Kultur Magazine 28: 2018

kultur GERMANY | AUSTRALIA | ART | CULTURE 2018 EDITION 28

ABOUT KULTUR kultur edition 28 highlights some of the Goethe-Institut’s cultural programs and events in 2018/19. Take a look behind the scenes and learn more about the people and organisations we work with. Through interviews and articles we provide a deeper understanding of our network and exchange between Germany and Australia.

Order your annual complimentary copy of kultur magazine at info@sydney.goethe.org To keep up to date, sign up to our newsletter, check our website or connect via social media.

Find out more about the Goethe-Institut in Australia: www.goethe.de/australia

ABOUT THE GOETHE-INSTITUT The Goethe-Institut is the cultural liaison between Germany and Australia. We are a not for profit, independent cultural organisation with a global reach. Our mandate is to promote the study of the German language abroad, and to encourage and facilitate international cultural exchange.

The Goethe-Institut in Melbourne was founded in 1972, followed by the Sydney branch in 1974.

Our two local branches work with partners and networks across Australia.

While we offer German language classes and examinations for about 2,000 participants in Sydney and Melbourne, our online courses and the eLibrary are available across the country.

We support schools and teachers to provide excellent teaching and learning materials and methods to keep German as a foreign language strong in Australia.

Our cultural program presents contemporary arts and culture from Germany. It is developed together with an extensive network of Australian partners like festivals, universities and galleries. Activities include events such as exhibitions, concerts, films and talks, but we also facilitate the cultural dialogue in a broader sense, as we initiate, facilitate and nurture important connections between the Australian and German scenes.

We are proud to be part of a strong global network: the Goethe-Institut has 159 branches in 98 countries. We work independently and at arm’s length from the German government.

45 percent of our local budget are generated through language classes, examinations and other services, while 55 percent are from the Federal Foreign Office of Germany, grants and sponsorship.

WILLKOMMEN People are at the heart of all our cultural programs and exchange. The Goethe-Institut is going strong in Australia, thanks to our long-term partners, supporters and friends.

DYNAMICS OF AIR 02 / EXHIBITION

DYNAMICS OF AIR

ENGINEERING OF AIR TRANSSOLAR

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On a daily basis our global network is active in many ways.

Three years into my term as Director Australia, my calender lists more than 1,000 meetings, openings, conferences, lunches, trips, and visits. Many of these lead to activities you will find on our website. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface dozens of people exchange ideas, bridging intercultural gaps and help building strong bonds between Australia and Germany through language and culture.

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In this edition of kultur, Dynamics of Air is a prime example.

For almost two years discussions about the program included many trips and meetings between Europe and Melbourne as well as a consultation with the German president and his delegation during the state visit in 2017. The results certainly will initiate further exchange between designers, scientists, engineers, students and academics in Melbourne and beyond.

I sincerely thank all the fantastic people working with me in Australia including my very own team in Melbourne and Sydney.

Let’s celebrate together

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POETRY OF AIR MIKAEL MIKAEL

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ART OF AIR EDITH KOLLATH

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QUALITY OF AIR BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE

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PERCEPTION, ARCHITECTURE AND SCIENCE OF AIR

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DRAWING OF AIR CAMERON ROBBINS VISIBILITY OF AIR PHRED PETERSEN

KINOKONZERT

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KINOKONZERT FILM AND LIVE MUSIC

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ALEXANDER HACKE AND DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO

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DARK SOUNDS AND VISIONS CHIARA KICKDRUM

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RESTORE, PRESERVE, DIGITISE

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THE GOETHE COLLECTION AT THE NFSA

Sonja Griegoschewski DIRECTOR, GOETHE-INSTITUT AUSTRALIA

POLITICS OF AIR FRIEDRICH VON BORRIES

ART AND CULTURE

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JULIANE LORENZ ON RW FASSBINDER

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IN THE MOMENT TRIO ELF

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THEATRE OF RESEARCH THEATER FUNDUS

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VRWANDLUNG KAFKA IN VIRTUAL REALITY

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THE GERMAN-AUSTRALIAN OPERA GRANT

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INSTANT CITY TOKYO 2020

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kultur © Rupert Kaldor 2016

GERMANY | AUSTRALIA | ART | CULTURE 2018 EDITION 28

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PUBLISHER Goethe-Institut Australia SYDNEY 90 Ocean Street, Woollahra NSW 2011 T 02 8356 8333 MELBOURNE Level 1, 448 St Kilda Road, Melbourne VIC 3004 T 03 9864 8999 EDITOR/DIRECTOR Sonja Griegoschewski, info@sydney.goethe.org COORDINATORS Jochen Gutsch, Gabriele Urban, Friederike Prillwitz • Views expressed by the contributors are not necessarily endorsed by the Goethe-Institut. No responsibility is accepted by the publisher for the accuracy of information contained in the texts and advertisements. DESIGN Torkos Ploetz Design, Melbourne PRINTING Doran Printing Pty Ltd, Melbourne IMAGES The Goethe-Institut has taken every possible care to secure clear copyright permission for all images published here. COVER Edith Kollath by Hannes Wiedemann [Nothing will ever be the same]

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EXHIBITION: DYNAMICS OF AIR Evelyn Tsitas

AS AIR IS INVISIBLE, WE TAKE IT FOR GRANTED UNTIL SOMETHING GOES WRONG. IT’S ONLY WHEN POLLUTION CLOGS THE ATMOSPHERE, SMOG OBSCURES THE HORIZON AND PEOPLE STRUGGLE PHYSICALLY DURING COLD SNAPS AND HEAT WAVES THAT WE FOCUS ON WHAT WE CAN’T SEE. Dr Malte Wagenfeld, Senior Lecturer, Industrial Design at RMIT and Professor Jane Burry, Dean of Design at Swinburne University, have taken air, that invisible element essential for life, as the starting point for a major exhibition to be held at RMIT Gallery in partnership with the Goethe-Institut.

“Whilst a designer might focus on the object that produces light or moves air I am more interested in designing the actual qualities of light and air. For instance, rather than designing a fan, I am interested in the air and how changes in air flow and temperature affect the way we interact with spaces.”

Evelyn Tsitas in conversation with Malte Wagenfeld and Jane Burry

Jane explains that space — the space around us as we sit at a desk, sprawl on the couch or lie in bed — has a life of its own. We might not see it, but this space is a complex eco-system. Think of the muggy, steamy bathroom after a hot shower and how you have to wipe the mirror clean of condensation, or your warm breath visibly escaping as vapour on a winter’s morning. “We are all air dwellers and air makers,” explains Burry. “Every individual has an impact on the environment, simply from the act of breathing.”

“As designers, how do we design to investigate climate change and use less energy and resources whilst simultaneously creating more pleasurable and healthy interior environments? How can we communicate this to audiences and encourage them to think about how we are going to be living in a changing climate?” asks Malte Wagenfeld.

As an architect with a strong focus on mathematics, Jane Burry has no problem with curating highly conceptual works based on an invisible substance. “Air is a structural material,” she explains. “The problem with designing buildings which have little consideration of the environment is that we are in danger of forgetting knowledge of how to build structures that are receptive to changes in temperature and the climate. We put in heating and air conditioning that use a vast amount of energy after a building has been designed rather than taking into account where the building is placed and the reality of the climate where we live.”

Malte Wagenfeld, the grandson of the German Bauhaus designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld, came to Australia from Germany as a child, and points to the passive cooling systems of the traditional ‘Queenslander’ buildings — constructed on stilts and well ventilated — as stellar examples of building for airflow and the reality of the environment. “By turning our backs on the design traditions of passive cooling and heating, and cocooning ourselves from the outside climate, we are turning our backs on using less energy and resources generally, and that has an impact on the environment,” he said. Wagenfeld recently completed his PhD exploring atmospheric encounters such as sound, light, breezes, air, smells, humidity and temperature, and investigated how re-contextualising these can lead to new designs for interior spaces.

How will the curators present an exhibition based on air, when it is around us, and we can’t even see it? Wagenfeld says that audiences will be able to ‘feel’ and experience different environments relating to cities heating up because of climate change, and plunge themselves into momentary ‘thermal shock’ going from air conditioned to hot environments.

“This exhibition will allow audiences to engage with the interface of air, lived space and architecture. They will be able to move through experiential environments and atmospheres, interact with inflatable structures, and microturbulence,” he said.

Helping audiences visualise the invisible will be achieved through works that utilise augmented reality to allow people to feel and sense the environment. “The aim of the exhibition is to make this a bit of an adventure, an interactive experience that hopefully will deliver a few surprises for people,” said Jane.

“The exhibition environment is an opportunity to give people a revelation through experience. We want audiences to go away thinking about air differently and about our influence on the environment we live in.”

Dynamics of Air

Dynamics of Air is an exhibition showcasing specially commissioned works by designers, creative practitioners and engineers that captures the beauty, dynamics and sensuality of air in our built environment and its critical role in designing for a zero carbon future. The exhibition explores radical innovations for creative sustainability in design and the built environment, and brings together leading local and international artists and designers including: Transsolar, Friedrich von Borries and Edith Kollath (Germany), Breathe Earth Collective (Austria), Philippe Rahm (Switzerland/France), Enric Ruiz Geli (Spain), Little Wonder (Gyungju Chyon and John Sadar USA), and from Australia; Natasha Johns-Messenger, Cameron Robbins, Chris Cottrell, Prof Simon Watkins, and Phred Petersen.

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DYNAMICS OF AIR PUBLIC PROGRAMS & EVENTS Thursday 13 September 2018 6.00 – 8.00pm DYNAMICS OF AIR EXHIBITION OPENING Friday 14 September 2018 12.30 – 1.30pm CLIMATE & DESIGN German guests Thomas Auer (Transsolar) and Edith Kollath (artist) in conversation with curator Malte Wagenfeld Saturday 15 September 2018 2.00 – 3.00pm HYBRID FORESTS BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE (AUSTRIA) Natural ecosystems and built environments, public talk Tuesday 9 October 2018 12.30 – 1.30pm SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY Phred Petersen, artist talk

14 SEPTEMBER – 17 NOVEMBER 2018 RMIT GALLERY, MELBOURNE

© RMIT

PROFESSOR JANE BURRY is the Dean of the School of Design in the Faculty of Health Arts and Design at Swinburne University of Technology, formerly Professor and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University. Jane’s research focuses on mathematics and computing in contemporary design. She has practiced, taught, supervised and researched internationally, including many architectural projects.

DR MALTE WAGENFELD is Senior Lecturer of Industrial Design at RMIT University as well as a researcher and practicing industrial designer whose explorative designs and texts have been internationally exhibited, distributed and published. In addition to the design of furniture, products and appliances, he investigates how to design the ‘immaterial’, such as interior climates.

The aim is to create healthier spatial environments for relaxed, productive, environmentally responsible surroundings.

Thursday 11 October 2018 5.30 – 6.30pm SPEAK PERCUSSION POLAR FORCE Eugene Ughetti and Philip Samartzis, performance and talk Thursday 18 October 2018 5.30 – 6.30pm DRONES & BIOMIMICRY Melbourne Festival Event Simon Watkins, Micro Flight Vehicle performance Thursday 25 October 2018 5.30 – 6.30pm WHITE CLOUDS OF SUGAR Mikael Mikael and Friedrich von Borries, performance and artist talk Thursday 1 November 2018 5.30 – 6.30pm EXPLORATIONS OF AIR Malte Wagenfeld and Jane Burry, curators’ talk Thursday 8 November 2018 6.00 – 7.30pm WIND GENERATED DRAWING SYSTEMS Cameron Robbins in conversation with curator Malte Wagenfeld and Jan van Schaik, RMIT Architecture & Urban Design Dates and times are correct at the time of print, but may be subject to change in due course. Please check our website for information and event details. www.goethe.de/australia

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ENGINEERING OF AIR: TRANSSOLAR Transsolar is an international climate-engineering firm determined to create exceptional, highly comfortable indoor and outdoor spaces with a positive environmental impact. They pioneered the concept KlimaEngineering, which describes an approach to climate-responsive design that takes advantage of the specific local climate and surroundings to maximise user comfort and passive strategies. Such an approach tailors architectural and mechanical systems to the local climate and programmatic requirements, in order to contribute to a special experience for the user.

Environmental qualities will become part of the experience — while minimising the use of resources.

Š TRANSSOLAR: Testing Cloudscapes

THOMAS AUER is partner and managing director of Transsolar and professor for Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design at the TU Munich.

He has developed concepts for buildings and districts noted for their innovative strategies, collaborating with world renowned architecture firms on numerous international design projects around the world.

Dynamics of Air

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SENSUALITY OF AIR: OUTSIDE _IN Dr Malte Wagenfeld

CURATOR MEETS THE CREATOR: FOR DYNAMICS OF AIR , MALTE WAGENFELD AND THE CLIMATE ENGINEERING COMPANY TRANSSOLAR WORKED TOGETHER ON A PROJECT CALLED OUTSIDE _IN. As part of the exhibition, there will be an experiential environment in the gallery that simulates the type of microclimatic perceptual experiences that might be encountered in outside environments — such as a park, a forest, the beach, or a combination of such settings.

I first met with Thomas Auer and his team in September 2017 at the Transsolar headquarters located on the green outskirts of Stuttgart. This was when we discussed the idea of jointly developing a project for this exhibition. I presented my research into the ‘aesthetics of air’ and mentioned my fascination with what makes the outside air feel so different from the inside.

This might seem like an obvious matter, hardly an insight, however it is in fact extremely difficult to quantify.

I am captivated by the dynamics and transience of microclimates and phenomena. Consider the dappled shade and sun when walking under and between trees, or experiencing a pocket of cool moist air under a tree before entering a patch of radiant warmth. When investigating the nature of something as seemingly unremarkable as a breeze, we discover that it is always changing direction and intensity, it is temporally entirely unpredictable and aperiodic. But most surprisingly, it is incredibly localised. A simple observational experiment will reveal this: study the leaves on a tree and you will find one leaf that is flittering in the breeze whilst its immediate neighbour might be entirely still.

Based on these initial thoughts, I suggested we build an experiential environment that somehow captures these experiences inside a gallery space. Thomas immediately jumped on this idea and mentioned an installation they had just completed, called Reversío at the Expo for Design, Innovation & Technology (EDIT) in Toronto, Canada. Thomas introduced me to his colleague Tommaso Bitossi who had just returned from Toronto. One of their key insights was that the acoustic environment plays an important role.

In outdoor spaces there is an absence of acoustic reverberation which is always present indoors. By using recycled acoustic absorbers, they were able to simulate this acoustic perception.

But whereas the Reversío installation in Toronto used many natural systems and vegetation creating an environment that resembled a greenhouse or rainforest, the installation Outside_In for Dynamics of Air will be markedly different. The visual environment will be heavily subdued and almost neutral, there are to be no visual cues as to what might be perceptually encountered within the different parts of the gallery space. It is to be an overwhelmingly bodily experience of breezes, temperature variations: radiant warmth, dappled warm and cool pockets of air, humidity, moist air, dry air, smells and so on.

Different microclimates will be encountered as the visitor moves through the space, and these microclimates will themselves be constantly transient and morphing. There are many challenges in creating such an environment inside a gallery. Firstly, the gallery as a building needs to be fully air-conditioned, so the installation must work with this reality, harvesting the cool dry air to power part of the system. Heat-pumps, UV lamps, misters, humidifiers and fans all controlled by microprocessors and specially coded algorithms will form part of the magic.

The larger goal, for both Transsolar and myself, is to create such environments of dynamic interior microclimates by employing passive strategies and renewable energy, aiming for a net zero carbon footprint. But that is not the overarching investigation with this installation, having to work within an air-conditioned space for one makes this impossible. So what we are exploring here is the question: how do we generate the experience of the type of dynamic and transient phenomena we might experience outside within an interior space?

Outside_In is an experiment as much as a gallery installation.

Investigating how this can be created in a dedicated, specially designed building — new or retrofitted — using sustainable and passive design strategies would then constitute the next stage.

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POLITICS OF AIR: FRIEDRICH VON BORRIES

Dynamics of Air

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THE AIR WE BREATHE, OUR INTERIOR, URBAN CLIMATES, AND INCREASINGLY THE WEATHER AND GLOBAL CLIMATE ARE ALL DESIGNED. ADVERTENTLY OR INADVERTENTLY, THEY ARE ALL A RESULT OF DECISIONS MADE ON A SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SCALE. Friedrich von Borries is an intellectual theoretician who concerns himself in particular with the social and political aspects of design. His practice evolves around asking questions and posing provocations, often based on fictional elements. He is interested in how design can produce positive change, especially from a social perspective.

For kultur, he explains his Dynamics of Air project UN-Mahac.

The UN-Mahac is a secret institution of the United Nations. It operates mostly on the sly. UN-Mahac stands for ‘United Nations Management and Harvesting of Clouds’. Founded in the 1950s, the institution was supposed to investigate how the weather can be regulated and controlled, on a global scale. While the original idea was to avoid catastrophic droughts, many heads of states may have had less noble objectives, as the manipulation of the weather can also be used as a weapon in times of conflict.

What sounds like a future fantasy, even in an era that is shaped by technological progress, actually matched the scientific research of that time. However, this research was influenced by the UN-Mahac. They supported many scientists with their weather research and initiated large-scale projects. On the one hand, this led to the creation of a substantive cloud atlas: which led to a substantive cloud atlas: areas of development, formation speeds, morphogenesis, and movements where documented, analysed, and mapped.

On the other hand, the UN-Mahac promoted applied research with the help of the American, Soviet, and later Chinese military.

Just to name one of the many fields of study: fighter jets were equipped with chemical tanks the dissemination of which could make clouds rain or prevent rain.

© Friedrich von Borries

The experiments of Wilhelm Reich caused the most sensation.

Reich, a psychoanalyst and sex researcher, experimented with so-called ‘cloud busters’ that looked like rocket launchers. Those cloud busters were supposed to use the energy of what he called Orgone — a substance discovered by himself — in order to change the weather. According to contemporaneous news articles, his testings led to strong rainfalls, an effect that was confirmed in the early 2000s by German artist and physician, Christoph Keller.

The practices of the UN-Mahac were not limited to the support of technological developments — they acted on a political scale as well. Central was the question of who owns the clouds — the states where they developed, or those where they were situated. These questions were hard to answer. The residence status of clouds

is fluid until they rain out. They are only temporarily present, which is why legal terms of property in the existing international law cannot be applied. At international conferences, legal experts aimed to create a global division of ‘weather zones of influence’ which of course displayed the former power relations.

Until today, these ‘weather zones of influence’ are subject to negotiations on UN Climate Change conferences, in which China is of great significance due to the Asian nation’s very active weather manipulation policies, pursued since the 1990s. Within the weather zones of influence, it is the responsibility of the states to implement regulations in accordance to their civil law.

The airspace above the Antarctic is a highly competitive zone. After long negotiations, it was awarded to the UN-Mahac.

Currently, the UN-Mahac is discussing the procedure by which clouds in their areas of responsibility should be distributed.

Although the technical questions of cloud harvesting are mostly answered, the key question about distributional issues remains unresolved.

Which criteria should be considered: the maximisation of agricultural return, or a fair distribution of weather resources considering equal opportunities — even if that means that crop failure could endanger nutrition all over the world? In addition to the optimisation of weather conditions for global agriculture, another primary objective of the UN-Mahac is to avoid water wars and catastrophic droughts.

The UN-Mahac is arguably the least-known institution, despite the fact that it is one of the most influential UN bodies when it comes to climate change. For a global democracy, it is important to disclose the veil of concealment and make their tasks and activities transparent.

DR FRIEDRICH VON BORRIES architect and professor of Design Theory at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg, Germany, operates between the blurring boundaries of urban planning, architecture, design and art.

The focus of his work is the relation of design practice and socio-political development.

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POETRY OF AIR: MIKAEL MIKAEL Mikael Mikael is exploring a different, more playful approach to the phenomenon of clouds.

While Friedrich von Borries provokes with the concept of the direct design and manufacture of global weather systems revealed through the harvesting of clouds for greater productivity, his alter ego, Mikael Mikael, raises the correlative question of how this will affect other weather systems and ecologies.

As part of the Dynamics of Air public program at RMIT Gallery, there will be three performances, the first one during the Opening Night on 13 September.

WHITE CLOUDS

Cloud scape.

Wolkenlandschaft.

Skyscraper.

Wolkenkratzer.

Cloud ranges.

Wolkengebirge.

Fleecy cloud.

Schäfchenwolke.

Pink clouds.

Rosa Wolken.

Cloud busting.

Cloudbusting.

Weather news.

Cotton candy.

Wetternachrichten.

Zuckerwatte

Cloud-cuckoo-land.

Wolkenkuckucksheim.

Cumulus.

Cumulus.

Weather front.

Wetterfront.

Who made the clouds?

Who thought of their shapes?

Who owns the cloud — and what is its price?

These are questions I cannot answer.

Maybe because they do not make sense.

Maybe because they are too beautiful.

Art is a cloud as well.

It is there, and gone again, and those who don’t have an umbrella will get wet.

MIKAEL MIKAEL is an artist. He lives everywhere and nowhere, but at the moment probably in Berlin. Mikael Mikael works independently of media and material. To document his interferences he makes use of objects, film, and photography

I do not make an artwork, I write a script.

Dynamics of Air

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SCORE: WHITE CLOUDS OF SUGAR 1. All participating artists in the planned exhibition space are asked which space they require to present their work. This space is then marked out with a black line.

2. For the duration of the exhibition, a preselected person dressed in white fills the unused space with white cotton candy.

He or she is free to decide in what order, how quickly, and how densely this is done, what shape it assumes, and when the process is complete.

White Clouds in Australia.

3. Appropriate media are used to document negotiations about the use of space, the drawing of the black line, the choice of the person, and the distribution of the cotton candy.

4. This score is to be displayed throughout the presentation of White Clouds of Sugar in the exhibition space. Anyone is free to carry out the script anytime, in any space available to him or her — so far it is presented together with the script. The documentation described in step 3 should be sent to sugar@mikaelmikael.com.

Cotton Candy.

Colonialism.

Who owns clouds, who owns land?

Who owns anything at all?

Cumulus.

Skyscrapers.

Weather front.

Cumulus.

Wolkenkratzer.

Wetterfront.

Reflecting clouds.

Spiegelwolken.

Cloud reflections.

Wolkenspiegel.

Cloudbusting.

Cloud busting.

Malte Wagenfeld, the curator of the project, is responsible for the implementation of the score in Melbourne. There will be a performer. He decided against black lines.

Instead, reflecting tape. A good idea. Clouds.

Reflections. Cloud reflections. Reflecting clouds.

I do not make an artwork. The artwork makes itself and many people are helping.

Then the artwork tells its own story. A story that is more fundamental than my own.

Translated from German by Friederike Prillwitz

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ART OF AIR: EDITH KOLLATH Interview by Gabriele Urban

INSTEAD OF PRODUCING OBJECTS, EDITH KOLLATH IS INTERESTED IN CHANGING THE STATE OF EXISTING MATERIAL Edith Kollath works with sculpture as an expandable media with a performative potential. She has widely exhibited through Germany and internationally. kultur: First, we would like to know a little bit about your work in general. What kind of media do you preferably use?

What does your work process look like?

Edith Kollath: As a conceptual artist, usually the question I’m working on leads me to the medium or materiality most adequate. So I’m using diverse media, including video, installation, performance, objects, and paper with an interest in searching for transformation processes, movements — real and potential, and fragile or unstable states. In my research I often circle around in the labyrinth of possibilities and create intuitive experimental settings that are like spider webs for me, in which I hope something interesting will entangle.

The unpredictability of this method makes my work so adventurous: failures, disappointments, surprises, hope, encounters and gained knowledge are part of the process. This has just recently been the case, when I was looking for a certain form of vessel in a glassblowing workshop. By chance I found something very different and fascinating — and I had to react to it, which is why I’m currently developing a video for the upcoming exhibition. kultur: When did you first come across air as an artistic medium?

What fascinates you about the element and what are you trying to express using air in your art?

EK: Actually, I first became aware of breath when it stopped functioning for me. It is an invisible and intangible medium that escapes our perceptibility as long as it works properly. Many years ago I experienced some breathlessness and light respiratory problems due to stress, which was an existential physical experience.

This led me into physical breath practices and further research.

In many cultures, religions and spiritual practices breath has been conceptualised in different ways. From ancient Greek philosophy and science to Indian and Chinese traditional practices, the study of breath and how it unites the body with the environment as well as the corporal dimension of being with the mind and soul

were at the core of interest. When you look at the word’s origin, it already shows the dimension of this subject: in both the Greek and the Indian language, the concepts of breath, air, spirit and soul are interconnected and their meanings are interdependent.

It is absolutely fascinating that air is an element that we can never fully appropriate. We can simply exist within it, use it to sustain our body and spirit, and share it with others. Breathing on the one hand unites us with the others, while on the other hand it emphasises our individuality. It generates proximity and distance at the same time: How do we experience this within the cyclic processes? To deal with breath within my artistic practice means to focus rather on process than on objects and on experience instead of appearance. kultur: Breath. All of us need to breathe, so for most of us it’s the most normal thing in the world. In your creations you play with the element of breath, for example in your artwork breathing books. What is it that you find so intriguing about breath?

EK: Yes, it is the most normal thing and yet the most ‘divine’.

The series thinking I’d last forever consists of antiquarian books that seem to be breathing in individual rhythms. Their covers are raised and lowered thereby unfolding the pages. The breathing books are showing a fragile and intimate side of existence to an extent that they create a sensation of empathy in the viewer.

As the ubiquitous presence of air becomes an absence and allows us to forget it so easily, the breathing books become a reminder and dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of our body.

The ‘duet’ between antiquarian editions of a Bible and a Koran form a special communicative structure within this series: the holy books face each other with their vulnerable sides and yet lie side by side in their correct reading direction. They open and close gently in individual rhythms, which are synchronous, then again asynchronous, exposing a moving intimacy between them.

In my artistic practice I noticed that all works that are in one way or another connected to breath, polarise the audience: almost no one is indifferent, the reactions vary between absolute reluctance and strong emotional affection.

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kultur: Is there an idea or a theme that follows you throughout your artistic career and that one can find in all of your artworks or was each piece developed individually? Is there something that continuously inspires and fascinates you?

© Hannes Wiedemann [Nothing will ever be the same] / Edith Kollath [Thinking I’d last forever] / Alfred Steffen [Portrait]

EK: I am a very curious person. As a child I’d walk around our village with a friend and we would just randomly ring doorbells in order to find out who lives behind the fence and what it looks like over there. We usually got invited for hot chocolates. I still really enjoy new encounters and the thrill of discovering new things: by travelling and in interdisciplinary exchanges for example.

Currently, I am researching the broad phenomenon of contingency, which is quite inspiring to me. We call something contingent, when it is possible in another way as well and it describes the uncertainty of future events and acts, which can be experienced for example in moments of levitation and hesitation — on individual and collective levels. Especially when you want to find out something new — in science or artistic research — it’s the question of how we act into the unknown. Are there artistic strategies that can be useful in other contexts as well? To deal with risks in society has produced management strategies such as probability calculations. Those have now moved into the digital realm, and further into algorithmic divination. What does that mean for us? These questions are interesting for multiple disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, politics, futurology, and many other fields of research.

I believe I have a lot of work and room for interesting exchanges for the years to come and I am very curious what I’ll experience in Melbourne.

[TOP ROW] Nothing will ever be the same [BOTTOM ROW] Thinking I’d last forever

EDITH KOLLATH works as a multimedia artist on questions of the visualisation of uncertain states and their social and theoretical contexts.

In 2009, she graduated from University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, where she received a MFA in Time Related Media and Sculpture. During a three year stay in New York, USA from 2006– 2009, she was an active member of the hacker collective NYC Resistor and realised a number of exhibitions and projects. Since then, her installations, objects and works on paper have been exhibited in Germany and internationally.

Since 2015, Edith has been a PhD candidate at the Bauhaus University Weimar.

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© Simon Oberhofer

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Dynamics of Air

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QUALITY OF AIR: BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE Lisa Maria Enzenhofer

ALL PROJECTS OF THE BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE SHARE THE COMMON FOCUS ON PEOPLE’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE PRECIOUS RESOURCES: AIR AND CLIMATE. For Dynamics of Air, the Collective is building a climatic installation, inspired by the ‘Gradierwerk’ tower typologies.

The installation investigates the evaporation processes and the conditioning of air with natural essences and aerosols.

Visitors are invited to smell, experience and inhale the breathable saline aerosols and ethereal oils.

Sensorial emotions are strongly rooted in environmental experiences. Light, wind, temperature, humidity, and plants are parts of natural processes and conditions which couple us humans inextricably with our direct environment. Referring to Tor Nørretrander who said: “When you take a breath, you touch a part of the planet, with the inside of your body” it is becoming even more clear how our bodies, lungs, skins, senses and emotions are in continuous exchange with the ecosphere.

With the contribution to the exhibition Dynamics of Air in Melbourne, we are aiming at highlighting the relations between humans and natural phenomena through an artistic encounter and a sensual immersive breathing experience based on the reinvention of a traditional inhalation practice. Built with local materials in Australia, the climatic installation will become a reinvention of the traditional inhaling practices developed in

the 19th century in Austrian and German regions close to salt mines to cure lung diseases. The project shall also provide a major contrast to the 22°C dry indoor comfort climate, where we are spending 90% of our time today. In the global context, the installation aims at contributing to a critical debate on how the quality of air impacts our health, as well as highlighting the potentials of reinventing low-tec air conditioning prototypes in the context of current planetary challenges like climate change and air pollution. The installation seeks towards a deeper understanding of ecosystemic relations to raise awareness and affection for rethinking the way we live our everyday lives through a sensual and embodied experience.

BREATHE EARTH COLLECTIVE develops new ways of dealing with interrelations of architecture, natural ecosystems, air and climate.

The collective was founded after their successful contribution to the Expo in Milan. They currently work on the landscape architectural design for the new headquarters of the Czech forestry administration, a building that unites forest and architecture. Furthermore, the group has developed a series of small-scale typologies of climate pavilions, called ‘Airships’, to research the potentials of tackling air pollution and providing natural cooling in urban spaces within 1:1 prototypes.

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PERCEPTION OF AIR: DANIEL PROHASKY Design engineer Daniel Prohasky focuses on human perception, aiming for a higher level of understanding and consciousness of our microclimate. Ultimately, the idea is that his experiments will result in more liveable and naturally stimulating environments.

In Dynamics of Air, he presents a wind tunnel along with what he calls a pulsometer — a machine that translates thermal comfort into quantifiable metrics for implementation in architectural design.

[A]

At its most basic, thermal comfort is the degree to which people may feel comfortable in ventilated environments, and not comfortable in stagnant environments. Prohasky aims to create environments that feel natural, hence his interest in the physiological resonance of transient airflow.

“WE ARE BECOMING MORE DISCONNECTED FROM OUR ENVIRONMENT. WE ARE NOT STIMULATING OUR SENSES IN THE WAY WE SHOULD.” Pointing to his arm, Prohasky explains that “our hair follicles will flutter and our skin will deform at a certain frequency relative to the speed of the air.” Additionally, when it comes to temperature, “you hover around an equilibrium or thermal value of 35 degrees on the surface of the skin, and that fluctuation creates the stimulation that we’re all very used to and evolved within.”

[B] [C]

[A] Miniwindtunnel: prototype of the

miniature wind tunnel for the exhibit

© Daniel Prohasky

DANIEL PROHASKY is a design engineer with a diverse background in architecture, civil and aerospace engineering. His current doctoral research focusses on the human perception of the dynamics of air.

He has published widely and taught at multiple international workshops in Barcelona, Sweden and Hong Kong with SIAL (Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory).

Dynamics of Air

:15

ARCHITECTURE OF AIR: MEHRNOUSH LATIFI

SCIENCE OF AIR: SIMON WATKINS

Mehrnoush Latifi is an architect who completed her PhD at RMIT University in 2017. Together with Phred Peterson she uses Schlieren photography to explore the acoustic, decorative, and heat transfer characteristics of building tile designs. Latifi’s work is focused on the environmental impacts of design and patterns of microclimates. Her goal is to produce more naturally simulating and thermally comfortable environments through the design of surfaces.

Simon Watkins enhances drones through biomimicry — design modelled on biological entities and processes — so they can better cope with instabilities in air turbulence. During Dynamics of Air, Watkins will be flying a drone through RMIT Gallery at public events, as well as exhibiting state-of-the-art modelling of air turbulence around buildings, using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Latifi’s geometric craft for building exteriors present more than an appealing facade: as exhibited in Dynamics of Air, the shape of the tiles controls how thermally comfortable the inside of the building will be.

“THE CONTEXT OF DESIGN IS NOT WHAT YOU SEE WITH YOUR NAKED EYES.” Airflow passing through these tiles is made visible using augmented reality (AR). Sensors recording temperature and humidity are attached to each of the ‘breathing’ tiles to visualise the airflow. Looking through the AR glasses, visitors can detect what Latifi refers to as her ‘microclimates’.

Latifi explains: “The context of design is made up of multiple layers that are hidden or invisible to us. Visualising the invisible context of design results in innovative design, which comes from a better understanding of environmental contexts.”

[B] Innovative tiles

The invisibility of air means that we often struggle to perceive its magnitude, while birds such as Kestrels can sense flow disturbances through biological sensory systems, enabling them to hover in the air with pinpoint accuracy.

“AIR IS THE MAIN FLUID THAT INFLUENCES OUR LIVES.” Watkins has long had a passion for gliders and radio-controlled aircrafts, which he designs, builds and flies himself. He says what excites him most about air is “its predictability and the unpredictability.” While he can estimate the average airflow around a building through computational modelling, he admits that the complex dynamics of air turbulence are essentially unpredictable. However, flow visualisations are still useful to give a sense of the magnitude, direction and speed of airflow.

They are empowering architects to factor in wind into their design.

[C] Still from Bio-inspired sensing for

Micro Air Vehicles video

© Mehrnoush Latifi

MEHRNOUSH LATIFI’s doctoral research has a multi-disciplinary focus exploring innovative design. Her installation in Dynamics of Air was developed through collaboration with many researchers and practitioners, such as Phred Peterson, Ehsan Shams, Daniel Prohasky, Dr Judith Glover, and Dr Malte Wagenfeld and Professor Jane Burry.

© Simon Watkins

RMIT PROFESSOR SIMON WATKINS’ expertise falls across aerodynamics, experimental fluid dynamics and turbulence.

He is currently conducting research into MAVs (micro air vehicles).

At RMIT he is involved with many research projects in aerospace and automotive engineering.

Summarised by Calum Alexander

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DRAWING OF AIR: CAMERON ROBBINS Cameron Robbins collaborates with nature. In Dynamics of Air, the artist presents his impressive ‘wind-drawings’: a wind-powered mechanical instrument transcribes weather patterns onto paper. The drawings are accompanied by a video of the wind machines in action, capturing a symphony of scratching and winding rhythms.

Originally installed and recorded at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, Robbins’ selfdevised drawing system used wind speed to drive the pen, wind direction to swivel the drawing board, and time and electricity to move the paper along.

To develop this machine it took Robbins a great deal of personal experimentation and learning from marine, structural and mechanical engineers, as well as technicians such as bicycle machinists.

“AN ENTIRE WEATHER SYSTEM LEAVES ITS TRACE — AROUND FIVE METRES EQUATES TO TEN DAYS.” Robbins’ affinity for collaborating with nature can be traced back to his love of surfing when he was growing up. “Sitting in the ocean for hours directly connects you with the greater natural world, beyond the oceans and into the multiverse”, he says. “And people respond directly and emotionally to drawings; like music, it seems to be the multiverse’s payoff for non-permanency.”

[BACKGROUND] 12-12-2013 (Gusty and Changeable) [INSET] Cameron Robbins with ShadowPhase © 2017, by SilverSalt Photography, courtesy of Hazelhurst Regional Gallery.

CAMERON ROBBINS is an Australian artist based in Castlemaine, Victoria. His work interacts with the elemental forces of the natural world. He is represented

by MARS Gallery in Melbourne and in Kyneton, Victoria by Stockroom Gallery.

His wind-drawing machine features as a permanent installation at Mona, where it will operate for up to a hundred years.

Dynamics of Air

:17

VISIBILITY OF AIR: PHRED PETERSEN Originally trained as a research chemist, Phred Petersen decided to move on to scientific photography with a special focus on what is known as Schlieren Photography. This highly technical visual process was invented in 1864 by German physicist, August Toepler, to study supersonic motion. It involves two optically matched parabolic mirrors to create photographs and videos which reveal invisible changes in air.

In his laboratory, Petersen works with specialised equipment including a large-scale camera that is 12 metres long. The resulting images are both beguiling and unnerving, revealing for instance the seductively undulating plume of a gas stove cooker alight or the determined trajectory of a bullet piercing the air.

Despite his expertise in a broad range of photography topics, Petersen states that he is still a scientist at heart. While he brings a high set of production values to the visual quality of an image, he will not let that compromise the veracity of scientific data.

“I USE PHOTOGRAPHY TO LISTEN, NOT TO SPEAK. SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY GIVES US THE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE AND UNDERSTAND HOW THINGS WORK.” As Petersen points out, Schlieren photography “allows us to see things that are transparent and normally pass us by completely because our eye doesn’t pick it up. When you add high speed imaging on top of that, it allows us to dissect events that happen too fast for us to perceive in a normal timeframe.”

[BACKGROUND] Flight of the Samara [PAGES 18–19] Toroid and bubble

A toroidal gas vortex seen by rupturing a soap bubble.

PHRED PETERSEN specialises in applications of photography for scientific and industrial research. His research collaborations include the study of fuel sprays for green engine technology, behaviour of liquid metal alloys for microfluidic applications, flow visualisation for micro air vehicles, and human impact on environmental air quality

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IMAGE SHOWS THE BEHAVIOUR OF A TOROIDAL GAS VORTEX, RUPTURING A SOAP BUBBLE AS A METHOD OF MAPPING THE FLOW AND VOLUME OF THE VORTEX. “SCHLIEREN PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWS US TO SEE THINGS THAT ARE TRANSPARENT AND NORMALLY PASS US BY COMPLETELY BECAUSE OUR EYE DOESN’T PICK IT UP” SAYS PHRED PETERSON.

Dynamics of Air

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KINOKONZERT IS A NEW BI-MONTHLY SERIES OF FILM CONCERTS PRESENTED BY THE GOETHE-INSTITUT IN AUSTRALIA. For this program, we invite a line-up of maverick Australian and German musicians to compose and perform new soundtracks for iconic classic and contemporary German films, or in some cases perform audio-visual concerts based on their own film material.

Through this regular program, we showcase landmark German films together with handpicked performers, inviting audiences to (re-)discover some iconic material through original musical interpretations.

CHRISTIAN PAZZAGLIA is an independent curator and audiovisual producer based in Sydney, where he recently relocated from Amsterdam. Christian has curated film, multimedia programs and live events for some of the most important festivals and cultural institutions in the Netherlands, such as IDFA, EYE and the Van Gogh Museum. He was a regular collaborator of the Goethe-Institut in Amsterdam, for which he curated a program of film concerts that ran from 2009 to 2014.

The series will be launched in July 2018 with the international premiere of Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto’s film concert Crossroads, followed in September 2018 by a screening of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic horror film Vampyr, with a score by Chiara Kickdrum. We will announce further editions of the series in due course.

The series is curated by the Goethe-Institut in collaboration with Christian Pazzaglia, co-founder of the international live cinema platform CineSonic.

KinoKonzert

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KINOKONZERT 02 CHIARA KICKDRUM & CARL THEODOR DREYER: VAMPYR

HOBART Thursday 14 June 2018 DARK MOFO FESTIVAL

MELBOURNE Friday 21 September 2018 ACMI

PERTH Friday 6 July 2018 REVELATION FILM FESTIVAL

SYDNEY Wednesday 26 September 2018 EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE STREET

MELBOURNE Wednesday 11 July 2018 ACMI

CANBERRA Friday 28 September 2018 NFSA

SYDNEY Saturday 14 July 2018 EVENT CINEMAS GEORGE STREET

We will announce further KinoKonzert events when details are confirmed. Dates are correct at the time of print, but may be subject to change in due course.

Please check our website for full event details. www.goethe.de/australia

© Gergő Pálmai

KINOKONZERT 01 ALEXANDER HACKE & DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: CROSSROADS

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LETTING GO OF LETTING GO: ALEXANDER HACKE AND DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO Interview by Jochen Gutsch

THE PAIR ARE LEGENDS OF BERLIN’S POST-PUNK SCENE. FOR SEVERAL DECADES, THEY HAVE COLLABORATED ON COUNTLESS PROJECTS ACROSS MOST ART FORMS. IN 2018, THE DUO IS IN AUSTRALIA TO KICK OFF THE GOETHE-INSTITUT SERIES KINOKONZERT PRESENTING THEIR OWN SILENT MOVIE WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK CROSSROADS IN SYDNEY, MELBOURNE, PERTH AND HOBART.

ALEXANDER HACKE and DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO are a married couple who have collaborated on numerous artistic projects with one another and with other artists from all over the world. Alexander Hacke is a founding member of influential industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten. He played in Australian band Crime and the City Solution, worked with Italian pop icon Gianna Naninni, and created soundtracks for films such as Fatih Akin’s Head On and The Cut. Danielle de Picciotto co-founded the Love Parade with Dr Motte. She also played with Australian band Crime and the City Solution and in Mick Harvey’s theatre production Ministry of Wolves, and published several books and films.

kultur: Alexander, please tell us about the audio-visual project you and Danielle will premiere in Australia.

ALEXANDER HACKE: Crossroads is the result of a seven-year transformatory process, which started when we gave up our house in Berlin in 2010 and decided to embark on a quest to discover new horizons. Our experiences in minimising our material possessions, learning to cope with the feeling of being up-rooted and eventually enjoying this new freedom have informed pretty much everything we produced since then. This program created eight years later is marking another turning point: letting go of letting go, if you will. kultur: Danielle, you are both multi-disciplinary artists.

When you work as a duo, do you divide projects into certain tasks or do you collaborate on all of its aspects?

kultur: Danielle, initiating the Love Parade with Dr Motte in 1989 was an idealistic and visionary move. After all these years, do you still feel positive about art as an instigator for social change?

DdP: When Dr Motte and I decided to organise the first Love Parade in the late 1980s, Berlin was in an iron curtain, stuck in the post-war depression. The city was very dark, with lots of heroin, suicide and depression. We both felt that light needed to be let in, and when we heard the new electronic music coming in from Detroit and England, it inspired us to such an extent that we thought putting on a parade dedicated to the thought that music can cross borders and make people happy would be a good idea. The results were huge and proved exactly that.

TODAY, ART IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER

DANIELLE DE PICCIOTTO: When we work on multi-media projects, we compose the music together, but I do the visuals. In general, we always work on themes that are a part of our life so we speak about them and ponder how to work on them for a long time before we actually start composing. As we are two very different characters it is always inspiring to carry together our thoughts because they can be completely contradictory. We have to find common denominators in order to achieve a strong result, which usually is something neither of us could have come up with on our own. This makes it fresh and surprising for both of us.

I believe that today, art is more important than ever. The 1990s seemed very easy and idealistic in comparison to the current state of our world. The great thing about art is that is can work with humour, intuition and surrealism to get points across on a subconscious level. It also has the imperative that it needs to be honest and not done for monetary, greedy reasons. In this way it has the possibility of opening eyes and hearts on a very universal and personal level simultaneously, for the artist as well as his/her audience.

A RAZOR’S EDGE OF COMPROMISE AND BALANCE

I feel very strongly about all the chaos that is happening in the world at the moment, and through my art I try to find answers for myself and others in how to deal with these themes.

I think this is the real challenge and the magic in collaborations.

It only works if both artists are on equal terms and nobody is the boss. It is a razor’s edge of compromise and balance, and it can be quite difficult and conflicting. But if it’s pulled through, the results are always amazing. We have worked on perfecting this process for years and we believe with our recent projects Perseverantia and Menetekel we have achieved a result we are finally happy with. Our latest project Crossroads is a culmination of these. kultur: Alexander, apart from your role as bass player in Einstürzende Neubauten you also compose and produce film soundtracks. At what stage of the production do you get involved, and what is the process?

© Marina Chahboune / Luise Barsch

:23

AH: That usually happens pretty late, in post-production when the filmmakers suddenly remember that they will have to address that subject and get in touch. By then they are often already very used to the temporary music, the so-called ‘temp tracks’ they worked with during the editing and actually, they want you to re-create something just like that without infringing anyone’s copyrights.

kultur: Alexander, in the 1980s there were many connections between Australia and Germany in the post-punk scene. Are you still in touch with artists from Australia?

AH: When The Birthday Party and later Crime and the City Solution moved to West Berlin in the 1980s, their personalities mixed nicely with the local scene. They brought an air of desperation and affinity to substance abuse to our post-war village, which just gelled perfectly with the all-night mad creativity we had going for ourselves. So we enjoyed having them around and they were happy to stay.

The times are very different now of course; the cost of living alone would make all the things we managed to pull through impossible today. Fortunately, many of the friends have developed in ways which surpass the self-destructive spirit of the old days — and yes, I’m in contact with those Australians I grew up with, who happen to be still alive.

Sometimes though, music and sound design are recognised as an integral part of a movie and a director has a desire to involve an artist in the creative process at an early stage. That’s when this line of work is very enjoyable and incredible results can be achieved.

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:25

DARK SOUNDS AND VISIONS: CHIARA KICKDRUM’S TAKE ON VAMPYR Interview by Christian Pazzaglia

THE FILM WAS RECENTLY RATED BY THE GUARDIAN AS ONE OF THE TEN BEST HORROR FILMS OF ALL TIME, WHILE THE COMPOSER IS A RISING STAR IN AUSTRALIA’S ELECTRONIC MUSIC SCENE. AMONG OTHER THINGS, SHE CREATED THE SOUNDTRACK FOR THE SHORT FILM ALL THESE CREATURES WHICH RECENTLY WON THE PALME D’OR AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018.

The second installment of our KinoKonzert series brings together two rather different worlds: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s horror classic Vampyr from 1932 gets a workout by Italian-born, Melbourne-based composer, producer and DJ, Chiara Kickdrum. kultur: You’re a musician wearing many hats: electronic music producer, DJ, film composer and sound designer. Do you have a favourite among these rather different creative fields?

© Chiara Kickdrum at the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS)

CHIARA KICKDRUM: Great question. I can’t say that I have a favourite — I enjoy all of these, but in different ways. Every time I compose something new, it excites me. This also happens when I play a DJ set, no matter if it’s a big gig or a small one. Playing music for a crowd of listeners or dancers is one of the best parts of this job. Lately though I have been making a conscious effort to spend more time in the studio rather than out DJing, as I see myself composing full-time a few years from now. kultur: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr is a haunting and dark film.

Are you comfortable with this kind of subject matter?

CK: I have always been intrigued by horror films. Back in Italy, I grew up watching Dario Argento’s movies — Suspiria, Phenomena and I remember loving them, even when I was very young.

I also grew up listening to a lot of death metal and generally have always been attracted to dark sounds and visions, so it’s definitely not something out of my comfort zone. kultur: Do you enjoy silent films, and is this the first time you compose music to accompany such a film?

CK: I have never composed music for silent films. I studied music and cinema at the University of Torino, graduating in 2005. One of the subjects was ‘History of Cinema’ so we would spent hours in cinemas watching old movies, many silent ones as well. I remember falling in love with Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

kultur: The score will be performed live — does this change the way you are approaching the artistic process?

CK: For sure. I play lots of live shows and the artistic process is definitely different to when I produce music in the studio. It’s much more open to improvisation and less refined. In saying this, there is still a measure of control over the performance that is mapped out beforehand. kultur: So who will we see on stage at these shows — Chiara the banging techno DJ or Chiara the refined sound designer?

CK: Well, you’ll come have to come to the show to find out!

CHIARA KICKDRUM is a Melbourne-based music composer, producer and DJ born and raised in Torino, Italy. Classically trained in piano and later exposed to electronic music after moving to Melbourne in 2004, Chiara has since moved into a well-respected position in the Melbourne techno movement through her dedication to a refined DJing technique and production of electronic music. This has led to extra studies in sound art and design, extending her interests into composition and sound design for screen.

Chiara has appeared at Pitch Music Festival, Melbourne Music Week, Meredith Music Festival and Dark Mofo, and composed music for fashion designer Dion Lee at Melbourne Fashion Week.

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RESTORE, PRESERVE, DIGITISE: THE MURNAU STIFTUNG Interview by Jochen Gutsch

THE FRIEDRICH WILHELM MURNAU FOUNDATION IN WIESBADEN, GERMANY, PRESERVES AND CURATES A COLLECTION OF FILMS BY LEGENDARY DIRECTOR FW MURNAU AS WELL AS A COLLECTION OF OTHER GERMAN FILMS PRODUCED BETWEEN 1900 AND 1960.

The foundation is home to a huge inventory of thousands of silent movies and sound films. However, its work goes far beyond archiving: kultur speaks to head restorer, Anke Wilkening. kultur: For those who are unfamiliar with your line of work, what is the restoration of films?

ANKE WILKENING: Unlike other culture objects, restoring a film means to duplicate it. This can be done either in a photochemical or digital way. Photochemical film consists of two parts: the original negative, and the print. The negative contains information about the shot, while the print provides information about how the film looked in the cinema. In an ideal situation, both sources are available; but this is often not the case. One of them will be defined as the physical base for the restoration, depending on a whole catalogue of criteria such as the condition of the sources and ethical aspects. kultur: You make use of special techniques, especially when it comes to colour and lighting — please explain some of these.

AW: It is not that there are special techniques involved to reproduce vintage colour systems or the grading of a print.

The question is rather how can they be reproduced by means of modern technology that is available in a lab. For tinted silent films or Agfacolor films from the 1940s, it is important that we can consult the original print during grading. It is important to examine the specific look of a historic colour technology.

A common misconception is that tinting means that only the bright parts of an image are dyed. A tint was created by putting a black-and-white positive in a dye bath. Hence, the gelantine of the emulsion is dyed yellow or blue etc. In the projected image, the colour is most obviously present in the bright parts, but it is also present in the grey tones.

In the restoration process, we analyse how the relation of the contrast of the black-and-white image and the tint is: if the contrast is very high, less colour is visible in the grey tones because they are too dense to let the colour through. On the

contrary, the contrast might be flat and the tint is also very present in the grey tones. These things need to be communicated to the lab’s colourists and technicians, so they can find solutions to reproduce a specific look in the digital world. kultur: Does your work evolve more around ‘physical’ processes in a lab, or does it lean more towards digital treatment using computer software?

AW: My works involves the research for source material, and comparisons with respect to physical, photographic condition, completeness, variations such as different versions of a film, their specific aesthetics, for example with respect to different historic colour systems. I work directly with the source materials on a rewinder, synchroniser or viewing table to inspect and document them. Documentation is done by creating a shot protocol in an Excel sheet and photographic documentation of damages, but also edge codes, splices and other comments that provide import information about age determination of a film element, or insights into possible manipulation.

Based on this documentation, I decide which version of a film can be restored and define the roadmap for the reconstruction or restoration: editing, colour mapping, and decisions about what damages should be addressed in the sound or image restoration.

The process in the lab includes the physical restoration of the source material (cleaning and repair), followed by a digital workflow with scanning, image and sound restoration of the digitised source (digital repair of damages, grading) and lastly, the digital mastering for viewing elements for cinema, DVD/BD or TV release (DCP, video files). The data, such as the raw scan and restored scan, are preserved on LTO tapes. For some projects, we also created photochemical preservation elements from original negatives by analogue duplication. Or we preserved the raw scan by film-out. However, this happens only rarely, for budget reasons. The current funding in Germany is dedicated to digitisation of the film heritage for access.

:27

[A] Negatives of Der müde Tod [B] The once coloured silent film, which has since only existed

as black and white copies, was retinted after much research [C] The work was undertaken by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung

in collaboration with the L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna [D] Film restoration is labouriously undertaken by hand at the

L’Immagine Ritrovata

[A] [B]

kultur: When you restore a silent film, do you only work on the film’s visual aspects, or do you also add an existing or newlycommissioned soundtrack to make it a package that can be played ‘as is’ in cinemas around the world?

AW: The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung only rarely produces scores. For Der Turm des Schweigens, directed by Johannes Guter in 1925, a new score was composed and performed by Uwe Dierksen. Usually the scores are produced by television. If an original score was composed for a film and if it still exists, this was used as — for example for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Die Nibelungen.

© Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung (Wiesbaden) / Bertelsmann 2015 [Der müde Tod]

kultur: Please tell us about a particularly exciting project you worked on recently.

AW: We are currently finishing the restoration of a silent film called Der Geiger von Florenz, directed by Paul Czinner in 1925/26, featuring Elisabeth Bergner in the lead role. This is a case in which no German version survived. There are only several export versions, and most of them were shortened. However, we could restore a complete version based on an original negative. The film was shortened for the British release, but we were lucky: all of the cuts had been assembled on separate reels. These reels also contained all inserts — such as letters and diary books — in German.

We also found one card of the original German opening credits.

This means we had a reference for the font, which we then used to re-create the lost German titles. As the approval certificate exists, we had the text for all the intertitles. For the first time in decades, we can now show the film in a complete German titled version.

ANKE WILKENING is a film restorer and curator at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-MurnauStiftung in Wiesbaden, Germany. The restorations she has supervised include Metropolis, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, and Münchhausen. Her publication work concentrates on German cinema of the 1920s, film restoration and DVD editions.

She is currently working on a PhD project on postproduction practices in silent film from 1920 to 1929 at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

[C] [D]

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SUBSTANTIAL RESOURCE: THE GOETHE COLLECTION AT THE NFSA Interview by Jochen Gutsch

THE GOETHE COLLECTION IS A SUBSTANTIAL RESOURCE FOR NONCOMMERCIAL ORGANISATIONS LIKE COMMUNITY GROUPS, FILM SOCIETIES, SCHOOLS, UNIVERSITIES AND OTHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. THE COLLECTION IS HOSTED BY LONG-TERM PARTNERS, THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE (NFSA).

Based in Canberra, the NFSA is responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting and providing access to a national collection of audio-visual materials and related items. kultur speaks to Dr Louise Sheedy, Engagement Officer at the NFSA. kultur: Please tell us a little bit about how it all began, and where it stands today.

LOUISE SHEEDY: The Goethe-Institut has been friends with the NFSA for many years, assisting us with both theatrical and nontheatrical screenings. Eventually, the NFSA became the official custodians of the Goethe-Institut’s amazing film collection in Australia, for us to distribute through our non-theatrical network.

Right now, there are now 1,155 titles in our collection: DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 16mm films. This number grows each month, which makes it a very rich resource. We currently loan over 100 titles per year, with an audience of around 3,000 per year. kultur: What types of resources can be found in the Goethe Collection?

LS: The NFSA looks after screening materials ranging from documentaries, key expressionist works, short films, animation, experimental and popular features. As you can see, the collection represents a great breadth of German cinema’s history. kultur: Are there any movies that are in particularly high demand?

LS: Our ten most popular titles from the Goethe collection are: Bagdad Cafe Nowhere in Africa Battleship Potemkin & October Don’t Come Knocking The Lives of Others

Four Days in May Aguirre, the Wrath of God Almanya — Welcome to Germany The Edge of Heaven Paris, Texas

kultur: In addition to its archive, the NFSA has a cinema and hosts public events in Canberra. What kind of events do you program?

LS: I program a huge range of events to showcase the collection, including feature films, filmmaker Q&As, live music, and we have many partnerships with national and subject-focused film festivals.

The Arc Cinema is a beautiful resource, with a tech set-up that allows for 16mm and 35mm right up to 4K digital projection.

One thing we’re particularly excited about is yet another cooperation with the Goethe-Institut: we will host the Canberra leg of the second KinoKonzert edition: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr with Chiara Kickdrum’s live soundtrack. kultur: The rapid development of communication technologies and the digitisation of content have had an impact on the film industry in recent years. Do these changes affect the NFSA’s work?

LS: That’s a big question! The short answer is, yes. For example, let me tell you about the Deadline 2025 project. There is now consensus among audio-visual archives internationally that we will not be able to support large-scale digitisation of magnetic media in the very near future. Tape that is not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever. This will be a collaborative effort, across several institutions. We are hosting the fourth Digital Directions symposium in August 2018 (www.nfsa.gov.au/ about/our-mission/digital-directions/digital-directions-2018).

This year, speakers drawn from the cultural and academic sectors, creative industries and government will come together to consider the digital future of Australia’s cultural collections.

:29

kultur: Where are we headed? Do you have ideas about the future of film?

LS: I feel that place and community matter now more than ever.

People can watch a film on their phone or on their laptop screen from bed, easily. What cinemas, including our Arc Cinema, seek to provide is a special place in which people can enjoy the magic of cinema together. It might be very easy to see a film on Netflix from your couch, but it’s a rare and lovely thing to see something like Dr Caligari or Fitzcarraldo on a big screen, with a huge sound system. I’m still amazed and excited about the crowds I see in cinemas on Friday nights. kultur: And lastly, do you have any personal German cinema favourites?

LS: Herzog. All of Werner Herzog’s work, but particularly his documentaries. He is the reason I did a PhD in documentary cinema. Wild Blue Yonder is my favourite film of all time.

WANT TO SCREEN A FILM IN A GERMAN LANGUAGE CLASS? STEP 1 Head to Loans on the NFSA website to select a film: loans.nfsa.gov.au STEP 2 Find the registration form under Non-Theatrical Screenings: nfsa.gov.au/non-theatrical-screenings

© THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE (NFSA)

STEP 3 Fill in and email the form to: nontheatrical@nfsa.gov.au DVD and BluRay loans are $22, which includes the license for the film screenings. Different prices apply for 16mm films.

Need help? Call 1800 012 175

DR LOUISE SHEEDY manages the nontheatrical collection and develops public programs for The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She has written on film for various publications. Her PhD from Melbourne University developed a theory of popular radicalism in documentary cinema.

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30:

JULIANE LORENZ ON RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER Interview by Gabriele Urban

AS A GUEST OF THE GOETHE-INSTITUT, JULIANE LORENZ VISITS SYDNEY, MELBOURNE AND BRISBANE, AND GIVES INSIGHTS INTO THE CULT DIRECTOR’S WORLD. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82) is one of the most polarising and influential figures of the New German Cinema.

Juliane Lorenz was the editor and long-time partner in Fassbinder’s later career. Together they produced film classics such as Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Marriage

of Maria Braun. Today, as president of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, it is Lorenz’ task to preserve Fassbinder’s heritage. kultur: RW Fassbinder died at the age of 37. A haunted man who created 39 films in 15 years. “I can sleep when I’m dead” his slogan says it all. What was it like to live and work with a man like him?

JULIANE LORENZ: I don’t think it is wise to reduce Rainer’s artistic oeuvre to simple numbers of titles. The titles often include more than a simple feature film: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979/1980/2007) is a fifteen and a half hours film, produced with the budget of a TV series and Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972/2017) contains five parts making up an eight-hour screening. There are about 124 titles of works, including film scripts, theatre plays and writings, song texts, essays — and that doesn’t even include his early work.

To answer your main question: I do not agree with the expression

kultur: Fassbinder and women — this is a very special topic, but we are interested in your life in the seventies: you were a young, professional woman in a male domain — even today it is difficult for women in the film business. Not only did you work as a producer, you directed, acted and gained experiences in almost all areas of film. What would you advise young women in the industry today?

JL: When I met Rainer in 1976 at the age of 19, I was already inspired by the protests of 1968 in West-Germany which were reflected by the New German Cinema Movement on the one side and politically by the student’s movement on the other side.

Altogether, it was a productive and fantastic time for a young woman. I must admit: I didn’t feel like I had to liberate myself.

Studying political science at the University in Munich, I felt liberated already. Becoming Fassbinder’s editor at the age of twenty seemed almost normal to me.

I saw international films very early on, as my stepfather was a short-film maker. He often took me to screenings, where I secretly sat beside the projector, watching films that were not appropriate for my age. I saw Chaplin, Renoir, and Visconti but also very bad German and American B-Movies. It made me think! If films were literary adaptions, I read the books. I also started reading the German newspaper Die Zeit, which had fantastic film critics.

‘haunted’. Rainer was never haunted. Rather, he was inflamed about the political situation in his country from 1848 onwards.

I DIDN’T FEEL I HAD TO LIBERATE MYSELF.

To say it in his own words: “There could be a kind of ‘madness’

These sources were a major part in my cinema education. And of course there was Mr Fassbinder who recognised my self-taught education. This will always be my advice to young people who want to experience and participate in cinema: take your chance to watch films, then go and learn the craft! Don’t be arrogant and think that sitting in an editing room or assisting an editor or director is minor work. I had great luck meeting a master of cinema very early on. It surely is a special story. But still, it didn’t just come naturally. It was seven intense years of working and living with Rainer, doing fourteen films together. It was the basis of all I do until today.

in the sense of psychoanalytic terms, which makes me do my work so intensely and one after the other. But there is nothing that I like better than creating films and telling the story of my country, and asking myself why it became a fascist country after the Weimar Republic.”

So, if you keep in mind that Rainer was born in 1945 and lived until 1982, you need to see his film and theatre work in a much wider range and consider the very special development Germany went through.

Film

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kultur: As president of the Fassbinder Foundation, it is your life task to preserve the heritage of Fassbinder. Please tell us about this work!

JL: The foundation is a not-for-profit organisation with the mission to preserve and maintain the estate and creative work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as well as to promote and support developments in film and theatre.

The first complete retrospective of Rainer’s cinematic oeuvre took place in 1992 as part of a big exhibition in Berlin, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Rainer’s death. It was a huge success, financially supported by the city of Berlin, the Berlin Lottery Foundation and the Goethe-Institut head office in Munich, which then sent a smaller exhibition of Fassbinder films around the world.

kultur: Fassbinder exerts a great fascination for following generations of filmmakers. What was so special about him? What distinguished him from other German directors at that time, and do you believe that his films are understood differently today?

JL: When we were in New York City for the opening of The Marriage of Maria Braun, screened at the New York Film Festival in 1979, there were a lot of ‘followers’, as we could call it in times of Facebook and Co. I remember the young Martin Scorsese, still in his early years as a filmmaker, coming up to congratulate Rainer. Richard Gere, Susan Sontag and a lot of other young directors, actors, writers, and other artist came. Rainer had already become a cult director.

© RWFF: Maximilian Johannsmann [main image] / Elfi Mikesch [portarit]

IT WAS SEVEN INTENSE YEARS OF WORKING AND LIVING WITH RAINER, DOING FOURTEEN FILMS TOGETHER. IT WAS THE BASIS OF ALL I DO UNTIL TODAY. He became an inspiration for a movement in the US cinema which was later called The Independent American Cinema. He was proud of being a mentor. And of course he was a star. Fassbinder was part of the (West-) German New Cinema Movement, and it was him and Werner Herzog who were the most admired directors worldwide at that time. Rainer could walk the streets in NYC and people surrounded him like football players today. He was regarded as a kind of hero then.

Today, I recognise it differently. When we presented our newest restoration of Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day in NYC, we made it to the front page of the NY Times. What I discovered during the 36 years after Rainer’s death: his films, his characters remain and his themes still touch the spectator right in the middle of the heart.

[ABOVE] Juliane Lorenz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder

on the set of Die Dritte Generation, 1978/1979.

36 YEARS AFTER RAINER’S DEATH: HIS FILMS, HIS CHARACTERS REMAIN AND HIS THEMES STILL TOUCH THE SPECTATOR RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HEART. The most important point was that German TV stations showed his films again, which meant that we were able to create new 35 mm prints and had enough income from all the TV licenses to invest in new material, which then became the basis for new international licenses. This made me come up with the idea to ask The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to think about a complete retrospective.

The result was a huge event with all Fassbinder film stars at the opening night in 1997 in NYC. This was followed by a three-month retrospective and a tour through the US with almost 50 locations, supported by the Goethe-Institut.

Of course, this brought along new projects for the foundation — both in the US and abroad. Something similar happened to Fassbinder’s theatre oeuvre. Today, the third generation of artists are directing his original plays or films adapted for the stage. DVD and Blu-Ray editions are available in about thirty countries. It was hard work to bring Fassbinder back to Germany. We continue to convince producers to digitalise and restore more titles for other DVD editions.

JULIANE MARIA LORENZ is an author, filmmaker, film editor, film producer and the President of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF) based in Berlin and in New York (FF Inc.). From her initial meeting in 1976 with Fassbinder they developed an intense professional, artistic and personal relationship, which entailed fourteen films.

After Fassbinder died in 1982, she continued to be a highly acclaimed European film editor and collaborated with other renowned author-filmmakers, among them Werner Schroeter and Oskar Roehler.

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IN THE MOMENT: TRIO ELF Interview by Jochen Gutsch

© Uli Zrenner Wolkenstein

MUNICH’S TRIO ELF ARE ESSENTIALLY A PIANO TRIO, HOWEVER THEIR SOUND IS INFORMED BY DRUM’N’BASS, BOSSA NOVA AND OTHER STYLES AS MUCH AS THE PLAYERS’ JAZZ ROOTS. WHEN ADAM SIMMONS, CO-ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF AUSTRALIA’S WANGARATTA FESTIVAL OF JAZZ TRAVELLED TO BREMEN’S JAZZAHEAD FESTIVAL IN 2017, HE HAD THE HONOURABLE BUT DIFFICULT TASK TO SELECT ONE OF THE MANY FESTIVAL ACTS TO COME TO AUSTRALIA.

Music

He chose to invite Trio ELF, and with support from the GoetheInstitut, the band will embark on an East Coast tour around the Wangaratta Festival in November 2018. Kultur spoke to the band’s drummer, Gerwin Eisenhauer. kultur: Your approach to jazz music is a playful one, with a lot of hints, references and quotes. Is this a conscious choice, or does it just happen due to your personalities?

GERWIN EISENHAUER: I think it’s a mixture of a lot of things. We all come from different backgrounds. Sometimes we even wonder ourselves how this can work. Of course, we all share a certain jazz and rock vocabulary, but at certain points in our musical careers we were interested in totally different genres. In the mid1990s, I was attracted to the breakbeat culture in the UK, and this became a huge inspiration for my drumming, especially jungle and drum’n’bass. Peter studied classical music and jazz, while Walter is known for his lyrical piano playing. We all have worked in many contemporary jazz settings.

The first time we played together was — somewhat ironically — at a jungle rave. This was the beginning of the story of our band, around 15 years ago. And the great thing was: we could blend our individual voices to a new sound that we developed over years of touring: a mixture of urban beat culture with jazz. kultur: Is the songwriting process based on improvisation and jamming, or do band members bring in pieces of music they composed?

GE: For the last two albums, each of us brought in tunes and compositions. Based on these, we usually try different grooves, feels and tempos. Even if we use club-orientated grooves like 2step, trap or jungle, we work from the composition and the theme as the starting point for improvisation. At this particular point, we are deeply rooted in the old jazz tradition, even if we don’t sound that way. There is actually no jamming to create a song, even if at the end of the night our music is 90% improvised.

EVERYTHING HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT kultur: Drum’n’bass patterns and breakbeats are a trademark of your sound. Have you considered going all-out electronic, using samplers and sequencing as more prominent elements?

GE: Actually, we never considered this. The only one in the band who uses some electronic gear is Walter, as he manipulates the piano sound. The drums are the element that sounds most like electronic music — however, I don’t use any electronic equipment.

I just use special cymbals and drums to emulate certain electronic sounds. But it’s all acoustic music. We also don’t use any prerecorded material or sequencers.

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The only one who uses a sampler is our live sound engineer, Mario Sütel. Sometimes really crazy things can happen. For example, Mario sometimes records our live sound while we play and then plays those samples straight back to us via the foldback speakers on stage, thereby creating another musical layer. But it’s all improvised, nothing is pre-recorded, everything happens in the moment we play. We never know what might happen. Mario is like a fourth member in Trio ELF. kultur: You received the Bremen Jazz Award and a full page in famous jazz magazine American Downbeat. Does this kind of publicity translate into larger audiences?

GE: It surely helped a lot. Since we received that prize, we were invited to the jazzahead! festival and trade fair in Bremen. It was there that Adam Simmons heard us and invited us to play in Australia. We were also able to play jazz festivals in Guatemala and toured through the US, where we had the chance to play in New York, Los Angeles, and even Las Vegas. So it looks like the jazz award did draw some attention to our tiny little band!

POPULAR CULTURE AS A BASIS FOR IMPROVISATION kultur: Jazz is often perceived as a rather serious genre. How do jazz audiences react to your humorous covers of Kraftwerk and Blink 182 songs?

GE: We don’t take ourselves too seriously. I don’t like music that has no sense of humour. On the other hand, our interpretations of Kraftwerk and Blink 182 songs were very serious. Kraftwerk is one of the most important German bands, and I’m a big fan of Blink 182. I met Blink 182’s drummer Travis Barker in Barcelona, and he liked our version of their song Down.

Jazz musicians have always used pieces of popular culture as a basis for improvisation; it’s an old jazz tradition. Another benefit is that younger people who don’t have any jazz affinity may now hear about our band and listen to our music. It can work as a first step into the world of improvised music, because they can relate to a melody they are familiar with. kultur: You have worked with guest musicians such as Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento in the past. Do you have plans for other collaborations?

GE: We just recorded an album with our long-time friend Marco Lobo, a percussionist from Rio de Janeiro, plus five wonderful singers from Brazil. One of them is Maria Gadu, who is really a super star in Brazil. We planned and worked on this project for two years, and now we finally made it.

The Brazilian Album was recorded in Munich, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Salvador and is our attempt to blend the Trio ELF sound with Brazilian grooves. We are very happy with it and we will play a few instrumentals from the album on our tour in Australia!

Trio ELF is an internationally acclaimed jazz group from Munich, Germany. The band features Gerwin Eisenhauer on drums, Walter Lang on piano and Peter Cudek on bass. Trio ELF combines a pulsating foundation of drum’n’bass and jazz grooves with lyrically expressive piano melodies and counterpoint bass lines.

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34:

THEATRE OF RESEARCH: THEATER FUNDUS Sybille Peters

“Doing research with children means asking how we wish the world to be, testing the impossible and connecting the biggest with the smallest.

It means researching in all languages: with the body, the telescope, in calligraphy, and with the camera on the street, until we find out how we can once more move the boundaries between reality and fiction.�

Theatre

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HAMBURG-BASED THEATER FUNDUS IS A PRODUCING THEATRE FOR CHILDREN. THEIR INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED PROGRAM, THE THEATRE OF RESEARCH, PROPOSES THAT EVERYONE IS A RESEARCHER — FROM KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN TO THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE THEATRE’S ACCREDITED PHD PROGRAM PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP. THEATRE OF RESEARCH IS AN INTERNATIONAL LEADER IN LIVE ART WORKS CREATED BY, WITH AND FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE. Think of research as something simple. We all do it from an early age: we want something, and so we try. Mostly, it does not work out the first time. So we try again, somewhat different than before, and now it almost works. This way we start a series of tests, keep going and do not allow ourselves to be disappointed too quickly. And thus, research has already begun.

In their early research, children often have amazing experiences of success. No wonder that for a while many of them think that everything is possible: if you can learn to speak, why not perform magic or attempt to fly? And as a matter of fact, humans have learnt many things that at first appeared to be magic, and so by now we can also fly. However, we have not achieved this on our own, but together with others, in complex constellations of humans and things. Yet, instead of growing into this joint research, children and adolescents are often taught something completely different: namely, that certain wishes can be fulfilled, and others cannot and that there are predefined ways that have to be followed in order to fulfil their more realistic wishes. As inevitable as these experiences may seem, they often harm our sense of research. It wastes away, and then a societal division of labour takes effect: research becomes something that only a few can afford or are allowed to do. Only those who are best at learning and who go to school the longest and then go to university become researchers in the end. Therefore, most adults stopped being explorers.

© Gyde Borth

As explorers of the everyday, children seem to do Live Art all the time. For them to light a match can be something extraordinary that needs focus and creates a singular experience. The same is true for everybody who practices Live Art. And in fact, Live Art has something to offer to kids: the acknowledgement of their actions and their thinking; the reassurance that everything can make a difference. Theatre of Research has been hosting and devising Live Art projects in which kids and adults, artists, scientists, scholars and citizens of different kinds have collaborated as researchers.

Together, they explore questions such as: How to meet a ghost?

How to search for miracles? How to go to space (without leaving the earth)? What is the life of a real pirate like? Theatre of Research uses Live Art as a strategy not only to present the outcomes of research onstage, but also to devise the research process as such in terms of explorative activities and interventions into the everyday.

The project development is based on a wish triangle: the wish is the starting point and also the point of the triangle where the children enter the process. Children are often ‘better’ at wishing than adults. In return, it is more up to the grown-ups to determine

which wish is suitable for a joint research project. The second corner of the triangle stands for the starting point of knowledge production, the entry of the adult researcher: which research question can be connected to the wish? What kind of discourse can help to fulfil the wish? The third corner of the triangle is the artist’s entry point. Their task is it to come up with a setup, with means and experimental practices to realise the wish. For example, the wish “I want to be an astronaut and live in space” has led to the research question: How can we change our everyday experience in such a way that we can actually experience the earth as spaceship and our existence as a journey through space? This is where the artistic expertise kicked in: we built a mobile space station from tents to be set up in a schoolyard or public space. We founded the Club of Autonomous Astronauts, and developed audio guides for experimenting with gravity (Flying While Lying).

Today, the Theatre of Research is doing a multitude of transgenerational projects and programs in Hamburg and internationally. For example, the Theatre of Research has started a dialogue between children and real pirates and founded the Children’s Bank which issued its own currency. One of the most popular shows is called 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your children do) , a show which is counteracting overprotectionism and the security paradigm. With Tate Families & Early Years Department and the Live Art Development Agency in London, the Theatre of Research created PLAYING UP — a game full of instructions to perform and play your way through the histories and practices of Performance Art. Today PLAYING UP is played by children and adults around the world, thereby creating something which seems to be pretty rare: a transgenerational public.

Transgenerational research supports kids to keep their sense of possibility alive, while it helps adults to jumpstart their sense of possibility, too.

Theater Fundus will come to Australia in early spring 2018.

DR SYBILLE PETERS studied literature and philosophy in Hamburg. She is the founder and director of the Forschungstheater/ Theatre of Research situated at the FUNDUS THEATER in Hamburg. She is a globally recognised expert in Live Art and participatory work for children.

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VRWANDLUNG: KAFKA’S METAMORPHOSIS IN VIRTUAL REALITY “AS GREGOR SAMSA AWOKE ONE MORNING FROM UNEASY DREAMS, HE FOUND HIMSELF TRANSFORMED IN HIS BED INTO A GIGANTIC INSECT.” Tomáš Moravec Thus begins the most well-known novella of the 20th century, Die Verwandlung or The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Based on the work’s core idea, the Goethe-Institut Prague developed a theme room with VR technology. It allows the audience to wake up as a huge insect in a room reproduced after the original.

After the successful opening of VRwandlung in Prague, the project will travel around the world.

FROM THE PAGE TO VIRTUAL REALITY Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis takes place in Prague during the early 20th century, where the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one day in the body of a beetle. Instead of resolving how and why this happened, the story focuses on how he comes to terms with it and describes the reaction of his family. Since Kafka published this story more than a hundred years ago, it has been adapted many times through different media, but for the first time, audiences will now be able to fully immerse in the story — thanks to Virtual Reality (VR).

VR is a computer-generated scenario that simulates a realistic experience with a 3D environment in which the user can move around. In collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Prague, a Czech start-up led by director Mika Johnson developed VRwandlung — a three-dimensional room installation allowing users to examine and explore a specifically laid out room through the distorted perspective of an insect.

YOU ARE GREGOR SAMSA By putting on the VR glasses, Kafka’s work is transferred from the pages into virtual reality. The protagonist is no longer Gregor Samsa: it’s you. Just like Samsa, you find yourself in a world where everything seems strange, especially your own body. First, you have to learn how to handle your new body, then interact with your environment and other characters from the novel. As the plot thickens, you will be able to interact with Samsa’s family and his boss, who continuously knock on the door, trying to get access to the room.

Behind the production of the VR project is a lot of work and attention to detail. The VR adaptation would not have been possible without a meticulous reconstruction of the room.

Everything was recreated like in the story: the writing desk with books, the white iron bed, the floral pattern on the wall, the suitcases, and the paperweight. The titles of the books on Gregor Samsa’s desk are the same that Franz Kafka himself was reading at that time.

A NEW WAY TO EXPERIENCE LITERATURE The Metamorphosis seems to be the perfect text for a virtualreality adaptation. There is a positive interplay between technology and text, which involves a double transformation.

First, your body is transformed physically by putting on the headset, then it continues in the virtual world as you enter the story. The VR version is not a reproduction of the text, but a new creation with active involvement of the visitor.

This is a new way to communicate literature as it provides an interesting relationship between technology and text. Of course, a VR adaption does not replicate the complexity or a story, but it gives the visitor the chance to experience it in a completely different way.

KAFKA, THE FATHER OF VIRTUAL REALITY According to Kafka’s biographer, Reiner Stach, Kafka was the spiritual founder of virtual reality. “As an enthusiastic cinema-goer and viewer of stereoscopic images, Kafka imagined that one day a twodimensional image would be fused with spatial effects to create a new completely illusory reality.”

Literature

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kultur 2018

38:

SWEET SIXTEEN: THE GERMANAUSTRALIAN OPERA GRANT EACH YEAR, AN EMERGING PROFESSIONAL OPERA SINGER FROM AUSTRALIA IS SUPPORTED TO LAUNCH HIS OR HER CAREER IN THE INTERNATIONAL WORLD OF OPERA. THE GRANT IS WELL AND TRULY COMING OF AGE AS IT CELEBRATES ITS 16TH YEAR. Wiesbaden is a beautiful, elegant town, centrally located near Frankfurt. It is also home to the Opera House of the Hessisches Staatstheater, which ranks high amongst the impressive array of 87 opera houses in Germany. It performs the great repertoire, including Wagner, Verdi, Puccini and Mozart, many world premieres, and also operettas and musicals. And for 16 years, this Opera House has hosted the program of the GermanAustralian Opera Grant (GAOG).

GAOG takes young opera singers from the beginnings of their Australian career straight to Europe. Many former GAOG recipients have received offers of roles or ensemble positions with renowned opera houses in Germany and other European cities: Mainz, Heidelberg, Dessau, Dresden, Munich, Augsburg, Linz, and Bern.

Their newly acquired German language skills have helped them to immerse themselves in a European opera culture.

A holistic national audition process provides guidance, and a generous financial support package smooths their way while they establish themselves. On top of that, there is a one-year contract as a young professional soloist at the Opera House in Wiesbaden.

This is a proper soloist contract, often with major roles and the participation in the prestigious Wiesbaden International May Festival.

“In such tough competition, with up to 30 artists competing, my favourite moments are when out of this crowd, a truly excellent singer is elected unanimously to receive the Grant. It is the moment when something that is already good has the potential to become excellent.”

GRANT BEGINNINGS GAOG started in 2003, when Hans Henkell, a well-known business owner and supporter of the arts in Wiesbaden and Melbourne, teamed up with Dr David Kram, Artistic Director of More Than Opera, and initiated an agreement with the Wiesbaden Opera House.

Hans Henkell: “I am proud that in Australia operatic singing is being brought to more and more perfection. Germany is a Mecca for opera performances and a fantastic territory for opera singers to further their careers and obtain necessary challenges for their advancement. To enable that cross-fertilisation which enhances Australian standards is the driver behind my support, particularly for young Australian artists.”

The Goethe-Institut provides the arriving singers with an 8-week German language course, which includes accommodation and integration in an entirely German environment. It offers language knowledge and insight into the German way of life. This initial contact base is invaluable as a start for the singers and their career path.

THE FUTURE OF GAOG After 16 years, a small enclave of Australian singers has formed in Wiesbaden, thus new awardees are not only supported by the GAOG team in Melbourne, but also on the ground in Wiesbaden.

Others have returned to contribute to the Australian operatic culture, of course now fluent in German and living proof of what Hans Henkell calls ‘German-Australian cross-fertilisation’. He evaluates the Grant’s cultural contribution as “a profound network within the German-Australian general community and the business community”. With its healthy partnerships including the GoetheInstitut, GAOG is set to continue well into the future.

HANS HENKELL

The Goethe-Institut is a proud supporter of two opera grants.

Details at https://www.goethe.de/ins/au/en/kul/ser/stp/ops.html

Cultural Exchange

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[A]

[B]

[C]

[D]

[E]

ONE STEP AHEAD WITH GERMAN Emma Pearson (2005 awardee) confirms the acquisition of German as “such an important part of my career’s progress”.

Brett Carter (2007) found the language program in Berlin “a huge help, very necessary for the challenges I was later to encounter”.

Christopher Busietta (2009) was able to attest that his German was “improving every day” through the course at the GoetheInstitut, while Hayley Sugars (2011) said she learned a lot: “my brain certainly got a good work out”.

Joel Scott (2017) is the most recent to receive the Grant. He sums up the experience: “I was able not only to immerse myself in the language and lessons but also to soak up the vibrant, cosmopolitan atmosphere in Berlin. The course was, in a word: Brilliant. The content was thorough, concise and clear but with sufficient stringency to challenge without making me feel incapable. This course has proved invaluable in terms of equipping me with a sturdy foundation from which to build my German language skills.

Thank you Goethe-Institut for your support and generosity!”

[A] Daniel Carison (2018 awardee of the German-Australian Opera Grant) performing at the Opera Finale on 12 August 2017 [B] Emma Pearson (2005 GAOG awardee) as Lucia di Lammermoor onstage at Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden © GAOG

[C] Angus Wood (2006 GAOG awardee) in a production of Un ballo in Maschera with Theater und Orchester Heidelberg [D] Hayley Sugars (2011 GAOG awardee) as Flora Bervoix in a production of La traviata at home with Queensland Opera [E] The 2018 Finalists, Adjudicators and Officials on 12 August 2017 at the Opera Finale at Deakin Edge, Federation Square

kultur 2018

40:

INSTANT CITY TOKYO 2020 Rosie Dennis

IN JULY–AUGUST 2020, THE OLYMPICS WILL TAKE PLACE IN TOKYO. WITH THE PROJECT INSTANT CITY TOKYO , THE GOETHE-INSTITUT JAPAN INTENDS TO CREATE A PLACE IN THE OLYMPIC CITY THAT WILL BE DEVOTED TO ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION ON A SMALL STAGE.

I recently travelled to Tokyo as a guest of the Goethe-Institut to participate in a workshop with international peers from the Asia Pacific. The workshop was called ‘Instant City Tokyo’ and below are a few diary entries from my time.

SUNDAY 1 MAY 2018 Daylight savings ends in NSW. Easter egg hunts take place across the country. And, I board a plane bound for Tokyo to attend the ‘Instant City Tokyo’ workshop led by Goethe-Institut Tokyo in collaboration with RaumlaborBerlin and Atelier Bow-Wow.

MONDAY 2 MAY 2018 I arrive in Tokyo at 5am. There are two people on the immigration desk to process 600+ passengers. I collect my luggage and leave the airport. The city is quieter than I expected. Three people help me find my way to the hotel. The hotel room is larger than I expected.

I meet the other Instant City Tokyo workshop participants in the hotel lobby and we walk to Goethe-Institut Tokyo for a welcome by its Director, Peter Anders, and Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, architect and member of RaumlaborBerlin, lead creative partner on the project with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo.

Each workshop participant shared their practice with the group in the form of Petcha Kutcha style presentations. There are many points of similarity between the presentations, in particular the socio-political themes explored in our work.

We have a tour of the local Goethe-Institut office, stopping by the emergency earthquake supply storeroom. We are told that the Goethe-Institut in Tokyo has enough emergency supplies to feed 150 people people in the event of an earthquake. We sample a cake.

Our tour finishes on the rooftop and we share lunch before breaking into small groups to navigate the local area and visit the proposed Instant City Tokyo site. We re-convene and discuss the proposed site and share ideas before departing for a traditional tea ceremony.

Day one closes with a group dinner at local seafood diner.

TUESDAY 3 MAY 2018 Our second day was spent as a group negotiating the neighbourhoods of Akasaka and Aoyama, stopping by a temple, a pet cemetery and a Taiwanese Pineapple House. At the latter, Yoshiharu spoke in more detail about the history and significance of the tea ceremony in Japanese culture in terms of class, ritual and tradition, and Benjamin introduced the democratic principles of community gardens in Germany, known as Schrebergarten. It is these two concepts that have been proposed as the conceptual foundation for Instant City Tokyo.

In our closing session, we discussed the bigger vision for the project, sharing our respective thoughts, observations and ideas of how we may be able to collaborate and contribute.

An intense and inspiring two days — building new relationships with the other artists, curators and architects; absorbing information about Tokyo; tea ceremonies and Schrebergärten; actively listening to the sound of the neighbourhood and remaining open to the possibilities of future collaboration and exchange. I look forward to our next meeting in January 2019.

[TOP LEFT] Japanese Tea Ceremony [TOP RIGHT] The proposed Instant City Tokyo site

ROSIE DENNIS is the current Artistic Director of Urban Theatre Projects. She creates work renowned for distinct beauty, universality and currency. Prior to joining UTP Rosie’s work was presented at more than 25 festivals across Central Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Most recently she has directed two documentaries, Bre & Back and One Day For Peace.

© Rosie Dennis 2018

It can be described as a laboratory for unusual everyday culture: international artists meet Tokyo citizens, and together they develop new forms of urban practice. The idea was developed with the architects of RaumlaborBerlin and Atelier Bow-Wow, and includes the participation of numerous organisations from overseas. The Goethe-Institut Australia invited Urban Theatre Projects (UTP), an innovative company based in the Western Sydney suburb of Bankstown, to get involved. UTP director, Rosie Dennis, recalls her first project meeting in Tokyo.

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