbidden by law and declared a human-rights violation by the courts. Would it be desirable, could we imagine that in another 75 years we might shudder to think that we had once imprisoned animals in zoos and circuses – a ­practice, which by then would be forbidden as violating animals’ rights to freedom and dignity?

The human-animal continuum and the legal divide “Animalité”? If we look back at the relevant ­discourse in philosophy, anthropology and zoology in the history of ideas, we notice that countless criteria have been used to demarcate the division between homo and animale, as the differentia specifica, the d ­ istinguishing characteristics of human beings, so as to justify their exceptional, superior position in the realm of living creatures. These made reference to cognition and self-awareness (reason, ability to speak, utilisation of tools, production of tools, etc.), as well as social and moral abilities (feeling sympathy for other species, passing down acquired techniques, i.e. culture). Naturally, the trait of possessing an immortal soul does not lend itself to an intersubjective plausibility analysis. All of the other allegedly distinctive characteristics of ­human beings have since been discredited by recent scientific findings.

Has the moment arrived when we must admit that there is no divide between man and beast, but rather a smooth transition, a new form of solidarity (“fraternité”)?

Solidarity which over the years has extended to the ­entire legal community, to the dispossessed, women, children, foreigners, etc., in other words, groups which did not immediately share in the pleasure of liberty, equality and brotherhood following the French Revolution. Should such solidarity now extend further to ­include animals capable of feeling emotions and ­experiencing the world?

It is impossible to “derive” any ethical laws on ­human interaction with animals from the mere fact that there is a biological (and cultural) continuum (common ancestors, common genome, common traits and behaviours) between non-human and human

a­ nimals. But our moral system is shaped to some d ­ egree by our reflection on scientific data. We can justifiably demand that this continuum is reflected in our legal system.

In contrast, our current laws are characterised by sharp discontinuity. A highly diversified body of ­national and international human rights stands in stark contrast to the almost non-existent rules regarding ­animal welfare. Granted, European nations in particular, the EU and the European parliament have passed a number of laws, regulating the treatment of animals since the 1980s (e.g. species protection, transportation, slaughter, animal husbandry, house pets). However, animals in Europe are only regarded as objects ­ deserving protection, but not as legal entities. ­ Furthermore, current animal protection laws still ­ ­permit everyday mass violence against animals.

The legalisation of violence against animals This violence is constituent of the two most ­important uses of animals in modern-day society, namely for food production and medical/pharmaceutical/­ chemical testing. The latter generates far more criticism, although it entails a quantitatively small ­ amount of ­violence compared to that of food production. “Only” twelve million animals (70 percent of which are mice) are used for research purposes in the EU each year. In c­ ontrast, 450 billion animals are kept in captivity in ­industrial, large-scale facilities worldwide, and according to the data provided by the Food and ­Agricultural ­Organisation (FAO), 58 billion land ­animals are slaughtered each year. An approximately equal number of ­marine animals are killed each year, whereby 80 to 90 percent of the by-catch (dead or dying ­creatures) is tossed back into the ocean.

In Western industrialised societies, the animal-­ based foods are ridiculously inexpensive because of their ­industrialised production methods. A European household today spends an average of ten percent of its entire income on food, while back in the 1950s, onethird to one half of a family’s income was used for buying food. The average European consumer demands cheap products with certain characteristics. For example, in Switzerland (like in other European countries), the male ­offspring of laying hens are immediately killed after birth because they cannot be sold for their meat.

According to Ruedi Zweifel, director of the Aviforum, the competence centre of the Swiss chicken poultry industry: “The optical aspect plays a decisive role (…).

The carcasses of male chickens nowadays do not correspond with ­ consumer expectations. They are not heart-shaped, but rather pointed.” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23 March 2013). The newly hatched male chickens in Switzerland – quite a large number at 2.5 million a year – are usually ­“homogenated”, in other words, they are shredded which is explicitly permitted by the Swiss animal protection ordinance – one of the most stringent in the world.

The ordinance on “chick homogenisation” is just one of many examples of how our legal system f­ acilitates and institutionalises the exploitation, discrimination and extermination of animals. There is a long tradition of employing laws against animals, as well as against human beings. The systematic exclusion of those who are different (often referred to as “othering”), e.g. ­Africans, Jews and aboriginal peoples, is often carried out by ­ verbally, then legally, and finally physically ­excluding them from society, and their designation as animals is a typical component of these strategies. Nazis called the Jews rats, while Europeans and US ­Americans defamed blacks and the Japanese as apes.

The Hutu called the Tutsi cockroaches. Another “animalised” group were ­ homosexuals. Until recently, several US states had laws on the books which forbid sodomy, i.e. sexual relations ­between people of the same sex or with animals, describing them as “crimes

14 against nature” or “unnatural intercourse”. These and similar injuries cause divisions ­between superior groups of people and a different, “animal-like” group to rupture and, in the worst case, ultimately result in the physical destruction of the animal-like.

their normal behavioural characteristics, and the ­freedom from fear and distress. Their structure and terminology strongly echo those of the (human-­related) “four freedoms”, which US President Franklin D. ­Roosevelt articulated in 1941 before entering World War II (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, ­freedom from want, and freedom from fear).

A series of other legal concepts, which have thus far Liberation of animals applied exclusively to humans, could also serve the benefit of animals. These include the institution of through the legal process stewardship, decolonisation (i.e. setting them free) and the responsibility to protect. A current example is the On the other hand, our legal system has the potential­ Anglo-Saxon writ of habeas corpus. This guarantees to combat the exploitation, discrimination and extermi- protection from arrest and imprisonment without just nation of animals. The welfare of animals, their needs cause; in the United States it was used in the legal and possibly their rights, are not only a matter of social ­battle against slavery. American animal rights activists justice, but of global justice. All of the central challeng- in the state of New York are now using this writ in es, which we must address in our dealings with animals, court to substantiate their argument for releasing are of a global nature. It’s about sustainability, climate, chimpanzees from their pens. ­extinction, poverty and poor nutrition – all global The most controversial, but potentially most ­problems. The animal-processing industry (food and ­ effective institution is that of law. For some time, pharmaceuticals) is a global industry. Commercial trade ­animal ethicists have been claiming, as, for example, with animals and animal products is global, as well. A Paola Cavalieri has: “It is time to take the “human” out single country can do very little to improve cage of human rights.” The question whether animals can ­conditions or animal testing on its own, because the and should have rights is of crucial importance, b­ ecause ­respective branch can simply relocate to another ­country its affirmation would overturn the prevailing where standards are less stringent. And when individual anthropocen­ tric justification of animal protection. nations attempt to keep these economically relevant Laws forbidding the abuse of animals (starting with branches in their country by providing them “attractive” English laws dating back to the 18th century) were (i.e. lax) legal regulations, the standards can start ­primarily intended to protect public moral standards, ­spiralling downwards at the expense of animal welfare. avert social brutalisation and thereby prevent violence International laws also influence the options of individ- against humans. This line of thought was classically ual states with regard to animal-related measures. ­expressed by Kant in his “Metaphysics of Morals”. The ­Various free-trade agreements enforced by the World “blunting of sympathy“, as Kant calls it, is indeed Trade Organisation (WTO) restrict the possibility of ­confirmed by more recent criminological research. In a ­levying import bans on goods produced in a manner Swiss study from 2011, self-assessment reports by cruel to animals. For instance, the WTO Arbitration young people showed that cruelty to animals correlated Board recently declared specific aspects of the EU with a higher risk of committing criminal acts (though ­import ban on sealskin products to be unlawful, which this does not prove a causal relationship). forced the EU to amend its regulations accordingly. This An overview of the existing animal protection laws demonstrates that legal regulations aimed at improving since the 1860s reveals that legislators have hardly animal welfare can only be effective if they can be shifted away from their anthropocentric reasoning. It is ­enforced at a global level. quite a different case when it comes to the evolution of laws protecting women and children. Originally, by which I mean until the start of the 20th century, all groups of norms served to protect public moral standFrom human rights ards. Accordingly, animal cruelty was only f­orbidden if it took place in public. The early bilateral agreements to animal rights outlawing trafficking of women and girls (i.e. “white” women and girls) were also implemented to protect The question whether the distinctive traits of morality, though women’s and children’s rights were ­human beings mentioned above are in keeping with yet unheard of. Meanwhile, a paradigm shift has taken ­biological research is an empirical one. But it’s an place, in that these laws no longer serve to protect ­ethical and legal question when we ask whether the public moral standards, but rather the victims for their ­distinctive criteria separating us from animals should be own sake. morally and legally relevant. Jeremy Bentham argued that ­animals’ sensibility to pain (in more modern terms, their capacity of perception and awareness) played an Forces driving ­ethically critical role in their treatment. The famous ­“footnote 1” in the “Introduction to the Principle of legal development Morals and Legislation” of 1781 concludes with the ­appeal: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, can The slaughterhouses of 19th-century Chicago they talk? but, Can they suffer?” However, only few are provide an historic example of the combination of ­aware that the footnote draws an explicit comparison ­ to slaves: “Slaves (…) have been treated by the law upon ­discourse on human rights and animal welfare and the the same footing as in England, for example, the (… ) role of the public and economic sectors. Henry Ford animals are still.” Bentham’s argument, which remains adapted the innovative assembly-line technology used valid today and forms the foundation of utilitarian in the slaughterhouses for his automobile factories, ­ethical standards developed further by Peter Singer in and the Nazis drew inspiration from both to carry out ­ pton Animal Liberation (1975), is based on parallels between industrialised mass murder. In 1905, the novelist U Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” – a belletristically wrapped slaves and animals.

With regard to animal protection laws currently in condemnation of the cruelty to animals and the place, we also encounter numerous analogies to ­dangerous and exploitative working conditions at the respected legal institutions established for human slaughterhouses. The sickening, rotting meat served as ­ benefit. For example, there are the so-called “five a metaphor for capitalism. The public outcry was so ­ ­freedoms” of animal husbandry, which date back to a ­resounding that the US Congress passed two hygiene report by an English animal welfare committee chaired laws within six months after the novel went to print.

by Roger Brambell in the 1960s, and have meanwhile This case demonstrates how legal progress in a become standard worldwide. These five freedoms are ­democratic system can be achieved. Potential voters the freedom from hunger and thirst, from discomfort, were roused to action through artistic means, and from injury, pain and disease, the freedom to express the slaughterhouse lobby itself demanded stricter

r­ egulation in order to save face and improve business.

To Sinclair’s disappointment, however, readers were far more enraged by the dangers of rotting meat than the plight of the proletarian class. Workers’ rights and animal welfare benefited little in this legal development process.

From a legal-sociological standpoint, it is remark­ able to what extent animal protection is a female domain. Activists and researchers are predominantly women. In the present situation, this undermines the interests of animal protection in the same way ­feminised occupations (kindergarten teachers, nurses, etc.) enjoy a lesser degree of social prestige than male-dominated occupations. In fact, in the early 19th century, the struggle for women’s rights and animal protection took place at the same time. They aimed to abolish the suppression and exploitation of women and animals alike. Legal provisions, which have long been amended for being discriminatory to women, were ­frequently justified on the basis of women’s “animal” nature (on account of the negative side effects of ­menstruation and pregnancy which made them moody, driven by instincts, sexually charged, less rational etc.).

The satirical reaction to the manifesto “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, published in 1792 by the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft has meanwhile gained notoriety. An English writer responded by publishing a pamphlet titled “A Vindication of the ­ Rights of Animals” to demonstrate how preposterous the demand for women’s right were. If one started ­giving rights to women, then one might as well give rights to animals! Might this argument be reversible ­today?

Some survivors of the Holocaust have drawn other parallels between injustice to animals and to humans.

In a novel by the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Isaac ­Bashevi Singer, the main character says: “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” Such comparisons are taboo in ­Germany. The NGO “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” (PETA) produced an animal protection poster titled “The Holocaust on Your Plate” – it was banned by the courts in Germany.

Cultural imperialism?

A full EU ban on animal testing for cosmetics ­entered into force in March 2013. In the corresponding press release, the EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy explained that the ban “gives an ­important signal on the value that Europe attaches to animal welfare. The Commission is committed to (…) engage with third countries to follow our European ­approach. This is a great opportunity for Europe to set an example of responsible innovation in cosmetics without any compromise on consumer safety.” There is an undertone of a mission civilisatrice at work here: “We” Europeans will show the rest of the world what it means to be civilised.

Such measures are frequently met with accusations of cultural imperialism. Namely, that animal welfare and the animal rights movement, like the human rights movement before it, represent the latest Western ­crusade against foreign practices, whose protagonists lay claim to universality in order to force purely local preferences onto foreign cultures, and thereby cement their cultural and political dominance over the non-Western world, in particular the southern hemisphere. This accusation is not completely far-fetched or trivial. With regard to human rights, we have yet to provide a response which completely discredits its premise and can permanently satisfy all critics, least of all because new situations keep coming up which can be interpreted as a further manifestation of Europe’s hegemonic ambitions.

An example with regard to animal protection was the ban on selling and butchering dogs as a delicacy in public at the marketplace in San Francisco’s China Town. Is this not a bit hypocritical in light of the fact

15 that billions of pigs, which are just as able to feel and perceive the world as dogs are, are slaughtered for Western consumption, the only difference being that the slaughter is carefully concealed from the public eye? And what would a devout Hindu think if he or she were to look inside a cattle slaughterhouse?

Cultural sensitivity has to, therefore, be taken into account in the further development of universal human rights, as well as animal protection. An animal welfare mainstreaming clause added to the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 addresses this line of thinking, but only with ­regard to “religious customs, cultural traditions and ­regional heritage”. It is not surprising that this ­provision was inserted into the agreement by Spanish diplomats, and that a recent Spanish law legally defined bullfighting as an integral part of Spain’s “cultural heritage”.

Such deference to cultural traditions can, with ­regard to animal rights and human rights, be a massive drag to progress. It is not always easy to define the line between legitimate issues of cultural diversity and ­disingenuous appeals of “culture” by those who wish to safeguard their illegitimate privileges. In this problematic area, we must be aware that cultures do not immutably develop according to a genetically predetermined plan. Rather, morals, customs and legal provisions are made, practiced and applied by people who are capable of learning.

Liberty is not voluntarily bestowed “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” don’t simply happen, and the elite rarely grant rights to the underprivileged of their own free will. Compliance with these principles is rather the result of the disenfranchised and oppressed, who, supported by the intellectual groundwork of philosophers, political theorists and legal scholars, have risen against the establishment and the predominant culture.

(This is naturally where the difference lies with animal rights, which the oppressed would never be able to ­demand on the basis of legal arguments. The same holds for children and most oppressed groups of people who normally have no choice but to rely on professional ­expertise to advance their cause.)

To avoid having to reinvent the wheel, the animal rights discussion ought to adopt and, where necessary, adapt the arguments which have already been employed in the fight for human rights. We should also consider the sociological and economic ancillary conditions, the ­factors of success and the inhibitors of progress in the discourse and practice of human rights. This will allow us to more closely examine the risks, but also the ­opportunities, of animal welfare and the animal rights movement.

“Zoo criticism is entering a new stage,” Christian Geyer wrote in the FAZ on 25 June 2014. We can only hope that animals locked in cages – like the “endangered Female Lip Negroes” in Basel long ago – will someday be swept to the history books as the “zoos of cultural ­shame”.

Anne Peters, born in 1964, is the ­director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative P ­ ublic Law and International Law in ­Heidelberg. In 2012/13 she worked as a f­ ellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. One of her research areas of expertise is the new ­legal domain of “Global Animal Law”.

In VIEW

of ANI MALS Cord Riechelmann

Natural history exhibitions frequently provide an excuse for more or less academic forays into worlds of imagery and curiosities of natural history. However, natural history museums might be better off shifting their focus to real creatures. Could art serve as a catalyst for change in the field of natural history?

When it comes right down to it, seeing – the simple act of seeing – is quite difficult. It’s difficult because s­ eeing must be bound to the visible world if it is to be unbiased. That, which is visible, has always been dictated by opinions, and opinions are basically blind. Seeing is an opinion-demolishing act first and foremost.

Jacques Derrida impressively de­­ scribed this situation in a lecture he gave in 1997 titled “The Animal That Therefore I Am”. The idea, on which his ­excurse was based, came to him when his cat watched him step out of his shower naked. At that moment, Derrida was filled with sudden shame at two different levels. Because cats – like all animals – have no conception of nudity, there could be no direct relationship between the cat’s glance and his shame. The shame was ultimately evoked by our

i­mperialistic anthropocentrism toward animals. A claim, whose significance suddenly withered under the glance of the cat.

At that moment, Derrida understood that no matter how well-meaning our intention is to take the view of the other, it will always be superficial and­ ­ultimately misconstrued. He realised we should not try giving a cat language, which we can somehow translate into something understandable. Instead we should aim to create a space in our minds for the very individual, untranslatable meaning of the cat’s glance.

Derrida takes issues with the typical representations of animals in general.

He levels his criticism toward two forms of description. The first is employed by those who observe real animals and write about them without considering their views and try to somehow weave them into description. The second is preferred by those who are only interested in animals as literary and mythological ­ characters and write one allegory or f­ able after another, without gazing out the window at the ants or foxes in the ­garden.

Both types of writers fail to recognise animals as independent from their own point of view.

This brings us to our current matter in which natural history and its counter-

16 part “art” come into play. Both attempt to represent animals in a way which does them justice.

Ever since the French Revolution, natural history museums have served as centres of natural historic research.

When the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle was founded as a state natural history museum in Paris in 1793 and the Louvre opened the same year as the country’s premiere art museum, it was the first time that nature and art were institutionally separated – a radical ­decision which had far-reaching­ ­implications. It was the beginning of an unprecedented expansion in art-­ his­ torical research and empirical natural-­ scientific study in the 19th ­ century.

Undoubtedly, the increasingly stringent divisions between disciplines played a substantial role in their success. While Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, the founding fathers of modern evolutionary theory, were magnificent stylists, nobody nowadays would expect modern geneticists, stem-cell researchers or neuroscientists to be able to write even a single paragraph of their research papers in stylistically engaging prose.

Any pretence at writing prose is banned in scientific journals today. With regard to contemporary life sciences – the new name for the scientific discipline ­devoted to the study of living creatures – something else has been lost, namely the view for “whole” animals. It is no laughing matter that the natural sciences – succumbing to the urge to describe life processes in ever smaller units, producing specialists for some protein, a synaptic combination or particular genome sequence – are incapable of distinguishing a donkey from a zebra in real life.

Although they may have lost sight of the movements of whole animals in their limitless diversity, it would be a bit unfair to ask specialists to devote their attention to animals themselves in light of advanced scientific progress. Modern observations are essentially based on technical imagination and the discoveries which result from it. Galilei probed the stars with his telescope, Johannes Kepler recalculated planetary tables, and bold seafarers discovered new passages on the high seas. In those times, seeing was anything but easy because it was based on recent technical discoveries which changed the way we viewed the world. Yet it was exactly at that moment when modern technologised visualisation cleared a path to simple seeing, which made everything accessible and attainable to each and every one of us.

The Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam wrote a wonderful essay titled “About the Naturalists” in which he summed up the parallel activity of art and the study of nature in one magnificent sentence: “From Darwin’s journey on the ‘Beagle’ to Claude Monet’s circumnavigation on the ‘Brigitte”, we have experienced a colossal exercise in analytical acuity, the wish to gain greater understanding of the world on the sound foundation of practical activity and personal initiative.”

This analytical acuity, of which Mandelstam speaks, is that simple form of “seeing” mentioned above. And the fact that we have only been able to attain it since Darwin and Monet is the apparent

paradox of modernity, which Mandelstam clearly recognises.

The technologisation of sight enables us to gain sensations for light and air in Monet’s outdoor paintings, as does Darwin’s view in revealing his theoretical intuition. However, in both art and Darwin, this moment of perception comes with certain preconditions. There are legions of scientific-historic texts which indicate that Darwin wouldn’t have been able to categorise all of the plants and animal cadavers he brought back with him from his journey on the Beagle to substantiate his theory without the help of the taxonomists in the natural history department of the British Museum. In a nutshell, one could say that without the fundamental systematising work conducted at natural history museums, we would possess no positive knowledge of animals, or living creatures in general. We can only recognise the specifying and individualising impact of life on the basis of natural historic classification. It was this which enabled us to recognise that superficial similarities must not necessarily have anything to do with inherited genetic relationships, and vice versa, that related species can look very different. Such findings offer the best argument against those who claim natural historic collections teach us little about animals because the animals which they investigate and exhibit are already dead. Indeed, people can have an endless number of opinions watching the encounters between magpies and grey-black hooded crows in Berlin’s parks, but the only relevant opinions will come from those who know that they are both related and members of the crow family. It is this aspect of positive knowledge about birds which natural history museums can represent and why we need them perhaps now more than ever.

Of course, this knowledge remains abstract nonetheless. Animals which are related to the same genus or family seldom live in the same biotope. The result has been nothing less than the failure to observe animals on the basis of their systematic position – a disconnect which zoos had long struggled to overcome until the 1970s. It was then that zoos began presenting animals as they co-existed in their natural environments. Zoos owe their continuing popularity to this shift in exhibition practice, which – provided the animals in question don’t devour each other – help make their lives in captivity easier.

Natural history museums began addressing this challenge relatively early – at the end of the 19th century. They employed the practice of using dioramas, the main advantage of which was that they could exhibit predator and prey side by side because they were already stuffed.

Reconciling abstract systematic research and the demand for exhibition scenarios, which are as authentically lifelike and natural as possible, is one of the crucial tasks facing natural history museums. This difficult balancing act has also found its way into the life sciences – though in a slightly altered form. In life science departments at many universities, the classification of animals and plants as the fundamental science of

Natural History Museums Natural history museums have always been places where artists were intensively involved in the study of nature. Alongside travelling researchers, artists have contributed to recording and depicting the history of life on Earth. In line with this tradition, the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin have embarked on a joint model project which invites international artists to develop interventions from 2014 to 2018 in one of the most renowned natural history museums in Europe. The project will feature ten artistic interventions in the areas of sound art/audio a­ rt, fine art and literature, in which an experimental space for ­interactions between art, museum practice and natural research will be defined. The results of the artistic works will be applicable to other museums and shall be integrated into a permanent exhibition at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. The Federal Cultural Foundation has allocated a total of 785,000 euros to fund this model project. The first project will be presented in spring 2015.

natural history museums is being phased out. Any university-level instruction or research in the field – if conducted at all in the world of bachelor’s degrees – is marginal at best. Their standing in the academic and research sector is negligible. And consequently, in some fields of biology – e.g. the study of insects and some plants – almost 80 percent of those involved in reclassifying species are amateurs and hobby biologists. In more drastic terms, we could say that the work of classifying biodiversity has migrated from the universities into natural history museums and the homes of hobby biologists.

It was very fitting, therefore, when employees of the Berlin Natural History Museum meeting with the curators of the project “Art / Nature” described their institute as a “biodiversity mill”.

The term not only refers to the fact that they produce and present species ­diversity, or “biodiversity” as it’s called nowadays, but also highlights its pre­ industrial character which distinguishes it from overly industrialised genetic and neurological research facilities. Which makes the art of the natural history ­museum possibly one of the most difficult interventions of all - interventions which do not assess, judge or evaluate, but rather – in ideal cases – dare to offer a comprehensive view beyond scientific requirements, and thus imagine the responses of animals.

Unfortunately, such projects are still very much the exception. In Gregory Bateson’s book “Mind and Nature” published in 1979, he points out the ­ consequences of a relaxed relationship between nature and art. He notes: ­“Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little “art” so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen.”

17 There is little to add to this diagnosis, except for the fact that the situation has worsened since then, and that ­natural history exhibitions today are increasingly resembling their academically advanced variants which use natural history as a mere excuse to offer more or less scholarly excursions into the imagery and curiosities of natural history, ­instead of providing an opportunity to investigate real creatures. Of course, this is not especially easy in a world in which animals are being pushed out and even vanishing from their natural environments because of human encroachment. A trend, which in some cities at least, is producing the opposite effect – the mass migration of non-native organisms, including plants, insects and more remarkable animals like foxes and wild boars. I wouldn’t go so far as to venture that cities are the new “life rafts” of biodiversity, but this development does offer sufficient opportunities to experience, as Bateson calls it, the “aesthetics of being alive” and our “animal and ecological nature”. If and when we encounter wild animals in the city, it will normally be fleeting moments and will have little to do with the romanticists’ portrayals of nature. The old distinction between nature and culture simply makes no sense in which cities double as natural habitats. And we should do away with such distinctions in our natural history museums. This could be an opportunity to consider the view of animals as a true response, and not simply as a reaction to some kind of human action. In this respect, art and natural history can merge to form a gigantic field, also because the industrialised Life Sciences have failed to cultivate it.

Both have very good prospects, as natural historians have always had a welltrained view for the images of nature, and artists have a good eye for social contrasts. The only requirement in this case would be, as Derrida would wholeheartedly agree, not to attribute certain traits to animals or even try to translate their expressions, but keep them out of the ideology of art and natural history altogether – which Adorno, by the way, also advocated. Strangely enough, the present moment appears to welcome such change; never before has the time for re-orientation of natural history museums been more promising.

Cord Riechelmann (*1960), author and journalist, studied Biology and Philosophy at the FU Berlin. He worked there as a guest lecturer, specialising in the social behaviour of primates and the “History of Biological Research”.

His main interests centre on the living conditions of nature in urban habitats.

He recently wrote the book “Krähen.

Ein Porträt” (Crows, A Portrait), published by Matthes und Seitz Berlin in 2013. Cord Riechelmann is a member of the curatorial team of the model project “Nature/Art” funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.

18

Incu bators or Crypts An Act of Liberation: New Forms of Representing Nature in Museums

19 The artist Mark Dion descends to the depths of museum collections, returns with hidden treasures and, looking into the past, sets his sights on the future. He spoke with Christine Heidemann about the “order of things”, amazing wonders and the possibility of ­presenting and understanding nature through artistic means.

Christine Heidemann CH: As an artist you have been dealing a lot with nature, or, to be more precise, with our idea of nature. Could you describe a little bit how it turned out that this became a main focus of your work?

Mark Dion MD: Since childhood nature has been a primary focus of my life; it was my first class­ room and playground. Yet it also has been the seed for my melancholy since even in those early encounters were experienced very much as loss. As a kid, I saw orchards plowed under for houses, farmland cleared for strip malls, and forests and fields disappear. So my wonder at nature's complexity has always been tempered by a sense of urgency at its disappearance. My second love ­ as a child was in museums.

I always have seen the value in thinking about nature through museums, but also have been able to track some of the problems embedded in museums as factories of ideas and ideology.

I still engage with natural places often, through hiking, expeditions, birding and other activities. My experience of degradation and ­ ruin is very real. So many sites I visited years before are devastated by the impact of civilization. There are places I can no longer visit since the sadness if seeing them so destroyed is simply overwhelming.

CH: You are currently involved in a major project in Dresden, working with the collections at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Dresden State Art Collections. As you say, it´s not the first time that an institution has asked you to take a look at their collec­ tions. Since the mid 1990s

you did several of those projects where you researched the ­ collections of institu­ tions for example, university museums and presented your ­ findings new arrangements.

Since your student days in New York in the 1980s you have been interested in investi­ gating the represen­ tations of knowledge that our society produces. ‘The order of things’ as Foucault describes it in “Les mots et les choses” is ­ ­ something you are exploring with your work.

Could you describe the fields of ­ research for your Dresden project a bit more in detail?

MD: The exhibition will be shown at three venues simultaneously – at the Octagon, the Green Vault and the Albertinum.

Considering that the Octagon spaces consists also of two pentagon rooms, two loggias and the former library space as well as the central Octagon, one can imagine how ­ ambitious the scope of the entire endeavor is. It’s just as impossible for one person to carry out such a complex project as it would be for a director to make a film by himself. We are a great team - Dietmar Rübel, Petra ­Lange-Berndt, Isabelle Lindermann and I – we have ­ a similar sense of humour, along with everything else that belongs to it, for aesthetics, politics and ­ meticulousness.

The three sites call for very different strategies of intervention. For the Green ­ Vault we have worked closely with the director and curator for the placement of five or six sculptural works to be discretely integrated into the display of the historic treasure art. These new sculptures reflect on the historical concept of wonder in the face of new rarities from freshly discovered worlds, but now focus on rarity ­ as an aspect of ­ extinction.

Corals, bird eggs, shells, horns and other precious natural objects were marvelous to European eyes when first discovered and represented a new world of infinite dimension. Now these same ­ elements are melancholy emblems of loss and ecological ­ devastation. The treasure art from the Green Vault and my sculptures are bookends, with the history of the modern world in between.

In a related investigation, our project for the Albertinum is also a survey of how we represent and understand the

natural world through art. We will occupy one of the museum's galleries with a "Salon of Wild Beasts" culled from the painting and sculpture collection. This collection ­ will function as an investi­ gation into the shifting meaning of the notions of wild and animal. Through a diverse collection of beautiful and masterful re­ ­ presentations of wild beasts, viewers will be able to understand animal bodies ­ as sites of projection for ­ideologies, fantasies, aspirations and desires. ­ Certainly Petra and I have long been interested in the animal genera in art and in how artists speak through nonhuman subjects.

The last and most complex aspect of the project relates most directly to the 250th anniversary of the Dresden Art Academy, an institution with a fraught and turbulent history. We are not, however, writing a book on this history or even presenting a ­ straightforward exhibition on ­ the topic. Rather we are looking at the material culture produced by such an ­ institution and using that to interrogate what art schools collect and why. Needless to say, with such a long history complicated by periods of repression and destruction not all the pieces of the puzzle are intact. Never­ theless we wish to reflect on a number of aspects of what it means to teach and learn art making. Things like fundamental skill training ­ and anatomy will be one focus, the artifacts and ­ detritus of now archaic pedagogical methods and tools ­ will be featured, and we will attempt to be inclusive, speaking also of student life, and less typical but important fields of study like theater design and conser­ vation will also be featured.

In the end, we are left to work with what actually exists and there are great gaps in the story. However, what exists is quite remarkab­ le and little of it has been seen by the public.

CH: Indeed, this sounds like a very complex project! It would be interesting to have a closer look at some of the aspects you mentioned. I think the concept of ‘wonder’ is something very interes­ ting. The way you used it relates back to the heyday of curiosity cabinets and the ‘Wunderkammer’ that started in the 16th century. Scientists

and other explorers brought countless diverse specimens from their travels. Natural objects and works of art were shown next to each other.

Widely used categories for systematizing were ‘Naturalia’, ‘Artificilia’ and ‘Scientifica’.

One could say that the early cabinets of curiosities are the origin of the museums we know today.

Can you describe what it is that is especially fascinating for you when it comes to the ‘Wunderkammer’? And why do think it is a concept that can be used in a fruitful way when looking at pressing questions of our times?

MD: Heterodoxy. We live in an age of extreme specialization with rather rigid borders between disciplines and very established taxonomies.

Wunder­ kammern with their seemingly erratic organiza­ tional styles, challenge the familiar order established in the Enlightenment.

Distinctions between nature and artifice, magic and science, display and theater, ­ the studio and the laboratory all blur in the Wunderkammer tradition. As you say, one could think of the cabinets of curiosity as the origins of today's museums, but one could also think of them as the end point for a kind of fetishistic and magical thinking about things in the European tradition. While they may be the incubators of science, they may also be the crypts of the hermetic tradition.

They are perhaps interesting today largely because rational systems of display have been shown to be so thoroughly drenched in ideology and exhausted of ­ inspiration and innovation.

I am trying to move forward by looking back. However there is a danger here as well, which is that some look to the Wunderkammer as a style or aesthetic in a very uncritical way. I like to think my approach to pre-­ Enlightenment collections is more than merely "home ­decoration".

CH: Your fascination with objects and the material culture of our society is very obvious in most of your works that are bursting with well selected things. I think one ­ could say that you are trying to tell stories and also focus on certain aspects of our cultural history through objects. In some of your

20 earlier projects you have also been working with living animals and plants but in many of your works that deal with collections they have already become objects. They have been collected, killed and preserved for museums of natural history, other scientific institutions or private collections. Also, you are very interested in the depictions of animals through history – in the context of science as well as in the arts. It would be nice to hear a bit more about your ideas for the “Salon of Wild Beasts” that you are planning for the Albertinum. What is it that makes our relation­ ship to animals especially interesting when it comes to looking at our relationship to nature in general?

MD: At the core of my most significant body of work is an attempt to understand how Western societies evolved to have a suicidal relationship to the planet. Having inter­ rogated the culture of nature so long, I feel that one of the threads worth pulling on, is the notion of the wild.

In representations of wild animal bodies are encoded our assumptions, projections, desires and fears around nature itself. We can uncover dominant themes, like the garden before the fall, or patriarchy and heroism achieved through dominating powerful nature through hunting, capture and display. ­ These themes of nature as pure and innocent or nature as demonic, fierce and threa­ tening, have been remarkably persistent. The represen­ tations of animal bodies over several centuries map shifting attitudes and ideas, ­ which have concrete influence on how real landscapes are

constructed or destroyed. The approach is an archaeology of ideas assembled of pictures and sculpture.

CH: You have worked a lot on the theme of hunting in recent years. What is it that makes the relationship between hunters and animals so fasci­ nating to you?

MD: The fulcrum of my art is the culture of nature and while I am a person with great respect and interest in science, I see the definition of nature being produced by many groups in a society. In other words, science does not have a monopoly on defining nature. ­ Hunting is one of those places ­ where an intense conversation happens about the status of ­ animals and the natural world.

I am interested in hunting since it is a practice which requires a significant degree of respect and understanding of animals and their homes.

Hunters are often extremely knowledgeable about animals and clearly invested in protecting wild places, ­ yet the expression of their passion results in death. If ­ one is attempting to under­ stand how our society has developed such ­ contradictory and ­destructive relation­ships to the natural world, I think hunting is just as important a site as the laboratory.

CH: Now I would like to ask some more general questions about your work with collections.

What do you think is the main interest of the institutions who invite you to look at their collections? And, to be more specific, what might be the main interest of the HfbK (Dresden Academy of Fine Arts)?

MD: There are a number of reasons why an organization ­

Mark Dion. The Academy of Things In commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Dresden Academy of the Fine Arts (HfBK), the internationally renowned American artist Mark Dion has been invited to explore the holdings of the Academy's collections and present selected works at new sites in Dresden. Together with Dietmar ­Rübel, professor of Art History at the HfBK, Dion is organising an ­exemplary laboratory situation with two ­international symposiums. The artefacts will serve as the basis for initiating d­ialogue between artists,­ zoologists, conservators, medical experts, ­re­searchers, and art and science historians.

Curators: Dietmar Rübel, Petra ­Lange-Berndt Artist: Mark Dion ­ In cooperation with Hartwig Fischer, Matthias Flügge, Susanne Greinke, Isabelle Lindermann, Ivo Mohrmann, Astrid Nielsen, Dirk Syndram, Mathias Wagner Dresden: Octagon, Green Vault, Albertinum 24 Oct. 2014 – 25 Jan. 2015 ↗ www.hfbk-dresden.de

might invite an artist to use the collections to reflect on its story. It is helpful to have an author, particularly when the "official story" of ­ a place is complicated, politi­ cally sensitive, or contested.

This way there is always someone other then the institution, who can take the ­ heat if things turn out controversial. Sometimes the ­ institution would like to speak more frankly about itself but does not have the courage. Inviting an artist who has some experience but also has a position and established method is ­ certainly a way to be sure ­ something gets done and ­ someone can take the blame for ­ it other then the institution.

I think the HfbK's desire to work with Dietmar Rübel, Petra Lange-Berndt and me has to do with the unorthodoxy in our approach, which is somewhat archeological in method. Also given the particular history of the Academy it is clear that this must be a commemora­ tion rather then a celebration of the 250-year history.

We are known for having a critical approach, but also ­ for being enthusiasts and true lovers of material cultural.

We share a complex methodology which is broad and anti hierarchical, which emphasizes ­ the importance of things, yet maintains a critical sense of social history. We start from the objects, the collections, first. With this ­ exhibition viewers will not get a ­ conventional display of ­institutional history.

CH: And do you think your approach and main interest ­ matches those of the host institutions? Or is there sometimes a potential for misunderstandings or even conflicts?

MD: Let's hope there is a good deal of conflict. I don't make exhibitions to make friends and create a comfortable space for affirmation. I do not think my interests precisely match the institu­ ­ tion's, but the institution is not really one monolithic thing. It is a battleground of ideas behind closed doors. So there is certainly a ­ powerful voice in the institu­ tion which is somewhat sympathetic to my approach. ­ There is a great deal of sensitivity about the institu­ tion's past. The worst way to deal with this, in my opinion, is to ignore it.

One could never make an exhi­ bition with artworks which

could tell a ­ consistent his­ tory of the Academy because there are too many holes. The amazing work which was made there in the 1920's was dest­ royed by the Nazi aesthetic vanguard, who took over the academy. The Nazi art itself was ­ destroyed later by the post war powers and there is not much straight-up Russi­ an-led socialist realist art which has survived to today.

These are some pretty big material gaps in the story.

However, there is a massive amount of student art, some of which is quite ideological GDR ­ material. This we cer­ tainly will display, despite the fact that some people will be upset.

CH: How would you describe the kind of critique that works like your Dresden project?

When you studied in New York in the 1980s ­ ‘institutional critique’ was quite an issue in the art world. At that time artists like Hans Haacke, Lothar Baumgarten, ­ Martha Rosler and Marcel Brodthaers had already developed some very critical ­ artworks, questioning the role of museums as instruments of power. But also artists of your own generation like yourself, Christian Philipp Mueller or Andrea Fraser ­ (to name a few) were investi­ gating the structures of institutions using art. In this context I think it is very enlightening to also look closely at the role of the artist doing such work.

How would you describe your own role? And would you ­ say your under­ standing of your own role has changed since the 1980s?

MD: Perhaps one aspect of my approach which differs slightly from that of my friends and mentors which you mention above (who I have both respect and affection for) is that I am deeply invested in material culture, in stuff. The art works and artifacts which my collabora­ tors and I have selected for this project are given a certain amount of room to speak for themselves.

They have great integrity, beauty and physicality and are not ­ displayed as mere illus­ trations. At the same time we combine pictures, sculptures, and artifacts to make an argument. I think if there is the expectation that this work will be some kind of illuminating investigative exposé of the Academy, viewers will be sadly disappointed.

21 That really is not my job, to point out the institutions contradictions and hypocrisy.

However I do want to examine how the academy does its job, what it promotes, what it ­ conceals, what are its didactic tools and strategies, ­ how and why the values it subscribes to change. I want to do that through exhibiting the culture that is produced there, which is far from homogenous.

I think my role is something like a troubleshooter, a fresh pair of eyes which can be applied to a situation too familiar to those so close.

I come from the outside and attempt to get the broadest possible sense of the place.

The established hierarchies, taboos and conventions I remain ignorant of. Of course I do not arrive naked, I have my own agendas and thematics, I carry my luggage of ­ concerns and interests, which shape my investigation. Primarily I do have some investment and identification with the institution. I only work with ­ institutions with which I share goals. Museums, schools, zoos, parks, aqua­ riums ­ places where one gains knowledge through encounters with people, animals and things, are the places I find rich in positive transfor­ mational potential. My goal is not to blow them up, but to help make them better.

Mark Dion (*1961) lives in New York and Pennsylvania. He has been exploring our relationship to nature and its representations in science and art since the 1980s. On the basis of extensive r­ esearch, Mark Dion develops materially opulent installations which f­ requently contain references to c ­ ircumstances on location.

His works have been exhibited around the world, including the Tate Britain (2000), the MoMA, New York (2004), the Musée Océanographique, Monaco (2011), at the Sydney Biennale (2008) and the most recent documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012.

Christine Heidemann (*1974) is an art scholar and curator in Berlin.

She received her doctorate in Art History in 2005 with a dissertation on “Dilettantism as method. Mark Dion’s research on the phenomenology of the natural sciences”. She has developed numerous exhibition projects as a curator, including “The city of tomorrow: contributions to the ­archaeological study of the Berlin Hansaviertel”, Academy of the Arts, Berlin 2007; “BELVEDERE. Why is landscape beautiful?“, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen 2011/12, and “David Bowie”(section on “Bowie and Berlin”), Martin ­Gropius Bau, Berlin 2014. In 2009, she founded the art gallery RECEPTION in Berlin, www.reception-berlin.de.

Learning to Walk, Beginning to Fly

John Burnside “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for saunter­ ing; which word is beautifully derived “from idle ­people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre” - to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer”, a saunterer - a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they ­pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere … For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.”

I quote this passage at length because, as is so often the case, Thoreau has anticipated everything I would suggest about the art of walking, an art that, in the age of motorised transport, we have all but lost. Like so many of the essential arts, (being alone, the skilful reading of poetry, the dream of flight) walking the sainte terre is now confined to a handful of eccentric, at best unre­marked, at worst despised souls, who d ­ eliberately ­choose to find holy such terrain as they stumble into.

These saunterers are not sightseers: they do not ­prepare for their wanderings with maps downloaded from Google; instead, they go at random, sans terre, peaceful ­crusaders who seek to undo the damage done by the capitalist-­consumer infidel, for whom no parcel of land is holy, (which is to say, valued for itself), even though every single plot, no matter how modest, has both “current market value” and “development ­potential”. To the i­nfidel, all land is empty until it has been assessed, s­urveyed and mortgaged according to his commercial and political ambitions - and by empty,

here, I mean quite literally deserted, unpeopled and so worthless. That impression of releasing potential is ­deliberately nurtured (to do ill efficiently, one must convince oneself one is doing good) but it is also a ­consequence of a ­culture that has forgotten how to walk. From the automobile, one sees almost nothing of the flora and fauna, and very little of the local weather; most important of all, one derives no sense of that land’s innate mystery, its quality of (altogether secular) holiness. The outcome of this is a complete disregard for mystery, and a selective blindness to the damage one is about to inflict. No ­wonder, then, that so much of our land is unholy, almost lacking in mystery and devoid of all but a few ­predictable species. To know the land, one must walk it, as a saunter­er, not as a speculator. To learn how to walk: this is the primal imperative for our time. No guidebook, no ­ rucksack full of expensive equipment, just a sturdy pair of boots and a compass.

This is not sport, nor is it a quest for self-realisation; this is about seeing and listening to the earth itself and, in all humility, learning how to set it foremost in our scale of values, and eventually coming to re-sanctify, to un-systematise, to re-scale and re-historicise our place in the neverending process of earthly creation.

To speak of (re) sanctification is always a risk, in a society that has so cynically used religion as a cover for its rapacity; might we agree, however, that any remarks made here about sanctification are taken as non-­ religious, in the usual sense: that, indeed, they are taken as animist, an-archic and secular. To rediscover the sacred in the land is not to set up an altar here, a midden there, nor is it to set aside one place as worthy (Site of Special Scientific Interest, UNESCO World Heritage Centre), while designating others as valueless.

On the contrary, a resanctified earth would be one in which each event and phenomenon was valued after its own nature; which means, of course, that we must apprehend that nature by way of a thoroughgoing ­

22 s­ cientia that is both rigorous and generous enough to see each thing as a whole, (in contrast to most contemporary, i.e. commercialised, ‘science’). That scientia would not only include a sense of wonder, it would ­depend upon it. When Rachel Carson remarked: “It is not half so important to know as to feel”, she was making an unfashionable but important point. We ­ know, now, how to dissect, and we know how to draw graphs, but neither can be fully workable unless we ­apprehend - until we feel - the complex nature of the events and phenomena we are investigating. Yet, ­instead of ­pursuing this goal, commercial science has sought to diminish, reduce, objectify or just plain ­ignore such matters, resulting in a glut of reductive, or suspiciously incomplete systems-models of everything from the markets to ‘global warming’, (and to be sure, these models are infinitely flexible, depending on ­political or commercial whim).

Of course, given Carson’s remark, Thoreau’s infidel would have a good deal to say about re-sanctification, as would his modern contemporaries, the developers, lords of agribiz and commercial landowners. Their PR-mediated remarks would vary in wit and tone,­ no doubt, but would mostly come down to one ­accusation, viz: that the saunterers among us roman­ ticise, or worse, sentimentalise Nature. A serious charge; yet it seems to me that the very opposite is true. What the saunterer sees in ‘Nature’ (giver of life and death in equal ­measure) is a grave and sometimes frightening necessity, a “justa fatalidad” that, in Jorge Guillen’s gorgeous line, “[v] a a imponerme su ley, no su accidente”. The developer, on the other hand, acts as though he, or at least his p ­ ersonal imperatives, were immortal.

Indeed, with terms like ‘lifetime a­chievement’ and ‘lasting contribution’, it is the ­developer who sentimentalises humanity, which is to say, himself. In the course of history, our regard for ‘nature’ has never been very deep or long-lived, while our ­capacity for sentimentalising ourselves, even as we have cheerfully decimated so many of our fellows, has never dimmed. (Indeed, it is our very s­ ­entimentalisation of our own tribes or clans that has allowed us to be so ­brutal ­towards other (unlike) h ­ umans, just as it is our senti­mental­isation of the ­human endeavour that has permitted us to think of ourselves as masters of ­ creation.) However, to re-­ sanctify our relationship with the earth would demand an end to all forms of s­entimentality, which cannot ­prosper among those who, of necessity, have come to enjoy the commonality of creaturely life.

As to the work that needs to be done in order to un-systematise and re-scale our view of ‘Nature’, little more needs to be said. The stark truth is that we have allowed the developers to destroy too much and, in an ideal world, we would have begun to limit and correct their moneygrubbing schemes long ago. In an ideal world, planning departments and funding bodies would be populated with saunterers, whose sole duty would be to scrutinise all proposed developments during long, attentive walks, (and all such walks are, of ­necessity, very long indeed; sometimes a lifetime is only just enough to find holy ground). Naturally, to hope for such an ideal world, given present political conditions, is naïve. Individually, however, we can do many things, from becoming saunterers ourselves, to exercising a true citizen’s vigilance (and scepticism) about any ­supposed ‘developments’ proposed for the land, our waters, or our civic institutions. As Thoreau’s friend, R.W. Emerson said, “Every actual state is ­corrupt”, and it is the duty of the citizen, no doubt, to limit that c­ orruption though existing political m ­ ethods; yet we can go further than that, by changing the ­politics ­(in favour of direct representation and, so, genuine ­democracy) and by refusing as much of the crap that the consumerist infrastructure pawns off on us, (start with fluoride in toothpaste, say, or ‘wind farms’ on ­remote, bird-sacred Scottish peatlands). As resistance grows, it becomes apparent that the real consolation for the loss of pseudo-burgers, Swatches and patio heaters is that the saunterer’s life makes such products

so obviously superfluous: there is so much going on out there that it eventually becomes clear that missing ­tonight’s repeat of The Good Wife is really neither here nor there.

Finally, word limit permitting, a note on re-­ historicisation. The papers are full of all kinds of critics these days. In many ways this is a good thing – but I have to say that, when I come to a review that critiques a book for being “too bleak”, or “too dark” I ­immediately turn the page. Why is this? Don’t I want to be warned off the pessimistic and unrelentingly dark works that ­occasionally slip through ye merrie worlde of modern publishing, so I can find the truly good reads, those children’s books for grown-ups and ­painfully deliberate comedies, that our marketeers have decided are, if not life-changing, then at least harmless fun?

Well, no. The saunterer’s life is full of events and phenomena that inspire happiness, optimism, even joy; enough, indeed, that the commercial simulation of such things is immediately suspect. The great comic writers can make her guffaw with the best, the mo­ mentum in a story or song that re-inhabits the ­wonder, or hope or plain vertigo of creaturely life will move him deeply, but where we are now is a place and a time for thinking about what it is to be creaturely, and g­ rieving for the injustices we have perpetrated upon one a­ nother and upon our Umwelt.

Early on, it may be that the practice of walking b­ egins, as many pilgrimages do, in an attempt to cure a grief - a specific loss or a general sense of outrage at the damage one has witnessed - but like all pilgrimages, it can only end (as opposed to being abandoned or ­suspended) in affirmation. A moving expression of this comes in Mark Kozelek’s extraordinary 2013 song, ‘Somehow the Wonder of Life Prevails’ where, after a catalogue of personal losses, both minor and grievous, the narrator says: Every day for miles I walk Along the Monterey Pines, and the Marina to Aquatic Park And I look at the Marin Headlands, and Tiburon, and Sausalito and Angel Island from the end of the fishing pier And oh, I couldn't ask for more My eyes couldn't ever want for more We can look at the healing power of that litany of names, and we can go on to summarise this by saying that to walk is in itself a way of healing - but not only of healing the self. When we learn to walk, we learn to ­participate in an overall process by which the world, or rather our relationship with the world, begins to­ be healed, if for no other reason than that walking makes us properly aware of, properly attentive to, the breath.

And this is the key (and the point where the word limit says I must end): this remembering of how the Old Testament tells us that the entire community of life, man and beast, is all one breath (Ecclesiastes).

Add to this that any meditator knows that an entire lifetime consists of a single continuous play of in- and ­­­­­out- breaths that, when we give it our proper attention, blurs the artificial line between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

Yet it is the act of walking that has traditionally alerted poets, (I use the word in its broadest terms) to the funda­mental importance of the breath, both to the act of imaginative making (poiesis) and of attentive being as such. And at this point (let me be fanciful for a ­moment) the walker has begun to learn how to fly.

Not literally, perhaps, but metaphorically. It is only a ­beginning, but what a beginning it is. To walk, t­o breath, to ­imagine, to fly. This is what we, the creatures, ­do. O ­ ur path out of grief, and our one salvation, is to do it well.

John Burnside (*1955) is an internation­ ally acclaimed Scottish writer, best known ­in Germany for his novels “The Devil’s ­Footprints” (2008), “Glister” (2009) and “A Summer of Drowning (2012), all published by Knaus in Munich. In his literary, essayistic and ­journal­istic works, Burnside frequently examines what it means for humans to live in harmony with nature. The works of John Burnside are currently the focus of the International ­Writers’ Days, regularly hosted by the Lite­ ratur­­büro Ostwestfalen-Lippe and ­organised by artistic director Brigitte Labs-­Ehlert, an event which is now far more than an insider’s tip among literature enthusiasts. The title of this year’s conference is “The Song of the Earth”.

You can find more information about the project on p. 35.

23 The American poet Allison Funk teaches English and Cre­ ative Writing at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She has p ­ ublished several volumes of poetry, most recently “The Tumbling Box” (2009), in which the poem “Virgin and Child with a Dragonfly” (p. 29) first appeared.

“Wonder Rooms” is a new and previously unpublished poem. ­Allison Funk has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Samuel French Morse Prize and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Allison Funk has been ­invited to participate in the project “The Song of the Earth” by the Literaturbüro Ostwestfalen-­ Lippe (see p. 35).

Allison Funk

Wonder Rooms Though ordinary in their own habitats, introduced to one another, Alligator to polar bear, Ostrich and starfish, they became a bestiary like none other on earth.

A country found nowhere On maps. The tusk of a narwhal, a dodo bird, mermaid’s hand.

In a wonder room, More dream than museum, collectors could travel To their own Interior.

Room within rooms, within. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Family, Genus, Species.

And so I gathered them along a roadway in France. Cernuella, Virgata Clinging to a blade of grass Or in clusters sometimes, small versions of the grapes ready for picking, Though not the Syrah’s blue-rouge.

Pearly grey instead, these slightly flattened globes. Their orbits Inscribed upon them.

So what if they’re only limaçons? Common vineyard snails.

My room Is becoming the field they came from: a Milky Way Studded with them.

24

25

26

When the Music Mimicks Nature Composers and musicians have attempted to express nature through music since the Baroque period. To what extent can music instil life in the acoustic realms of nature? In the following, musicologist Bernhard Schrammek speaks with chamber musician Jeremias Schwarzer and concert ­designer Folkert Uhde about worlds of harmony, musical petting zoos and the wild creativity of nature.

Bernhard Schrammek BS Mr. Schwarzer, Mr. Uhde, the notion of a harmonious world order is quite ancient.

The Pythagoreans developed the model of the Harmony of the Spheres, on which the order of the heavenly bodies was based, construed as a harmony inaudible to the human ear. In the early sixth century, the scholar Boethius described the concept as “musica mundana” and also coined the term “musica humana” to describe the musical harmony in the human soul and body. The latter played a constitutive role during all of the Middle Ages and early modern times. It holds that nature – without any human interference – is based on harmonious-musical order. Is there any way we can still work with this musical term nowadays?

Folkert Uhde FU That is very far from how we view the world today, though I have always found the thought extremely interesting, especially in how musica mundana and musica humana relate to one another. I think the reason we find the concept of musica mundana so difficult to understand is because people hardly ever listen consciously nowadays. Of course, we constantly hear things via every conceivable form of media, but it’s a very passive process, because we block out the one thing that distinguishes listening from hearing. Most people aren’t even aware of what a sensational organ they possess:

an acoustic radar which is constantly at work around the clock. The ear is the one human organ which has contributed most to ensuring human progress because it ­protects us the most from danger. Yet we no longer realise this due to the constant acoustic bombardment coming through earplugs.

Jeremias Schwarzer JS The basic principles of awareness are ancient human traits which are integrally linked with nature. We are all clearly part of nature; we act and react within the natural world. But we’ve forgotten that. It started a long time ago when Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages began viewing humans as detached from nature and evaluating them “objectively”. As nature became increasingly regarded as a “mechanism”, a notion took hold which consequently divided humans and nature. Newton ­reaffirmed this pattern of thought which runs through European intellectual history and which still strongly influences our views today: We are here, nature is there. And this separation from nature is ultimately the cause of most of our global problems. What would happen if we no longer viewed nature as a gigantic storehouse of raw materials, but instead viewed ourselves as part of nature? Our project can perhaps contribute just a little bit to increasing awareness, and so doing, reaffirm the close bond of humans to nature.

27 BS In almost every epoch and culture, we find examples of artists imitating nature ­through music. Composers have always attempted to express more or less authentic sounds of nature and natural phenomena with the musical means of their times, whereby animal sounds were extremely popular. By the 16th century, if not earlier, “imitatio naturae” became an established practice in the musical field.

Renaissance organs had a “bird call” register, Johann Caspar von Kerll produced a charming “Cuckoo Capriccio” for the cembalo, while Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber presented an entire petting zoo in his “Sonata r­ epresentative”. But also in the Baroque and Classical periods, we find a lot of “tonal painting”, such as Vivaldi’s “Tempesta di Mare” or Beethoven’s ­“Pastoral ­Symphony”. The 19th century opened an entirely new chapter with symphonic poems, but one can also hear thunder and sounds of nature in Wagner’s operas and Mahler’s symphonies. And composers have continued imitating nature in their works during the 20th and 21st century – perhaps the most prominent example is Olivier Messiaen, who ­reproduced birdcalls in many of his works.

In view of this large historic perspective, we have to wonder what exactly composers find so appealing in imitations of nature.

FU

The first thing is that composers of every era have clearly been interested in looking back at the archaic beginnings of all music, which originated from the imitation of natural sounds. One theory on how music developed states that humans initially mimicked what they heard. We still possess this “primitive reflex”, obviously now enriched and influenced by the entire spectrum of musical traditions and styles.

BS

JS

On the other hand, birds in some areas learn to mimic the sounds of the civilised world. I’ve heard of a certain kind of starling in America which has incorporated a cell phone melody into its song.

BS

Could we interpret the musicians’ tendency to imitate nature as an attempt to establish some order in the otherwise disorderly world of nature? Antonio Vivaldi, for example, was able to imitate nature – be it the song of a goldfinch or a storm at sea – in his own designed and standardised system of a three-movement concerto.

FU

But there are many different degrees in which composers can lend space and order to nature in their work.

JS

That’s right, and I’d even go so far as to claim that a composer’s general attitude ­toward nature directly corresponds to that portrayed in the music. In my opinion, there are two fundamentally different approaches one can take. The first follows the motto: “Subdue and dominate the earth!” which is propagated by the ­demystified, industrialised world. The second is a much less active, rather ­attentive reference still cultivated by some indigenous cultures today, namely “You are guardians of the planet, you are responsible for the earth because you are a part of it!”

Both attitudes naturally influence the ­ way nature is portrayed in music. Looking at compositions from various eras, one can clearly recognise how human beings ­– ­either the composer personally or the prevailing intellectual current in which he lived – wanted to see themselves relative to nature. For example, Joseph Haydn’s ­ “The Creation” presents a faithful representation of nature in the sense of the ­Enlightenment which raised the human being to the pinnacle of God’s creation.

The works of the romanticists, however, frequently emphasised the human being’s intimate relationship with nature. And then there are the heroic constructions like the “Alpine Symphony” by Richard Strauss, which superimposed a powerful “ego” onto nature and made it easy to instrumentalise for human self-aggrandisement.

BS

And how close was Vivaldi’s relationship to nature?

JS

I believe Vivaldi’s portrayals viewed the human as a participant of nature. After all, in

Is it even possible to produce an exact replica of nature in music?

JS I went to a lecture once in which the bird imitations in a work by Olivier Messiaen were compared with their respective original birdcalls. Despite the meticulous care Messiaen took in his transcriptions, they were a far cry from what the real birds sounded like. Preparing for Vivaldi’s flute concerto “Il Gardellino”, I listened to real Italian goldfinches on YouTube. There is no way to express such wild creativity in musical notation, and definitely not in a Baroque concerto. But that’s obviously not the central priority for the composer.

What’s more important is the idea of an artistic modulation of the original natural sound.

I believe it’s more of a reciprocal ­relationship between the musical piece and nature. On one hand, the composer takes ­inspiration from nature and organises it according to certain criteria of his own. On the other hand, the creativity of nature also serves the composer by bringing a bit of chaos into his self-determined order.

Order only gets interesting when you start ­playing around with it or occasionally disrupt it. But if you’ve figured out the compositional principle after only a few bars, there’s no reason to listen to the rest of the piece.

BS

JS Reproducing sounds of nature is definitely appealing to composers. Imitations of nature can serve to demonstrate one’s compositional virtuosity and brilliance. I think Vivaldi also took great pleasure in “capturing” nature with art. But from personal experience, I know that “the reproduction of nature” can be a very tricky matter. For example, I once tried to draft a musical “protocol” of the subtle changes of raindrops. That was a good learning experience because the mixture of regularity and change, which nature produces in an endless stream, is almost impossible to convert into a system.

BS

But then music could give listeners false impressions of nature. The call of the cuckoo in many Baroque compositions, for instance, certainly sounds different that the true cuckoo song in nature...

Venice he practically lived “on the water” and also spent longer periods of time in the countryside. In this context, I find his music very physical and sensual.

FU

What’s more, in his imitations of animals and nature, Vivaldi was obviously touching on something obvious to people for existential reasons: When you walked through the woods, rode on horseback or took the coach, you had to distinguish whether the snapping twig in the underbrush came from a bear, a robber or a harmless little animal. This conscious awareness of nature, which we no longer comprehend, is embedded in his music.

BS

The concert project “sounds & clouds”, which you both developed together, f­ ocuses on this conscious awareness of nature. The project features four concerts by Antonio Vivaldi which contain descriptions of nature. These are supplemented by the musical piece “Singing Garden”, written by the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa in 2010, and the electronic sounds of the Italian artist Letizia Renzini, who created a sound installation from birdcalls. How did this unusual combination of works come about?

FU

Vivaldi arranged natural sounds, as I mentioned before, into a Baroque m ­ ovement scheme, and we confront them with an environment – music by Hosokawa and electronic sounds by Letizia Renzini – that helps reawaken our senses. And we are also working with the spatial dimension. Neither the bird sounds nor the music come from only one direction. We try to sharpen the sense for the diversity of sounds.

JS

For each of the four Vivaldi concerts, we developed a basic mood which plays a central role for its interpretation. “La Notte“, for example, is not a portrayal of a peaceful night, but rather a musical description of a physical experience. At the very beginning, we hear the rhythm of a heartbeat and the gasping of breath. There are pauses which are peaceful, relaxed, but there are also pauses, during which you dare not breath. Essentially it’s a very “vegetative” piece. “Tempesta di Mare”, on the other hand, is a true musical theatre piece which thrives on a striking rhythm and an interesting repetitive structure in the musical pattern, comparable to the central perspective used in Baroque stage painting. These extremely clear character­ isations of the Vivaldi concerts were important to Toshio Hosokawa for composing his own music. He always incorporates references to Vivaldi in his works. On one occasion it’s a small canon, on another a certain rhythm, in “Tempesta di Mare” a small bell which alludes to the wind ­ceremony in Japan. In this way, he creates an acoustic space which sounds very unconstrained, but is actually composed with incredible precision. I felt this when I was recently organising the Japanese premiere of the “Singing Garden in Venice” together with Japanese musicians who paid even closer attention to the ­composer’s performance notes than the European musicians did.

FU

The third aspect of the project is the electronic sounds by Letizia Renzini who works with sampling technology. She forms

28 a new structure, using sound recordings of Tuscan birdcalls. Vivaldi basically did the same in his times. He took a “sample” of a goldfinch and modified it into a continuous structure which corresponded to the rules of the early 18th century.

BS

JS

It goes without saying that one must come up with an adequate form for such a unique concert programme. The traditional stage-audience situation, which dates back to the 19th century, is incapable of ­producing the desired effect…

But isn’t that just an illusion?

FU

Of course, it’s an illusion. Obviously we’re not really sitting in nature, we’re at a concert. But its main purpose is to open one’s senses and awareness for the musical depths in Vivaldi’s and Hosokawa’s works.

We put the audience directly among the musicians so they can experience the spatial structures of the music. In this way, we can show the listeners that they are capable of listening three-dimensionally.

I’ve worked in numerous projects where I saw how surprised people are, how they listen especially attentively the moment someone plays an instrument from behind them or beside them. For “normal” concert-­ goers who are used to sitting away from the stage in fixed rows of seats, this close proximity to the musicians – the sound creators – is an enormous physical experience which leads to a deeper a ­ wareness of the music.

FU

BS

Can such a concert experience change one’s relationship to nature?

FU

Why not? A concert like that has the potential to create a positive movement of resonance within a community. It can be an incredibly intense experience which can also influence my life “outdoors”.

JS

I leave the concert and notice that I actively employed my sense of awareness. My awareness is precious and I had ­participated actively in what happened.

The world, as you know it and have ­repeatedly experienced it, won’t change because of it, but maybe for a little while you’ll find yourself in a “different”, more consciously perceived world, with which people interact differently. In any case, you have come in intensive contact with music and nature at both an emotional and intellectual level.

We as musicians are in the centre of the action anyway. But we ask ourselves what we can do to immediately draw the ­audience into our midst so that there’s no difference between the musicians, music and the audience. And you can do that through remarkably simple means. The audience will sit among the musicians in a garden installation comprised of turf, plants and other garden elements.

BS

JS

­ xperience which was only possible because e they attended that particular concert.

We always notice how hungry the audience is to participate in concerts. However, we have to be very careful and not demand too much from them. The listeners will move to a point where they would like to take the next step but never had the opportunity to do so, and if you can pick them up at that point, it creates a kind of magical attention that everyone shares in.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa has described this experience as the “desire for ­resonance”. That’s exactly what we’re trying to satisfy with our concert projects.

A good example of this is “joint breathing”.

When musicians – be it violinists or hornists – perform together, they all breathe at noticeable moments. Sitting so close to the musicians, I’m positive the audience draws breath and holds it together with the musicians in time with the music.

Being so physically close to a musician, you would have to be quite resistant not to synchronise your breathing to theirs.

In traditional stage concerts, however, you have an audience which usually does not relax and enjoy this aesthetic ­experience. Only seldom do they ­participate so intensively in what is­ ­happening on stage. I would wish that people don’t leave the concert saying “That was nice...”, but rather share in an

BS

Does this mean that we’ve come one step closer to achieving harmony of the world and the human soul, which you mentioned earlier?

JS

Possibly. For my part, I find that Toshio Hosokawa’s music possesses this dimension, as it explicitly emphasises the harmony of silence. The precision of his works reminds me of a Zen garden, like the one on display in the “Gardens of World” in Berlin-Marzahn.

Everything in there is precisely planned and arranged. It’s not an end in itself, but rather it enables visitors to perceive and take joy in the slightest movements and changes – like the flight of a bumblebee.

You might not have seen the bumblebee if the garden hadn’t been designed in a way that permitted a sharpened awareness of the beauty and vitality of nature.

FU

That’s a very beautiful image for our work.

Our aim is to create a fitting and wellplanned contextualisation around the music so that one can truly recognise its quintessence.

Jeremias Schwarzer (*1969) studied Recorder in Frankfurt and Zürich. Since then, he has gained an outstanding reputation as a soloist with an ­extraordinary repertoire spanning ancient music to New Music. Solo performances in concerts around the world have taken Jeremias Schwarzer to ­international festivals and concert series in ­Europe, the United States, Japan and Israel. S ­ chwarzer regularly commissions works from other artists ­ which has generated new impulses in New Music for the recorder. In over 70 world premieres, he has collaborated with some of the most interesting ­composers of our times, including Rolf Riehm, Annette Schlünz, Salvatore Sciarrino, Misato ­Mochizuki and Samir Odeh-Tamimi. Aside from his ground-­ breaking concert work as an instrumentalist, he also ­develops unconventional concert and educational projects which create new and e ­ xciting spaces of ­perception for concert goers. ­Jeremias Schwarzer has produced numerous CDs featuring works of ­ancient and New Music under such­­recording labels as Moeck, Cybele and neos ­records.

Folkert Uhde (*1965) received professional training as a radio and television technician b ­ efore he studied Communication and Musicology at the TU Berlin. At the same time, he studied Baroque V ­ iolin at the Academy of Ancient Music in Bremen. Between 1997 and 2008, Folkert Uhde worked as manager and dramaturge at the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.

In 2006, he co-founded the “New ­Space for the Arts”

at RADIALSYSTEM V, for which he continues to develop concert and music theatre concepts. Uhde has initiated and curated various festivals, including the Zeitfenster Biennale Alter Musik since 2002 in cooperation with the Konzerthaus Berlin. Uhde has regularly worked with the ­Dialoge Festival hosted by the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg as a dramaturge and concept ­developer since 2012. In 2013, he became the a ­ rtistic director of the “Musica Sacra” International ­Organ Festival in Nuremberg. In addition to ­teaching, he also works intensively on television and film ­productions for ZDFtheaterkanal, 3sat, ARTE and harmonia mundi.

Bernhard Schrammek (*1972) studied Musi­ cology and History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He earned his doctorate in 2000 after ­ ­completing a several-year research stay in Rome.

Today Schrammek lives and works in Berlin as a free­ lance musicologist and teaches courses at the University of Rostock, Leipzig and Dresden. He is also editor-­in-chief of the ortus musikverlag and a concert presenter for Deutschlandradio Kultur, SWR2 and RBB.

sounds & clouds The project “sounds & clouds”, managed by artistic director Jeremias Schwarzer, ­combines four of Vivaldi’s concerti with a composition by the Japanese artist Toshio Hosokawa. The production is supplemented by a Surround Sound installation by the Italian artist Letizia Renzini based on authentic bird calls. The concert designer Folkert Uhde has designed the performance venue to resemble a fantasy garden, through which the visitors can move freely. For more information on this project, see p. 36.

29 Allison Funk

Virgin and Child with a Dragonfly After an engraving by Albrecht Dürer ­(about 1495)

She doesn’t notice it And neither do I Until something starts up in us – Then suddenly: bronze Between see-through wings, The dragonfly flashes its wand.

How ever, she wonders, Could she have missed Its look-at-me look next to her hem?

So much else to attend to, of course.

Joseph, what does he want, Arm slung over the back of her bench?

And the dear child himself With his little hand at her neck.

Once she’s glanced away from them, though, She sees it is paradise. One, two, three, More goldfinches flushed from the grass.

And like a child now herself, She claps others from hiding: Surprise! A monarch Unfolds its fan; the live coal Of a cardinal glows.

Then just for fun (red, red, another one) She thinks how like the sour cherry Ripening the bird is when it flies.

And her mind, freed, flying now, Sees from the stones the cardinal drops Each branch of a new tree flare.

Tinder, everything’s tinder For the dragonfly’s wick, she cries Before she goes up, goes out.

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31

32 ence the marketing activities and post­ humous reputation of the artists This is how Christoph Schlingensief and Dash Snow, for example, have become such ­polarising and dazzling public fi ­ gures.

This exhibition presents the works of some forty international artists – from van Gogh to Schlingensief – and the various strategies applied in stylising them.

The exhibition includes emble­ matic works which exemplify patterns of stylisation and demonstrate their impact on social regard and market value. U ­ nlike conventional exhibitions, the visitors to the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden will be encouraged to move beyond the aesthetic pleasure evoked by the works and consider the circumstances and reper­ cussions of premature death on ­re­ception history. This theme will also be the focus of an extensive educational ­programme.

New Projects in General Project Funding At its meeting in spring 2014, the interdisciplinary jury of the Federal Cultural Foundation recommended funding to 28 new projects with a total funding volume of 4.2 million euros.

You can find detailed information about the individual projects on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de or on the websites operated by the respective project coordinators. The next jury session will take place in autumn 2014.

The submission deadline for the next round of applications to General Project Funding is 31 July 2014.

The members of the jury are: Dr. Brigitte Franzen, director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen / Joachim Gerstmeier, director of the performing arts department at the Siemens Foundation / Dr. Angelika Nollert, director of the Neues Museum – Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nuremberg / Dr. Andreas Rötzer, publisher and managing director of Matthes & Seitz Berlin publishing house / Albert Schmitt, managing director of the German Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra in Bremen / Gisela Staupe, deputy director of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden / Karsten Wiegand, currently the opera director at the Deutsches National­ theater Weimar; starting August 2014, general theatre director of the Staats­ theater Darmstadt.

After Premature Death Group exhibition

As the authors of their work, artists often play an active role in how it is received while they are alive. But what ­happens when artists die at an early age? ­Frequently, legends start forming around supposedly unfinished works, which influ-

Artistic directors: Hendrik ­Bündge, Johan Holten (DK) Artists: Bas Jan Ader (NL), Jean-Michel Basquiat (US), Öyvind ­Fahlström (SE), Angus Fairhurst (GB), Eva Hesse (US), Michel Majerus (LU), Piero Manzoni (IT), Ana Mendieta (US), Hélio Oiticica (BR), Francesca Woodman (US), Vincent van Gogh, ­August Macke, Christoph Schlingensief, Dash Snow u.a.

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden: 21 Mar. – 21 Jun. 2015 ↗ www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de

Animals Dressed Animals as portrayed by Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud is considered one of the most influential portrait painters of the 20th century. His overwhelmingly ­large-format nudes have garnered him the nickname “painter of the flesh”. The ­upcoming exhibition “Animals Dressed” at the Kunstmuseum Siegen, however, focuses on works in which he depicts ­animals. Portraits of animals played an important role in Freud’s earlier works.

Later, as he concentrated more on people, the animals he painted were more inconsequential or served merely as compositional elements or accessories. Nonetheless, his double or even triple portraits of humans and animals are among his best-known works today. Viewing his works in their entirety, it is evident that Lucian Freud redefined and fundamentally modernised the genre of animal portrayals. Many of the works in this comprehensive exhibition of animal portraits will be shown for the first time in public.

It is also the first exhibition which exclusively highlights the animal theme in Freud’s works. With this unique angle, the project wishes to attract the professional art-scene as well as the g­ eneral public.

Artistic director: Ines Rüttinger, ­Kathrin Schönegg Artist: ­Lucian Freud (GB) Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen: 1 Mar. – 7 Jun. 2015 ↗ www.mgk-siegen.de

Lucian Freud, Quince on a Blue Table, 1943–44, Lambrecht-Schadeberg Collection, Museum für Gegen

William Forsythe Choreographic and p ­ erformative museum interventions

William Forsythe is regarded as one of the top choreographers in the world.

His artistic endeavours include dance installations, performances, films and the development of Internet-based dance projects. In the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden, William Forsythe is develo­­ ping an installation in cooperation with the State Art Collections Dresden, which merges humans and m ­ achines and analyses spatial experiences and s­ equences of movement in the museum. The exhibition room presents visitors with three industrial robots which take on the role of dancers, waving giant flags. The complex, room-filling choreography of these high-tech machines evokes physical reactions in the visitors, who dodge, pass or approach them, thereby creating a ­dynamic interaction between robots and humans. The normally static “relationship” between the viewer and the artwork begins to blur or even d ­ isappear altogether. The experimental project raises questions concerning museum exhibition practices, e.g. what roles do situationand perfor­mance­­based artworks play in a

museum? How do choreographic objects influence the reception of conventional, static art displays in museums?

William Forsythe invites inter­ national dancers, choreographers and fine artists to present their own works within the installation. A museum educational programme, workshops and lectures will accompany the project.

Artistic director: Hartwig Fischer Curators: Mathias Wagner, Gwendolin Kremer Producer: Julian Richter Artist: William Forsythe Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden: 26 Nov. 2014 – 11 Jan. 2015 ↗ www.skd.museum

Disorder / Ha-fra-ah A German-Israeli theatre and ­research project, international theme-based congresses

“Disorder” is a commonly-used term in modern medicine and is now the basis of a long-term, interdisciplinary research project by the Theater Freiburg. To conduct this special type of “artistic ­

33 c­omprised of concerts, lectures and a diverse educational programme. The ­ themes ­addressed in the exhibition and educational programme are geared toward a very broad audience.

Artistic directors: Sven Beckstette, ­Ulrike Groos, Markus Müller Artists: Ernie Barnes (US), Jean-Michel Basquiat (US), Candice Breitz (RSA), Otto Dix, Fernand Léger (F), Jason Moran (US), Piet Mondrian (NL), A.R. Penck, Jackson Pollock (US), K.R.H. Sonderborg, Andy Warhol (US) Kunstmuseum Stuttgart: 10 Oct. 2015 – 29 Feb. 2016 ↗ www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de

Artefacts and Traces from the ­Theresienstadt Ghetto 1941–1945 Documentation and website

© Estate of Lucian Freud/Bridgeman Images →

wartskunst, Siegen

r­ esearch”, the theatre has teamed up with the Excellence Cluster “BrainLinks-­ BrainTools” at the University of Freiburg, the dance company headed by the choreo­grapher Yasmeen Godder in Tel Aviv and four neuroscientific ­research institutes in Israel.

Dancers in Israel and Germany will artistically collaborate with individuals who suffer from Parkinson’s disease.

When it comes to neurological disorders like Morbus Parkinson, the scientific and medical community often focuses ­merely on the brain as a technically and chemically treatable organ. This research project differs in that it builds on the ­experience of dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease. Dancers – as ­experts for movement – will artistically apply their knowledge regarding the control of movement. Based on the ­ “movement disorder”, the participants will explore the limits and the possibility of controlling movement. For the first time, junior researchers specialising in this field will be strongly integrated into the artistic process and have the chance to intensively work with the participants.

For the fields of science and philosophy, this form of artistic r­ esearch is a way to become acquainted with entirely new forms of knowledge. The dancers will

document their ­experiences in the form of “physical diaries” which they will later condense into performances. The ­choreographer ­Yasmeen Godder will develop a dance piece based on the theme of disorders. The r­ esults of the project will be ­presented at two theme-based con­gresses with ­performances in Tel Aviv and Freiburg.

Supervising artistic director: Barbara Mundel Artistic director: Josef Mackert ­Choreography: Yasmeen Godder (IL), Company Yasmeen Godder (IL), Itzik Giuli (IL) (dramaturge) and others Cooperating institutions: Excellence Cluster “BrainLinks-BrainTools” at the University of Freiburg: Oliver Müller, Gunnar Grah, Ad Aertsen, Ulrich Egert, Weizmann Institute of Science (IL), The Leslie and Susan Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center (IL), Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) (IL), Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (Hebrew University) (IL) Theater Freiburg, Freiburg: 1 Feb. – 13 Dec. 2015; Suzanne Dellal Center, Studio Yasmeen Godder, Tel Aviv: 16 Feb. – 18 Dec. 2015 ↗ www.theater.freiburg.de

I Got Rhythm Jazz and art since 1920

The exhibition “I Got Rhythm” at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart offers the public a special chance to view the interdisciplinary relationship between art and music and experience its history in n ­ umerous international contexts. It high­lights the close connections and interactions between jazz and changing art trends from the 1920s to the present.

One can understand certain artistic developments, e.g. the abstraction of the post-war period, only in connection with the jazz music of that time. The ex­hi­ bition also presents the interweave of the fine arts and jazz today, as demonstrated, for example, by the American pianist and composer Jason Moran.

The works will be accompanied by audio stations where visitors can listen to selected examples of music. Both the ­audio stations and media guide are being developed in cooperation with the ­Stuttgart sound designers at “Klangerfinder” and students from the ­Trossingen University of Music, who are known for their innovative concepts with sound documents. A central component of the exhibition is an event programme

In 1941 the Germans constructed the Theresienstadt concentration camp on the grounds of the Terezín Fortress. They converted the former Czechoslovakian garrison town into a model concen­tration camp, the structure of which remains unaltered today and ­represents a unique memorial of the Shoah. Even today, one can still discover r­ emarkable traces of the past – graffiti, wall paintings, fi ­ xtures and utensils – many of which have been left exposed to the ravages of time for ­decades.

Because the collection of artefacts in the archives of the Terezín Memorial is largely fragmentary, the Association of Friends and Patrons of Theresienstadt would like to document these relics ­before they are lost forever. The results will be incorporated into the educational programme of the memorial site and presented to the international community via a special website. In addition to intensifying German-Czech cooperation, the Friends and Patrons of Theresienstadt hope that their project will strengthen efforts to make the ­former ghetto an ­international site of commemoration and long-term documentation.

Project director: Uta Fischer Participants: Carol Bayer (CZ), Thomas Danzl, Roland A. Wildberg Cooperation partners: City of Terezín (CZ), Theresienstadt organisations (CZ) Terezín Memorial (CZ), Terezín Fortress Military Historic Association (CZ) Commencement: June 2014 ↗ www.terezinfreunde.de ↗ www.ghettospuren.de

34 BUVERO – Roma ­Woman Live Network Project Empowering young Romani women; media camp, video installation, exhibition, workshops

Due to their living circumstances, the Roma have few chances to develop their culture and make use of the ­infrastructural opportunities available to them for this purpose. They also have very little chance of receiving project-­ specific funding to promote ­exchange and networking because they fall through the cracks of most national funding organisations. That is why the Roma ­ usually have to organise their cross-­ ­ border projects on their own. The BUVERO ­ ­ festival unites a variety of ­artistic a­ ctivities and formats which f­ ocus on the artistic and media-based education of Romani women. An e­ xtensive exhibition of fine art from contemporary Roma ­artists, as well as performances, video i­nstallations, ­ concerts and film ­series present an ­international panorama of current ­ Romani forms of artistic expression. The Roma will meet in ­ ­workshops and other events to discuss the current situation of their art and ­culture. As in previous years, the participants will address the controversial matter of Roma cultural identity which faces marginalisation as “ethno art”. ­Although this might strengthen a sense of Roma identity, it can lead to their ­exclusion from international art trends and scenes. ­BUVERO wants to c­ ontribute to debunking the folkloric-exotic clichés about the Roma.

Artistic director: Katalin Barsony (HU) Artists: Moritz Pankok, Kristóf Asbót (HU), Katalin Bársony (HU), Orsolya Fenyvesi (HU), André Jenő Raatzsch (HU), Dávid Szauder (HU), Damian Le Bas (GB), Sinziana Marin (RO), Galya Stoyanova (BG), Pablo Vega Dunabogdány: 18 Jul. – 3 Aug. 2014; TAK Theater im Aufbau Haus / Galerie Kai Dikhas, Berlin: 1 – 31 Aug. 2014

Freedom of Form & Radical Independ­ ence Works of the architect Lina Bo Bardi

↗ www.romediafoundation.org

LINA BO BARDI 100 Brazil’s alternative path to modernity

The Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914 – 1992) achieved worldwide fame for her pioneering works in the fields of architecture and design, stage design and the fine arts. In these she combined elements of Brazilian ­tradition with contemporary concepts and explored how cultural identity was expressed in modern architecture and how all of society could be integrated into the design of architecture.

On the occasion of her 100th anniversary in 2014, the Architecture Museum at the TU Munich is organising a solo exhibition in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

The aim is to present Lina Bo Bardi’s Continued on p. 35 →

She connected art with life, conviction with ­playfulness, and creativity with honesty. In her view, building was a social process; she felt a profound responsibility to the people of her ­a dopted home of Brazil: Lina Bo Bardi. The ­Architekturmuseum at the TU München (TUM) is now hosting an ­exhibition on the life and work of this Italian-­Brazilian architect. Curator Simone Bader spoke with Tobias Asmuth about the re­ discovery of one of the leading representatives of modern ­architecture.

Judging by the names of the most important ­architects of modern times, or on a visit to this year’s A ­ rchitecture Biennale in Venice, you get the ­impression that ­women played practically no role in modernity. Lina Bo ­Bardi was an exception in the male-­dominated world of modern architecture, yet hardly anyone has heard of her in Europe. Why is that?

It’s is not entirely correct to say that Lina Bo Bardi is unknown in Europe. Let’s put it this way: The interest

in her work has steadily risen in recent years. ­Certainly this has something to do with the fact that, being a female architect of the 20th century, she was an ­exception in a male-dominated world. But to ­reduce her significance to her role as a female would be short-sighted. At a lecture she gave to an ­auditorium full of students, she described herself quite provocatively as a Stalinist and anti-feminist. But she didn’t want to be put into categories anyway. I think the growing interest in Lina Bo Bardi has more to do with the social aspects of her work, and also the fact that she always adapted her building ­projects to the ­surroundings and the prevailing ­circumstances on site. In view of the recent financial and economic ­crises and the general disaffection toward globa­ lisation, her projects which address ­local culture have become highly topical again.

Lina Bo Bardi worked as an architect, designer, set designer and journalist. What made her change her roles so often?

Lina Bo came from a family with strong connections to the art scene. Her father discovered his talent for painting rather late in life, but he always maintained contacts to well-known Italian painters like Giorgio De Chirico. Her uncle was a journalist and had close contacts with the futurists. He frequently took Lina Bo to the cinema. She was artistically influenced from a very early age, and so her decision to study architecture is understandable. After graduation, she moved to Milan where she worked for the extremely wellknown architect and designer Giò Ponti. He was the editor of a number of Italian trade journals in the 1930s such as “Domus” and “Lo Stile”, for which Lina Bo wrote articles on architectural theory, art, fashion and design. Even before she really started building things, she felt quite at home in entirely different roles.

From the very start, she developed talents in different areas, a trait, by the way, that wasn’t so uncommon in Italy in those times.

“The artist’s freedom has always been ‘individual’, but true freedom can only be collective. A freedom aware of social responsibilities which can knock down the frontiers of aesthetics.” Would you agree this quote

by Lina Bo Bardi fittingly describes her concept of building?

For Lina Bo Bardi, the most important thing was ­ esigning works which took society into account from d the very start. That’s why her social projects like the SESC Pompéia continue to function so well today. She was not particularly interested in developing forms and concepts which corresponded to the a ­ rchitectural taste of the time and would be regarded as aesthetically beautiful. The buildings could be ugly for all she cared; they even should be, because that reflected her notion of freedom and independence far better.

Probably Lina Bo Bardi’s largest building project was the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, which was constructed between 1957 and 1968. Today it’s ­considered a classic of modern Brazilian architecture.

Doesn’t it strike a very unique, spectacular chord?

The Museu de Arte Moderna stands apart from the rest of São Paulo’s urban centre more than ever for the simple reason that it’s the only horizontal structure far and wide in a city of vertical high-rises. The ­concept of a glass box suspended from two concrete brackets is also unique, as well as the idea of giving a bit of urban space back to Brazilian society. After all, Lina Bo Bardi designed the space below the ­museum as a venue for staging exhibitions, concerts and performances for people of all ages and walks of life. Even the glass façade fits into this concept in that it exudes openness, a kind of freedom, if you will, for art – a stark contrast from the “white cube”. As you see, her radical ideas are still spectacular, contemporary and topical.

35

© Chico Albuquerque/ Convênio Museu da Imagem e do Som – SP/ Instituto Moreira Salles – P003

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e­xtensive and diverse oeuvre in an art ­historic context and enable a broad audience to gain a deeper understanding of its cultural and socio-political themes.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an international symposium where leading architects, scholars, artists and students from Europe, Brazil and the United States will present and discuss their latest research on central aspect of the exhibition, e.g. Lina Bo Bardi’s ­innovative exhibition practice, her urban development concepts and her social commitment, which was always evident in her works. In addition to workshops and a film series, young Brazilian architects will develop their own projects to reflect on Lina Bo Bardi’s influence on the younger generation.

Curator: Simone Bader Artist / Architect: Lina Bo Bardi Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich: Opening: 13 Nov. 2014, 13 Nov. 2014 – 23 Feb. 2015 ↗ www.architekturmuseum.de

Francisco Albuquerque, Lina Bo Bardi on the stairs at Casa de Vidro, 1951

One of Lina Bo Bardi’s most influential projects was the old factory complex in São Paulo which she ­converted into the sport and cultural centre SESC Pompéia in 1982. This project, perhaps more than any of her others, represents her ideal of “poor ­archi­tecture” in social responsibility. What exactly ­distinguishes the building?

When I visited the SESC Pompéia, I was fascinated with how the building was used and what the ­atmosphere was like. Lina Bo Bardi truly succeeded in c ­ reating a location which society can embrace. ­Children play there, young people hang out, families have meals there. You see people talking, reading, watching TV and all this in a large space, a public area.

I especially liked the idea of having the new building, the sports centre, resemble a factory with a smokestack, which incorporated the form of the old building – ­a former factory hall. Like in so many of her projects, Lina Bo Bardi was able to forge a link b ­ etween the old and the new in a very sensitive way. But the overall impression you get draws on many small details, like the colourfully designed wiring and piping, the bright signposts and the menus carved out of wood. T­ ogether they create an extraordinary atmosphere which we hope to capture in our exhibition.

Lina Bo Bardi dedicated the SESC Pompéia to the young and old people of Brazil. How important was Brazil in her life? To what extent did Brazil influence her work?

You have to imagine that Lina Bo Bardi was 32 when she moved to Brazil. She had already gained a well-­ informed opinion about architecture during her ­studies in Italy. As a result, Brazil was certainly a strange world to her at first, but a world which ­offered her the opportunity to build, put her ideas into ­p­ractice and develop them further in communion with this new culture. It is no coincidence she was strongly influenced by her years in Salvador, a part of Brazil where Afro-Brazilian culture is quite prevalent. The experiences she gained there are reflected in many of her works. She became intensively familiar with the culture to such an extent that by the end of her life, she saw herself more as Brazilian than an Italian – a Brazilian with a rather noticeable Italian accent.

The Song of the Earth Writers’ conference on John Burnside, readings, speeches, discussions, exhibition, concerts

The internationally acclaimed writer John Burnside has gained increasing recognition in Germany in recent years as a world-class story teller with such novels as “The Devil’s Footprints”, “Glister” and “A Summer of Drowning”. In many of his literary, essayistic and journalistic works, Burnside is driven by the question of what it means to live in harmony with nature as a good person. In this respect, Burnside is one of the few contemporary literary fi ­ gures who merge poetic-aesthetic concepts with ethical views and social commitment.

This year’s international writers’ ­conference dedicated to John Burnside ­focuses on the thematic complexes which are characteristic of his work and influence, e.g. poetry as a science of the close interweave of humans and nature, or the question of homeland and the right to possess a home. The Literaturbüro Ost­­ west­ falen-­ Lippe wishes to present a ­diverse range of artistic perspectives in readings, d ­iscussions, concerts, film screenings, excursions and an exhibition.

Invited writers, such as Allison Funk, Raoul Schrott and Teresa Präauer, will discuss why literature cannot shy away from the controversial social and political issues of the present and how artists can express their opinions in their works.

Artistic director: Brigitte Labs-Ehlert Writers: John Burnside (GB), Allison Funk (US), Teresa Präauer (AT), Robin Robertson (GB), Raoul Schrott (AT), Adam Thorne (FR), Jan Wagner, Robert Wrigley (US), Amy Shelton (GB), Franui Musicbanda (AT), Tarkovsky Ouartet (FR) Robert-Koepke-Haus, Schwalenberg: 1– 20 Oct. 2014 ↗ www.literaturbuero-owl.de → See the interview with John Burnside (p. 21)

and the poems by Allison Funk (pp. 23 and 29).

36 A musical gardening project

The project “Sounds & Clouds” ­embarks on a search for new performance formats for ancient, classical and new music. The project contrasts two very different ways of artistically ­exploring nature – on one hand, in the traditional, European and Asian repre­sentations of nature through m ­ usic, and on the other, the recent global trend ­toward “urban gardening”. It ­combines four of Vivaldi’s concerti that are based on portrayals of nature with a com­position by the Japanese artist ­oshio as a setting for these concerts. The ­production will be supplemented by a Surround Sound installation and elec­­tronic music based on authentic bird calls, created by the Italian artist Letizia Renzini. The concert designer Folkert Uhde has designed each per­ formance venue to resemble a fantasy ­garden, through which the visitors can move freely. The interior design, which will ­allow visitors to physically experience the music, and the combination of ­ancient, new and electronic music shall introduce a heterogeneous audience to novel ­ experiences of reception. The Frankfurt-­based Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, founded just last year, is cooperating with the Institute of Musicology at the University of Potsdam to evaluate the impact of the interna­ tional project. The goal is to gain detailed information about the aesthetic ex­peri­ ence of the audience and its flow of ­attention.

European Literary ­Activist Conference and Pan-European Omnibus Reading Tour Ein Projekt des europäischen Netzwerks „CROWD“

CROWD is an international network of young European writers who regard themselves as “literary activists” and ­advocates of a not-yet established contemporary literature scene. In this project, they aim to discuss various concepts of contemporary literature in Europe and address current issues related to European literature and literary promotion.

Together with other leading figures in the literary branch, they will share their ideas and event formats and help each

↗ www.radialsystem.de → For more, see the interview on p. 26.

Haus-Rucker-Co, Oase Nr. 7, documenta 5, 1972

“This is where new architecture is b­ eing made.” This programmatic claim of 1927 fittingly describes the ambitions of the brothers Heinz (1902 – 1996) and Bodo (1903 – 1995) Rasch, whose visionary ideas and concepts in architecture and design made them pioneers of classical modern­i­ ty. Between 1926 and 1930, they designed furniture, proposed floating structures and urban spatial concepts, and created a limited, but vibrant collection of works.

Their audacious concepts included suspended houses, container structures and pneumatic buildings, as well as graphic works and typography. And although their architectural ideas and design proposals

Conference: Literaturhaus Lettrétage, Berlin: 13 – 14 Dec. 2014; Literaturhaus, Hamburg: 18 – 19 Jun. 2016; Tucholsky Museum, Rheinsberg: 20 Jun. 2016; Literaturarchiv, Sulzbach-Rosenberg: 22 – 24 Jun. 2016; Lyrikkabinett, Munich: 25 – 26 Jun. 2016 ↗ www.lettretage.de

The importance of reflection on the past for shaping the future Six ­concerts and symposiums

Flanders Festival, Kortrijk: 9 – 10 May 2015; International Organ Week, ­Nuremberg: 24 – 25 Jun. 2015; ­Radialsystem, Berlin: 19 – 20 Dec. 2015; Montforter Zwischentöne, Feldkirch: 2 – 3 Jun. 2015

The Rasch brothers and their pioneering influence on modern architecture

Curators: Lily Michaelidis (CY), Laura Serkosalo (FI), Max Höfler (AT) Writers: Ondrej Buddeus (CZ), Jazra Khaleed (GR), Alessandro de Francesco (IT), Odile Kennel (FR), Ricardo ­Domeneck (BR), Artur Becker (PL), Andrea Inglese (IT), Gür Genç (ZY) and many others

I Shall Not Remain Silent – The Jürgen Fuchs Project

Artistic director: Jeremias Schwarzer Director: Folkert Uhde Composer: Toshio Hosokawa (JP) Orchestra: Holland Baroque Society (NL) Performance: Letizia Renzini (IT)

The Unleashed Gaze

Cyprus. The Federal Cultural Foundation will fund the German section of the tour, as well as the conference in Berlin.

Haus-Rucker-Co, Oase Nr. 7, documenta 5, 1972

Artistic director: Roland Nachtigäller Artists: Michael Beutler, Luc Deleu (BE), Luka Fineisen, Erika Hock (KG), Ernesto Neto (BR) Architekt/innen: Heinz Rasch, Bodo Rasch, Norman Foster, Coop Himmelb(l) au, Haus Rucker Co, Dramabox, ­NL-Architects Marta Herford: 25 Oct. 2014 – 1 Feb. 2015 ↗ www.marta-herford.de

other develop and implement their projects. Their primary objective is to increase the readership of contemporary literature regardless of its original language by means of appropriate literary promotion measures and generate increased public awareness of pan-European literature.

The CROWD network, initiated and coordinated by the Lettrétage in Berlin, will be organising a festival in Graz over the next two years. The international conference in Berlin is the network’s first outwardly active engagement; literary activists from all over Europe will meet in various formats to discuss current literature-related issues. During a three-month omnibus reading tour, 120 European writers will travel in varying arrangements through Europe from Finland down to

The writer and psychologist Jürgen Fuchs was one of the most prominent civil rights activists of the former GDR. In 1976 he was arrested for “forming subversive groups” and deported to West Germany in 1977.

On the 25th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2014, the Robert-­ Havemann-Gesellschaft is organising a concert series titled “I Shall Not Remain Silent – The Jürgen Fuchs Project” to commemorate one of the most courageous figures of the GDR opposition.

Texts and poems by Jürgen Fuchs will be performed to music. The piece for ­soprano, baritone, saxophone quartet and percussion instruments was written by the composer H. Johannes Wallmann.

The concerts will be performed in various cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and at venues which played a significant role in the civil rights ­movements of the GDR, such as the Gethsemene Church in Berlin. The programme will be supplemented by photo projections by Harald Hauswald, one of the founders of the famous photo agency Ostkreuz, and a series of accompanying events.

Artistic director / Composition of the Jürgen Fuchs cycle: H. Johannes Wallmann Musical director: Lennart Dohms (CH) Curators: Lennart Dohms (CH), Lothar Eckhardt, Martin Hermann, Jochen Staadt, Walter Schmitz; Sänger/innen / Musicians: Katharina Hohlfeld, Matthias Vieweg, project-saxophonquartett Speakers: Ulrike Bestgen, Lilo Fuchs, Ilko Kowalczuk, Ernest Kuczynski, Doris Liebermann, Utz Rachowski, Lutz Rathenow, Udo Scheer, Stefan Wolle; photo projections by: Harald Hauswald.

Gethsemanekirche / Freie Universität, Berlin: 3 – 20 Oct. 2014;

Photo: Brigitte Hellgoth, Archiv: Zamp Kelp © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

sounds & clouds

significantly influenced the development of architecture and design in the 20th ­century, the Rasch brothers are relatively unknown today. The exhibition project “The Unleased Gaze” offers a comprehensive view of their achievements, featuring selected work complexes, such as the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, with ­architectural models, letters, plans and historic photos.

Models and sketches by Norman ­Foster, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Haus Rucker Co, and exemplary project models by younger architectural teams, such as Dramabox and NL-Architects, will ­illustrate the lines of development and points of reference between the Rasch brothers’ concept of “New Building” and contemporary architecture. In addition, five ­contemporary artists, e.g. Luc Deleu and Ernesto Neto, will develop spatial ­interventions which address and react to the works and visions of the Rasch brothers.

37 Leipzig: 9 Oct. 2014; main auditorium at the University of Jena: 15 – 16 Oct. 2014; HafenCity University, Hamburg: 4 – 5 Nov. 2014; Dresden University of Technology / Dreikönigskirche, Dresden: 9 – 10 Nov. 2014; Berne University of the Arts / minster, Berne: 1 – 30 May 2015

station located in Berlin-Mitte.­ As an ­ experimental art, music and ­technology festival, it strives to ­challenge our ­ listening and viewing habits and search for new ­visual and acoustic forms.

For the ­up­coming edition of the festival, its ­ organisers are collaborating with engineers and musicians to design a ­ Concerts, installations, discussions ↗ www.havemann-gesellschaft.de ­special stage in order to create an extra­ The project “When Things Are ordinary musical experience. It will allow Hopping” examines the interest in audience members to witness how musi- ­ cal images can float, move and pass above, ­musical instruments and their further debelow and among them. Four outstanding velopment. Inventive musicians structurcomposers of electronic music – Ben ally alter their instruments to adapt them Frost, Peter van Hoesen, Thomas Vaquié to new performance techniques and tunand David Letellier – will be g­ iven the ing systems, innovative instrument buildopportunity to develop a live show exclu- ers attempt to fill gaps in certain families sively for this stage as the f­estival’s art- of instruments, and composers tap the Celebrating musical cultures ists-in-residence. The main hall of the ­potential of new acoustic possibilities. from Levante to Xinjiang power station will serve as the setting for Inventors, musicians and ­composers, The Osnabrück Morgenland Festival a gigantic, kinetic sound i­nstallation and such as Ole Hamre, Hans van ­Koolwijk enjoys an excellent reputation among sculpture created by the architect and and Samson Young, the Mercan Dede ­international music festivals. The annual musician David Letellier. His sound Ensemble or the Klangforum Wien, are programme provides an overview of con- composition, synchronised to the move- invited to Hellerau to present the temporary musical culture of the Middle ments of the sculpture, will ­offer a synes- ­fascinating worlds of sound made p­ ossible East, from traditional music to avant-­ thetic spatial experience. by new musical instruments. In concerts, garde and rock. The festival sees itself as Music, art, technology and science performances, installations and other a kind of podium and collaborative work- will unite in a 3D artwork, jointly devel- events, participants will demonstrate shop. This is where musicians from the oped by two astrophysics pro­fessors, the such ­novelties as the steel cello, the douEast and West come together to d ­ evelop Belgian light artists ­collective AntiVJ and ble-belled trumpet and the contraforte, and present joint music projects of high a producer of ­electronic music. A per­ while others will present the musical posformance by the Ensemble Modern sibilities of these acoustic, melodic and artistic quality.

In celebration of its 10th anniversary promises to be one of the highlights of rhythmic innovations in round-table in 2014, the birthday edition of the this year’s festival. The American com- events and workshops. The idea for the ­festival will present some of the most poser Steve Reich, to­gether with the En- project originated from the extraordinary ­influential musicians of the Middle East, semble Modern, will present a very spe- musical instruments d ­ eveloped by the such as the Iranian kamancheh player cial interpretation of his key work “Music American composer Harry Partch for his Kayhan Kalhor, the Azerbaijani singer for 18 Musicians”. microtonal music. In a workshop by the Alim ­Qasimov and the Armenian duduk musicians of the musikFabrik ensemble, master Jivan Gasparyan. The programme Artistic directors: Paulo Reachi, Harry audience ­members will be able to experiincludes numerous cooperation projects Glass, Laurens von Oswald ence the sounds and performance methas well, such as joint collaborations Musicians: Ensemble Modern, Steve ods of these instruments. A workshop for ­between the NDR Bigband and the Kurd- Reich, David Borden & The Spectrum journalists will address the issue of ­ ish singer Aynur, the Azerbaijani jazz pi- Spools Orchestra (US), The End of all ­presenting music based on examples of anist Salman Gambarov and jazz musician Existence, Miles Whittaker, Samuel sound production and perception.

Florian Weber, and a joint ­concert by the Kerridge & Oake, Ben Frost, Peter van Uyghurian rock band Qetig with guests Hoesen, Thomas Vaquié, David Letellier, Artistic directors: Dieter Jaenicke, from Syria, Lebanon and Germany. The AntiVJ, Dopplereffekt and others Barbara Damm, Jan Heinke Hamburg filmmaker Günter Wallbrecht Artists: Gaybird (HK), Ole Hamre (NO), will make a docu­mentary film of the 2014 Kraftwerk, Berlin: 20 – 24 Aug. 2014 Klangforum Wien (AT), Hans von ↗ www.berlin-atonal.com festival.

Koolwijk (NL), Mercan Dede Ensemble In addition to workshops, podium discussions and an exhibition, the ­University of Osnabrück is organising a symposium on “The language of popular music” in cooperation with the Morgenland Festival.

When Things Are Hopping – New ­Instruments, New Sounds

10th Anniversary of the Osnabrück ­Morgenland Festival

Artistic director: Michael Dreyer Musicians: Alim Qasimov (AZ), Jivan Gasparyan (AM), Aynur (TR), Dhafer Youssef (TN), Kayhan Kalhor (IR), Giora Feidman (ARG), Abrahim Keivo (SY), Qetig, Salman Gambarov, Florian Weber, NDR Bigband, Capella de la Torre and many others

↗ www.morgenland-festival.com

Photo: Camille Blake

Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden: 15 – 25 Oct. 2014 ↗ www.hellerau.org

Les robots ne connaissent pas le blues / The Abduction from the Seraglio Festival

Since 2005 the director duo Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klaßen have been collaborating with a German-­Ivorian team on dance and performance projects which combine aesthetic statements with socio-political dicourse. Gintersdorfer/ Klaßen create spaces of confrontation that are ­characterised by speed, spontaneity, inde­pendence and curiosity.

In cooperation with the Musik­ theaterensemble Bremen, the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra and Ted Gaier of the band “Die Goldenen Zitronen”, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen explore the political potential of music theatre in their newest production “Les robots ne connaissent pas le blues” (Robots Don’t Know the Blues). Their goal is to open up music theatre to socio-political ­debate and discourse. The production primarily focuses on the difference b­ etween a European tradition of E ­ nlightenment and an African culture which hasn’t been influenced by the ­Enlightenment. Mozart’s opera “The Abduction from the Seraglio” will serve as the basis and model for the clash of divergent cultures. In “Les robots ne connaissent pas le blues”, two seemingly dissimilar worlds collide – classical ­music theatre and Couper-Décaler, a West African musical style in which the ­vocalists sing to a fast-paced electronic beat. What differences and similarities do these musical traditions have, which seem (at first listen) so completely o ­ pposite?

The participants will learn how to listen to the music in a different way, and in several sessions, develop a project in which the audience can also p ­ articipate. The festival will include open workshops and a symposium on opportunities for activism in music theatre.

Artistic directors of the festival: Katinka Deecke, Ingo Gerlach Artistic directors of the performance: Ted Gaier, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Benedikt von Peter, Markus Poschner Artists: Bremen music theatre ensemble, members of the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra

Various performance venues, ­Osnabrück: 19 – 30 Sep. 2014

Theater Bremen – Theater am ­Goetheplatz, Bremen: 2 – 5 Jul. 2015; Kampnagel, Hamburg: in the 2015/16 season

Berlin Atonal Festival

↗ www.theaterbremen.de

A Festival for New Methods in Sight and Sound

The Atonal Festival, revived in 2013, will take place again this year in the unconventional setting of a thermal ­power

(TR), Ensemble musikFabrik, Senyawa (ID), Alwin Weber, Samson Young (HK), Mivos Quartet (US), and others

Berlin Atonal 2013 – Kraftwerk Berlin

38 Kafka Goes to the Movies International event and publication project by Hanns Zischler with a DVD edition

Kafka was a movie-goer. What films did Kafka see? What traces did they leave in Kafka’s works? Hanns Zischler offered preliminary answers to these questions in his book “Kafka Goes to the Movies” in 1996, which was translated into nine ­languages and is meanwhile out of print.

Since then, further research has not only dug up more films, but also photos, ­newspaper reports, postcards, film adver­ tisements, distribution texts, ­censorship cards etc., as well as related texts by Kafka himself and his contemporaries. Kafka’s plans for Palestine, for example, are quite revealing in view of the Zionist ­propaganda film “Sivath Zion” (The Return to Zion), which is now available in a completely ­remastered version. The new edition of the book, published by the ­Verlag Galiani in Berlin, will contain new material which only ­became available with the digitali­ sation of large film archives and a significant number of silent films on two DVDs, as well as a posthumously published essay

by W.G. Sebald.

Three film series will be shown in ­Munich, Paris and Prague, highlighting the films that Kafka had seen. The p ­ roject will particularly highlight those films he watched on his journeys and ­visits to each respective location.

Artistic directors: Hanns Zischler, Stefan Drößler Films: Lutte pour la vie (1910), Nick et le vol de la Joconde (1911), La Broyeuse des coeurs Filmmuseum, Munich: 5 – 7 Apr. 2015; conference: Cinématèque française, Paris: 5 – 7 Jun. 2015; film series: Film­ový ústav, Prague: 11 – 13 Sep. 2015

Went to cinema.

Cried.

Hanns Zischler on some of the films Kafka saw – films that fascinated and moved him.

I don’t mean to sound smug when I say that my documentary essay might have been published several years too soon. In the mid-1990s, digitalisation of film archives wasn’t as far advanced as it is today, and several items remained hidden from view in the dispersed collections of early silent films because they were ­simply not listed in the film registries.

What’s more, the expanding use of DVDs has made it much easier to access these digitally recorded films.

The lamentable “movie gap history”, an ironic term coined by Fritz Güttinger, has meanwhile become somewhat more complete, though many desiderata are still waiting to be discovered.

1 CITY LIFE IN PRAGUE On a postcard to his friend Max, dated ­ 22 August 1908, Kafka mentions his visit to the major commemorative ­exhibition in Prague, saying, “that we have to go see the cinema, the machine hall and the Geishas long and often.”

It took me a while to appreciate the meaning of this urgent suggestion: The exhibition ­featured current footage of Prague made by the Czech film ­pioneer Jan Krizenicky – most likely a weekly newsreel of city life in Prague.

Some of this footage still exists at the Czech National Film ­Archive.

© Sammlung Hanns Zischler

↗ www.galiani.de

Omnia cinema

© Sammlung Hanns Zischler

39 2 THE WHITE SLAVE GIRL AGAIN AND AGAIN This film must have been enormously entertaining to the two friends and bachelors Kafka and Brod. They watched the movie twice and repeatedly ­mentioned individual scenes in their correspondence with one another.

The “White Slave Girl”, which was ­restored and made available in 1999, is tinted in blue, red and yellow ­representing the night, the bordello, ­ and the day – a chromatic scaling which enhanced the melodramatic ­action on film.

3 THE AUDIENCE FREEZES WHEN THE TRAIN PASSES My speculation that Kafka’s first entry is his “workbook” referred to the “big bang” of cinematic history, “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”, turned out to be incorrect. By that time, the film by the Lumière brothers from 1895 had long faded from public view and apparently those reports of audiences being awestruck is a legend. It is far more probable that Kafka was referring to a spectacle in “Small ­Venice”, a panorama constructed in the Vienna Prater in 1909/10 which included an artificial alpine landscape and a ­veritable train. Apparently, the audience received quite a start when the train entered and rolled past them.

4 THE AEROPLANE IN BRESCIA One of the most surprising discoveries was the film about the air show in ­Brescia in autumn 1909, which both Kafka and Brod mentioned in their travelogues and soon after described at length in separate reports.

Kafka’s report on this spectacle is so suffused with details, one might be tempted to believe he wrote the rough draft of a script for this film.

5 “THE NOVEL OF THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED”, JULY 1912 / NATURE FOOTAGE OF NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1908 It still seems like a bizarre twist of fate that a Gaumont film titled “The Novel of the Man Who Disappeared” was shown in Germany on 27 July 1912. ­Exactly on that day, Kafka made a stop in Dresden after a stay at a health resort, and ­continued on his way to Prague the following day. In September/­ October, he wrote the first chapter of the novel ­“The Man Who Disappeared” (a.k.a. “Amerika”).

6 “THEODOR KÖRNER” ­ OR “LÜTZOW’S WILD, DARING CHASE” For Kafka, watching this patriotic “flop” possessed a strongly erotic connotation.

And it is this intimate entanglement in the dark with the flickering image on the screen that makes it so intriguing and the exciting informality of the ­cinematic experience so special. From this point of view, it is not surprising that all that we know about these ­noctambulist ­adventures are steno­graphic and ­olfactory remnants – sighs, sweat and tears.

7 RETELLING A FILM STORY IS MORE COMPELLING THAN ­WRITING A LOVE LETTER: “LA BROYEUSE DE COEURS” Of all Kafka’s notes, thoughts and ­random memories of his visits to the cinema, the case of the French ­melodrama “La Broyeuse de coeurs” is singular. Essentially it is his sister’s retelling of the story upon returning home from the cinema that causes Kafka to ­interrupt the most important thing in his life – the affair of the heart, his substitute diary – his daily letter to Felice. And he doesn’t conceal the ­fact from the addressee that the reason for the interruption was his ­unquenchable curiosity (to hear his sister’s report) and thus ironically ­succumbed to this venial sin – a ­“confession” of a deed that Felice would never have noticed otherwise!

The Cinema Queen

8 “SLAVES OF GOLD” (LE COLLIER VIVANT) This Gaumont western, which ­unfortunately no longer exists, is the only film which Kafka characterised with stenographic concentration.

The writer’s equally passionate but futile desire to “capture it” is demonstrated by his visit to the cinema in almost painful clarity. The existing film stills, the cinema programme, the memories ­of the leading actress and the completely mangled German censor card make this film an extraordinary desideratum.

Interestingly enough, he didn’t mention a word about “Fantômas” which was also shown in the same film programme, but perhaps there are very hidden traces to be found elsewhere.

9 LOLOTTE After watching this tear-jerker by ­Gaumont, Kafka jotted the following in capital letters: Went to Cinema. Cried.

Lolotte.

Hanns Zischler (*1947), in addition to a prolific acting career, has worked as a journalist for many years. He has ­written numerous works published by the ­Galiani-Verlag, such as “Der Schmetterlingskoffer” (The Butterfly Suitcase, 2010) together with Hanna Zeckau, ­“Berlin ist zu groß für Berlin” (Berlin Is Too Big for Berlin, 2013), “Die Erkundung Brasiliens” (The Exploration of Brazil, ­ 2013) together with Sabine Hackethal and Carsten Eckert, and most recently “Das Mädchen mit den Orangenpa­pieren” (The Girl with the Orange P ­ apers). In 2013 Hanns Zischler received the Prize of the Literature Houses.

40 Fire and Forget An exhibition on the relationship ­between power, the body and violence

According to a study in 2013, the global market for “precision-guided ­ammunition”, often erroneously de­­­ scribed as “intelligent weapons”, will expand to about 50 percent by 2018. “Fire and forget” is military jargon for the ability of these guided weapons to home in on and strike targets without any human ­involvement. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin examines the implications and con­sequences of this military technology. In cooperation with the Israeli Center for Digital Art in ­Holon and the Museum for Contemporary Art in Bat Yam, curators Ellen Blumenstein and Daniel Tyradellis have teamed up to develop the exhibition, which includes an accompanying programme of discussions and workshops. The focus will be on the changes that occur in the individual and collective psyche when most of the human body is replaced by technology or “technologised”. Guided weaponry also shifts the act of violence away from us and into the virtual and invisible realm – the ­result being that humans no longer feel em­pathy or sympathy for the victims, nor have the chance to hesitate and search for non-lethal alternatives. – With military innovations which extend ­ beyond the military sphere and have ­ found their way into everyday life, the relationship ­between power, the body and violence has fundamentally changed. The exhibition in Berlin in 2015 will e­ xamine this constellation and initiate public debate on the fundamental r­elationship which humans have with war and violence.

Artistic directors: Ellen Blumenstein, Daniel Tyradellis Artists: Martin Dammann, Harun Farocki (CZ), Adela Jusic (BA), Miki Kratsman (AR), Gianni Motti (I), Rabih Mroué (LB), Trevor Paglen (US), Chloe Piene (US), Amir Yatziv (IL), Artur Zmijewski (PL) KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin: 30 Apr. – 9 Aug. 2015 ↗ www.kw-berlin.de

africologne 2014/2015 Co-production of “Coltan Fever” in 2014 & the African Arts Festival 2015

Cologne’s long-term goal is to e­ stablish itself as a leading centre of contemporary arts from Africa. The Theater im Bauturm at the Freies Schauspiel Cologne is working to achieve this goal by organising what is now the third edition of the “africologne” festival in cooperation with numerous project partners. The event is shaping up to be significantly larger in 2015 in terms of participants and performance venues; in addition to the six established venues, the Schauspielhaus Cologne and the a­ lternative art and cultural centre ­Odonien have agreed to

Cologne Philharmonic Orchestra, Cologne: 2 – 3 May 2015; Vienna: 23 – 24 May 2015; Festival ZeitRäume, Basel: 12 – 13 Sep. 2015; Philharmonic orchestra at the Rainy Days festival, Luxembourg: 28 – 29 Nov. 2015 ↗ www.achtbruecken.de

Straight White Men Representation, performance and body politics, festival

Miki Kratsman, Targeted Killing, 2010

host festival performances as well. The feature ­presentation of the festival will be the play “Coltan Fever – The Future of Raw Materials” – a co-production by the Goethe-Institut Kigali in Rwanda and the Congolese performance collective Tarmac des Auteurs from Kinshasa. The piece explores the effects of coltan ­mining, an extremely valuable metallic ore required for high-end technological products. In several African countries, it has sparked and fuelled social maladies, corruption, war and the irresponsible exploitation of nature. The play, written by Aristide Tarnagda and directed by Jan-Christoph Gockel, will premiere in October 2014 at the Burkinan Récréâtrales theatre festival, one of the most prominent of its kind on the African continent, and will later be shown in C ­ ologne in 2015. The festival will also­­include numerous guest productions. The project will present a number of ­African artists, who are not as well known to European audiences, such as the choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso and the Ivorian-­Haitian choreographic duo Massidi Adiatou and Jenny Mezile.

The broad spectrum of performances will be ­accompanied by an extensive programme of workshops, symposiums, discussions and dramatic readings. In this way, the organisers wish to stimulate public i­ nterest in intercultural themes in the areas of theatre, dance, film, fine arts and literature and promote networking between artists from African countries and Germany. Together with the city of Cologne, the project hopes to establish a long-term cultural partnership between the metropolitan city on the Rhine and Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou, as well as secure regional financing to ensure that the biannual art and cultural festival “africologne” can continue being staged in the future.

Artistic director: Gerhardt Haag Project director/Curator: Kerstin Ortmeier Production manager: Lisa Kihm-­Dolmaire Artists: Massidi Adiatou (CI), Panaibra Gabriel Canda (MZ), Serge Aimé Coulibaly (BF), Jan-­ Christoph Gockel, Nicolas Guyot (F), Laurenz Leky, Harvey Massamba (CD),

Jenny Mezile, Yves Ndagano (CD), Michael Pietsch, Tarmac des Auteurs (CD), Aristide Tarnagda (BF), Tim Winsey (BF) Festival Récréâtrales (Artistic director: Etienne Minoungou), Burkina Faso: 25 Oct. – 2 Nov. 2014; world premiere Coltan Fever on 31 Oct. 2014, Theater im Bauturm, africologne Festival, Cologne: 17 – 27 Jun. 2015 ↗ www.theater-im-bauturm.de

EIGHT BRIDGES / ­Music for Cologne 2015: Music and ­Politics Klangforum Wien – A day and an hour in urbo kune

The field of New Music is often a­ccused of showing too little political commitment. Consequently, the fifth addition of the Cologne music festival explores whether there are any political positions to be found in contemporary New Music – especially in works which are not text-based. Under the motto “Music. Politics?” the 2015 festival will present a large number of concerts by internationally renowned orchestras and leading ensembles of New Music. In ­addition to a series of participative projects for amateur musicians, the festival will include events portraying the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, in whose works political commitment plays a ­central role.

The festival is developing an interdisciplinary, cross-genre project in cooperation with the “Klangforum 25”, which examines the visionary and p ­ olitical potential of music by means of artistic actions, lectures and concerts. Audiences will have free admission to a 25-hourlong, diverse programme of concerts and philosophical and scientific reflection and exchange, staged in the concert hall and foyer of the Cologne Philharmonic Orchestra, in the festival tent and in the neighbouring Museum Ludwig.

Following the overwhelming success of “Precarious Bodies”, the HAU ­Theatre am Ufer is taking on the subject of body politics once again in a two-week theatre festival titled “Straight White Men”. With eleven productions from the areas of theatre, fine arts, dance, p ­ erformance and music, the festival will feature works which address the cultural scientific stereotype of the white, heterosexual ­ male as a representation of inconspi­ cuousness and normality. The theme and title of the festival are based on a production of the same name by the New York director Young Jean Lee. The theatrical language in her works is known to go beyond standard representations of ­ ­gender, thereby forcing the audience to reflect on their own cultural stereotypes.

In his production of Chekhov’s “Platonov”, the Belgian director Luk Perceval wishes to explore extreme e­ motions, the possibilities of expressing them and their social origins. The dance performance by the American choreo­ grapher Andros Zins-Browne examines the figure of the cowboy, which c­ ontinues to be a symbol of Western, white­ ­masculinity today. The result is a g­ rotesque requiem to the old heroes who represented pure manliness.

“SexyFM” is a performance by the Portuguese ­artists Ana Borralho & João Galante. The performance will feature thirteen actors, casted exclusively for this production, who will take to the stage and interact with the audience. The pro­duction aims to investigate the mech­anisms which ­determine our social identities and d ­ efine what we regard as “male” and ­“female”.

Ivo Dimchev will present his famous ­performance of “Lil Handel” – a story in which an aging ­ theatre diva tries to pour out her heart to the audience by ­auctioning off a syringe of her own blood to the highest bidder.

Artistic director: curatorial team at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theatre artists: Young Jean Lee (US), Luk Perceval (BE) Dance artists: Andros Zins-Browne (BE), Marlene Monteiro Freitas (PT) Performance artists: Ana Borralho & João Galante (PT), Zachary Oberzan (US), Thabiso Heccius Pule & Hector Thami Manekehla (ZA), Ivo Dimchev (BG) HAU 1, 2, 3, Berlin: 8 – 19 Apr. 2015 ↗ www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

© Miki Kratsman, courtesy of Chelouche Gallery

Artistic director: Louwrens Langevoort Participants: Klangforum Wien, ­Vokalensemble Nov a Wien, Anna Soucek (AT), Jan Tabor (CZ), Michael Scheidl (AT), Nora Scheidl (AT)

41 Indonesia LAB Laboratory / festival of ­I ndonesian performative arts

© Mário Macilau

The Frankfurt LAB is launching a new project, titled Indonesia LAB, together with six partners: the Ensemble Modern, the Hessian Theatre Academy, the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, the Städelschule, the HTW University of Music and Performing Arts and the Forsythe Company. The project aims to encourage encounters and joint productions by Indonesian and German artists from the fields of music, dance and fine arts.

The Indonesia LAB directs its attention to the fourth-largest nation in the world. With more than 250 ethnic groups, Indonesia has long been a crucible of the most diverse cultural practices and religions. As an Islamic democracy, Indonesia is undergoing processes of transformation which are gaining global relevance. Yet Europeans are seldom aware of Indonesia’s enormous cultural diversity. Indonesia LAB wants to present the artistic strategies, working and organisational forms in Indonesia which have arisen as artists overwrite, reshape or break with historic art traditions.

The Ensemble Modern and the artists’ collective Ruangroupa are among the many artists participating in this project.

In close cooperation with Indonesian musicians and composers, the Ensemble Modern will produce new compositions for joint performance with Indonesian musicians. Ruangroupa, a collective of numerous artists from the areas of film, video art, design and performing arts, has become well-known for its interventions in public areas in Jakarta. Ruangoupa will open a temporary ArtLAB in Frankfurt and develop various actions and interventions in the city of Frankfurt together with students from the HTW and the Städelschule. The project will bring Ioannis Mandafounis, Tian Rotteveel, Darlane Litaay and Agus Mbendhol together – four of the most talented young choreographers from Germany and Indonesia.

The Indonesia LAB will begin in summer 2014 in Indonesia and Germany and will conclude in autumn 2015 with festivals in Jakarta and Frankfurt. The concluding festival in Frankfurt will take place shortly before the Frankfurt Book Fair, which will feature Indonesia as its “Guest of Honour” in 2015.

We Aren’t Ducks on the Pond. We’re Ships on the Ocean City Curator. A project by the city of Hamburg; art in public space

In 1981 Hamburg became one of the first German cities to introduce a pro­ gramme for art in public space. ­Curated, large-scale projects like “Jenisch­park” (1986), the “Hamburg Project 1989” (1989) and “weitergehen” (1997) are examples of the innovative and ex­peri­ mental character of the programme. In 2013 Hamburg created the position of “City Curator” to reflect on artistic debates in an urban context and generate new ideas for the p ­ rogramme. The new project “We Aren’t Ducks on the Pond...”, initiated by the city curator Sophie Goltz, is an attempt to provide the programme a new ­direction. It asks how Western-­ influ­enced public art can evolve so as to offer a global perspective. What kind of art is necessary and appropriate at a time of rising “rebellious cities” where public, democratic spaces are eroding? The title of the project “We Aren’t Ducks on the Pond…” alludes to a work by the artist Lawrence Weiner, presented at H ­ amburg Fish Market in 1989.

The project begins in May 2014 with a symposium and a survey of completed art projects in Hamburg’s public areas.

Artists are invited to present and discuss their projects in hindsight together with curators. In September 2014, a performance festival will take place featuring pioneers of Latin American performance art. Further research, interventions, performances and screenings are planned for 2014 and 2015. The project will culminate in summer 2015 with a festival presenting brand-new artistic works. A literary-discursive essay will document the numerous artistic contributions.

Artistic director: Sophie Goltz Artists: Georges Adéagbo (BJ), Maria Jose Arjona (CO), Nairy Baghramian (IR), Ricardo Basbaum (BR), Etctera (AR), Maria Jose Galindo (BO), Michaela

Melian, Marta Minujin (AR), Ahmet Ögüt (TR), Dan Perjovschi (RO), Johannes Paul Raether, Tracey Rose (ZA), Gabriel Sierra (CO), Omer Krieger (IL) Hamburg: 1 May 2014 – 30 Nov. 2015 ↗ www.stadtkuratorin-hamburg.de

Making Africa The design of a continent

In this large scale exhibition, the Vitra Design Museum presents contemporary design made in Africa and illustrates how design accompanies and even advances economic and political change in African countries.

The exhibition comprises a diverse range of media and objects – products, furniture, architectural models, textiles, magazines, music videos and smart phone apps. It addresses the question as to what extent design influences social interactions, the use of new technology, urban spaces and branches of industry. The project’s curators want to explicitly focus on the overlap of related disciplines, such as handicrafts, fine arts and architecture.

The featured contemporary works will be supplemented by historical documents which make reference to early post-colonial Africa. This will demonstrate how artists of the younger generation consciously tap into the positive sentiment, the new beginnings and self-confidence which ­Africa experienced in those early postcolo­nial years.

New media will play a special role. The goal is to encourage the African design scene to participate in the curatorial process leading up to the exhibition via social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and foster long-term international contacts.

Artistic director: Amelie Klein Curatorial consultant: Okwui Enwezor (NG) Advisory board: David Adjaye (GB), Manuel Herz (CH) and others Artists: XP&Expand Design (NG/GB), Pierre-Christophe Gam (CM/GB), Porky Hefer (ZA), Cyrus Kabiru (KE), Gonçalo

Mabunda (MZ), Mário Macilau (MZ), Saki Mafundikwa (ZW), NLÉ (NG/NL), Yinka Shonibare (GB), Vigilism (NG/US) Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein: 13 Mar. – 9 Sep. 2015 (tentative); Museo Guggenheim Bilbao/Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Bilbao orBarcelona: between autumn 2015 and summer 2016; Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon: 2016; Zeitz Museum of ­Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town: 2017 ↗ www.design-museum.de

The Trisha Brown Dance Company in Berlin A final encounter with the key works of dance modernity

The choreographer Trisha Brown is one of the most influential figures in the American contemporary dance scene.

The Trish Brown Dance Company, which she founded in 1970, is internationally renowned in the dance world, and her choreographic works have inspired and influenced several generations of dancers.

Her working method is characterised by a readiness to embrace new, experimental art forms and intensively collaborate with fine artists and composers.

Following several successful performances at the Berlin Academy of the Arts – such as the 1983 production “Set and Reset” featuring music by Laurie Andersen and set design by Robert Rauschenberg – the Academy wants to invite the Trisha Brown Dance Company once again to Berlin to perform several of Brown’s key works. It will offer a younger audience and younger generation of dancers a chance to discover her pioneering works.

In all likelihood, it will be the last chance to view these pieces, as the dance company will be disbanding at the end of 2015.

The programme will include the reconstruction of her famous pieces “Set and Reset” and “Son of Gone Fishin‘”, as well as a selection of early works which have never been performed in Berlin before. The stage programme will be accompanied by an exhibition of photos and films about the dancer and choreographer in the lobby of the Academy of the Arts, which will provide further insights into Brown’s work and methods.

Artistic director: ruangrupa (ID) Curators: Helly Minarti (ID), Anna Wagner Artists: Reza Afisina (ID), ruangrupa (ID), Ensemble Modern, Darlane Litaay (ID), Ioannis Mandafounis (GR), Agus „Mbendhol“ Margiyanto (ID), Garin Nugroho (ID), Arco Renz, Tian Retteveel (NL), Fitri Setyaningsih (ID), Jecko Siompo & Amigo, Eko Supriyanto, Melati Suryodarmo

Artistic director: Nele Hertling Choreography: Trisha Brown (US) Artists: Neal Beasley (US), Cecily Campbell (US), Tara Lorenzen (US), Megan Madorin (US), Tamara Riewe (US), Jamie Scott (US), Stuart Shugg (US), Nicholas Strafaccia (US), Samuel Wentz (US)

Frankfurt LAB, Frankfurt am Main: 1 Jun. 2014 – 31 Dec. 2015; Theater Salihara, Jakarta: 1 – 6 Sep. 2015

↗ www.adk.de

Academy of the Arts, Hanseatenweg, Berlin, guest performance: ­ 24 – 26 Apr. 2015

↗ www.frankfurt-lab.de

Making Africa, untitled, 2013

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Movies of a Political Thaw How the GDR nipped its ­ New German Film in the bud “The Spring Needs Time”, “I Am the Bunny”, “Trail of Stones”, “Miss Butterfly” – titles which are just as programmatic as they are poetic. DEFA films, almost all of which were banned by the ­leaders of the East German SED party in 1965.

Tobias Asmuth spoke with the chairman of the ­ DEFA Foundation Dr. Ralf Schenk about how an entire year of film production never made it to the cinema, but landed directly in the archives, and what aesthetic impact these films still have today.

“Don’t Think I’m Crying” portrays the emotional ­crisis of a pupil who rebels against the hypocrisy around him. “I Am the Bunny” tells the story of a young girl who is not allowed to enrol at university ­because her brother – for reasons unknown – is locked up in prison. What was in the air in 1965 that made East German filmmakers dare to address issues which ­ levelled criticism at the prevailing circumstances?

After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, younger a­rtists in particular, but also more liberal-minded ­cultural policymakers believed that in the shadow of the Wall – or perhaps in the “protection” of the Wall – they could reflect more openly and honestly on the problems of the GDR. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1960s, there were a number of books, plays, poems and also films which critically addressed the social reality of the GDR. In response to this sentiment, the DEFA planned a whole series of projects which touched on sensitive themes: conflicts in the economy in “Trail of Stones” and “The Spring Needs Time” problems in the justice system (I Am the Bunny) and youth politics (“Karla” and “Miss Butterfly”). Viewed altogether, the films present a social panorama of the GDR at that time.

between the filmmakers and the party – but they were sorely mistaken. Neither “Trail of Stones” nor “Berlin around the Corner”, which was dedicated to the working class, were spared the wrath of the SED hardliners. By the end of the year, even the modern-day fairy tale “When You Grow Up, Dear Adam” along with other films and unsynchronised rough cuts all disappeared into the State Film Archive where they remained hidden until the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990.

“Jahrgang 45” (The Forty-Fivers), the only ­ feature­l­­ength film by the artist STRAWALDE, plays with elements of Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). “Berlin around ­the Corner” has an edgy street realism. Aside from the political considerations, could the aesthetics of these films have played a role in their banning?

Despite the Berlin Wall, the DEFA filmmakers were not cut off from the rest of the world. They could go to festivals, to the cinema and even observe how inter­ national films were developing from the reports on West German TV. And the directors followed the latest trends, such as Konrad Wolf in his film “The Divided Sky” of 1964, which refers to the influences of Alain Renais. “Jahrgang 45” does indeed contain e­lements of Nouvelle Vague, but fi ­ lmmakers also incorporated stylistic features of ­Italian neorealism, British free cinema and black poetic ­realism from Poland. ­Aestheticsplayed only a marginal role in the film ban – politics were always the most ­significant factor. Whereby many held the opinion that films were supposed to have a didactic function as a means of agitation and propaganda. These people were always a little suspicious of aesthetic innovations and artistic experiments.

Some rather well-known East German artists collaborated on the banned films – the authors Christa Wolf and Ulrich Plenzdorf, the screenplay writer Wolfgang Kohlhaase, the popular actors Manfred Krug and Jutta Hoffmann. How did they come to terms with the fact that their work was banned?

At first they didn’t understand it at all and it took What led to this extraordinary surge of bans in­ them a long time to realise why films, which espoused a 1965/66 which shelved almost an entire year of DEFA better kind of socialism, were not desired. After a while, ­productions? they gradually understood that the hardliners in the SED had absolutely no interest in reform, that they The sense of renewal in the GDR was certainly ­actually wanted to prevent what was later described made possible and was encouraged by Nikita K ­ hru- during the Prague Spring as “socialism with a human ­shchev’s policies in the Soviet Union, which ­compared face”. It wasn’t until Wolf Biermann’s expulsion in 1976 with its socialist sister states, permitted only a limited that most of them started turning away from the GDR degree of openness and new freedoms. This thawing – ten or eleven years after their works were banned in period ended abruptly when Leonid Brezhnev came to 1965/66. power in 1965. Cultural policies were immediately reined in again – particularly in the GDR. And thus, Many of the directors of the banned films were fresh the political thaw, in which these DEFA movies were out of film school. What kind of impact did the bans being made, suddenly became a new ice age. At the have on their careers?

11th plenary session of the SED, the hardliners ­succeeded in pushing through their demands. “The Only two directors were sacked. One was Frank Spring Needs Time”, which had been showing at East Beyer, the director of “Trail of Stones” and the other German cinemas for several days, was immediately was Günter Stahnke, who made “The Spring Needs pulled. “Don’t Think I’m Crying” and “I Am the Bun- Time”. The other filmmakers more or less adapted to ny”, which had just been completed, were ­immediately the new circumstances. The DEFA studio in Berlin banned. The other films were in post-production, but was the only studio in East Germany where cinematic after the bans the responsible managers at the DEFA films could be produced. If you wanted to make big got “cold feet” and started questioning everything. films, you had to do it there. None of the filmmakers back then could imagine defecting to the West. In So you’re saying that after the SED made an example 1965, at the end of the Adenauer era, West Germany of two films, the DEFA started censoring itself? was not the choice destination for young filmmakers who were still convinced they could build a better Indeed, the committees at the DEFA and the film ­ socialism. Some directors allegorically integrated ministry scrutinised all of the scripts and filmed m ­ aterial, their experiences in later films, such as Frank Vogel and then censored itself, not even submitting certain whose historic film about Johannes Kepler portrayed films for state approval like “Karla” or “Miss Butterfly”. the universal and timeless mechanisms of censorship The DEFA hoped that the other films which were and inquisition. On the whole, the reactions to the ­supposed to premiere in 1966 would re-establish trust bans ranged from quiet subversion to adaptation.

The DEFA Foundation is now working to restore and present all of the banned films of 1965. What makes these films so important apart from the fact that they all shared the same fate?

These films have an aesthetic value, which the DEFA later achieved occasionally with individual films, but never again in such volume. Only this once did it produce such an artistically dense, critical, panoramic view of East German society. This level of cinematic artistry could have gained international fame had the films been released. When several of the films were ­finally completed in 1990 and shown at the Berlinale Forum, a number of West European and American ­critics were surprised. Many of them came to the same conclusion: New German Film, which began in the mid-1960s in West Germany with Kluge, Schamonis and Wenders, would have had a counterpart in East Germany at the same time. But unfortunately those in ­power radically nipped it in the bud.

Banned DEFA films 1965–1990–2015 Film screenings, restoration, digitalisation, publication

December 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the most extensive film ban in German cinematic history. At its 11th plenary session in 1965, the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party banned twelve new DEFA films. The decision effectively halted DEFA’s entire annual film production at various stages in 1965 and 1966.

The DEFA Foundation will now examine thisextraordinary “across-the-board” film ban and present these films which were kept from the public for so long. The twelve banned films will be released as a film series and offered to cinemas and institutions for public screenings. These will be accompanied by discussions with experts, contemporary witnesses, actors and filmmakers. Numerous events are already in planning, for which the DEFA Foundation is cooperating with partner institutions like the Zeughauskino, the German Historical Museum and the film museums in Munich and Vienna. In addition to the restoration of the film “Sommerwege” and digitalisation of several banned DEFA films, which are still in analogue format, the organisers will produce a publication and present the films in the German Digital Library.

Artistic director: Ralf Schenk Zeughauskino Berlin at the Deutsches His­torisches Museum; Filmmuseum Munich, Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna, LEOKINO/Cinematograph in Innsbruck; STADTKINO BASEL; Bozner Film ­Festival, Bozen ↗ www.defa-stiftung.de

© DEFA-Stiftung / Eberhard Daßdorf (Karla)

© DEFA-Stiftung / Klaus-Dieter Schwarz

© DEFA-Stiftung / Jörg Erkens

© DEFA-Stiftung / Jörg Erkens

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Don't Think I'm Crying

I Am the Bunny

Trail of Stones

Karla

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Committees of the German Federal Cultural Foundation The Board of Trustees is responsible for making final decisions concerning the general focus of the Foundation’s activities, its funding priorities and organizational structure. The 14-member board reflects the political levels which were integral to the Foundation’s establishment. Trustees are appointed for a five-year term.

Board of Trustees Chairwoman of the Board Prof. Monika Grütters Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Representing the Federal Foreign Office Prof. Dr. Maria Böhmer Minister of State Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Steffen Kampeter Parliamentary State Secretary Representing the German Bundestag Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Thierse Vice President of the German Bundestag Hans-Joachim Otto Former Parliamentary State Secretary als Vertreter der Länder Boris Rhein Hessian State Minister for Science and Art Stephan Dorgerloh State Minister of Education of Saxony-Anhalt Representing the German Länder Klaus Hebborn Councillor for Education, Culture and Sports, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States Dr. Dietmar Woidke Minister-President of Brandenburg Representing the fields of art and culture Prof. Dr. Bénédicte Savoy Professor of Art History Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist

Advisory Committee The Advisory Committee makes recommendations on the thematic focus of the Foundation’s activities.

The committee is comprised of leading figures in the arts, culture, business, academics and politics.

Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut, Chairman of the Advisory Committee

Dr. Volker Rodekamp President of the Association of German Museums

Inprint

Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Cultural Policy Society

Publisher Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Johano Strasser German P.E.N. Center

Franckeplatz 2 06110 Halle an der Saale T 0345 2997 0, F 0345 2997 333 info@kulturstiftung-bund.de ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de

Frank Werneke Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein President of the German Theatre Association Olaf Zimmermann Managing Director of the German Cultural Council Juries and curatorial panels The Federal Cultural Foundation draws on the scientific and artistic expertise of some 50 jury and curatorial panel members who advise the Foundation on thematic and project-specific matters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects posted on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de.

The Foundation

Editorial advisor Tobias Asmuth Final editing Christoph Sauerbrey Translations Robert Brambeer Design Neue Gestaltung, Berlin Illustrations Laetitia Gendre (courtesy by the artist)

Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director

Druck BUD, Potsdam

Secretarial offices Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch (Berlin office) / Christine Werner Team Assistant to the Executive Committee Dr. Lutz Nitsche Contract department Christian Plodeck (legal advisor) / Susanne Dressler / Katrin Gayda / Doris Heise / Anja Petzold Press and public relations Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel (dept. head) / Tinatin Eppmann / Bosse Klama / Juliane Köber / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier

Dr. Dorothea Rüland Secretary General of the DAAD, Vice Chairwoman of the Advisory Committee Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the board of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung

General Project Funding Torsten Maß (dept. head) / Bärbel Hejkal / Hanna Saur

Jens Cording Commissioner of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik

Project controlling Steffen Schille (dept. head) / Antonia Engelhardt / Franziska Gollub / Fabian Märtin / Antje Wagner

Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States

Editor-in-chief Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel

Executive Committee Hortensia Völckers Artistic Director

Funding and programme department Kirsten Haß (dept. head) / Ursula Bongaerts / Marius Bunk / Teresa Darian / Kristin Dögel / Marcel Gärtner / Dr. Marie Cathleen Haff / Dr. Alexander Klose / Antonia Lahmé / Anne Maase / Uta Schnell / Karoline Weber

Prof. Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council

Executive Board Hortensia Völckers, Alexander Farenholtz (responsible for the content)

Administration Andreas Heimann (dept. head) / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe

Copy date 31 Aug. 2014 Print run 26.000 By-lined contributions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editor. © Kulturstiftung des Bundes – All rights reserved.

Reproduction in part or whole without prior written consent from the German Federal Cultural Foundation is strictly prohibited.

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The Website The Federal Cultural Foundation maintains an ­extensive, bilingual website where you can find ­detailed information about the Foundation’s ­activities, responsibilities, funded projects, ­programmes and much more. Visit us at: ↗ www.kulturstiftung-bund.de ↗ facebook.com/kulturstiftung ↗ twitter.com/kulturstiftung

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