Your dreams come true Flutgraben performances #3 The Program
THE PROGRAM This is the first year “Flutgraben performance” is taking place, it’s a an artist-run and self-organised event-series. Around it, a group of 10 artists has gathered, the artists, based in Berlin, are also creating the form of the event-series, it’s structure and it’s character. “The Program” is an artwork made for the event “Flutgraben performance 3 your dreams come true”. It is a fiction, the hallucination of a festival happening on paper only and in the imagination. The group wrote this program in Schloss Bröllin, in Brandebourg, few hours from Berlin in September 2019. They went there in order to continue the practice of “insights”. An “insight” is a moment in which an artist leads other people through the meanders of his/her artworks, feelings and thoughts, and by any possible means tries to bring them closer to the work, the thought or the feeling. Each artist wrote a fictional performance, it makes “the program”.
“…and in the delirium caused by pesticide spread over the field next to the castel by a strange machines, I thought to add some words like: And dreams come true, and fiction, in tortuous and unexpected manners finds ways to come to life. And it feels good to bring fiction in this crowded landscape of things to achieve, lines to follow, planning, dead lines, and applications. And at the same time we’re creating value out of the blue. We make a program that doesn’t exist, touching the shadows of what really happens.“ Clémentine Mensonge
LIGHT UP by Eyrún aka Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir Walking Installation Eyrún Guðjónsdóttir takes her work ever further into the field of unexplored experiences. In this walking installation, overwhelming heat, blinding light, and lack of oxygen all play their parts to create full intensity for the sensory and physical experience of the audience. Put on a fireproof suit and crawl through a labyrinth of 10,000 candles filling up every inch of the Flutgraben building. It shines, giving off light when seen from afar. Make your way through the building towards the rooftop, where you will find oxygen masks. Up the staircase to the rooftop terrace you will discover a rooftop ablaze. The fire, five metres high and fitting perfectly onto the rooftop, delivers an intensely visceral experience. With an unexpected and hallucinatory effect, arrive at a new level of enchantment.
FALLING by Uri Turkenich Participatory Performance One hundred performers walk around the space, each one choosing someone to fall in love with. They talk to this person in a private space and somehow manage to really and totally fall in love. The installation “Falling” is for people who want to fall in love with a random person. It’s like life. It’s for people who forgot how to fall in love / never managed to / fell in love too long ago / and want to do it again. Falling in love is something to experience at least once before dying. Suitable for adults (18+) who want to fall in love
THIS IS NOT WHAT I HAD IN MIND by Claire Montduvin Performance This artwork reflects the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. It was a time when the human impact on the environment increased dramatically and a sudden acceleration in society deeply affected the human body. The artefact is a machine that performs a useless action in an endless loop, during which it produces screams, laughing, and sighs. After six minutes the machine stops and only the museum guard can activate it again. Before each activation, the guard has to clean away the large puddles of oil that have leaked from the machine and onto the floor. The action of cleaning makes the floor slipperier and slipperier, and the guard needs to work harder and harder to keep their balance as they operate the machine. The role of the guard is performed by a performance artist who, at the beginning of every loop, says: “This is not what I had in mind.�
EXTRACTION by André Uerba Performance-installation Extraction is a performance-installation with one audience member as the main character/ performer. They sit on a medical chair inside a hexagonal glass structure around six metres in diameter. This ‘glasshouse’ is sterile and equipped with surgical instruments, cameras hanging from the ceiling on movable arms, and six LCD screens. Inside the glasshouse, there are a doctor and an assistant. The doctor is extracting hair from the performer and re-implanting it in the affected areas. The performer cannot see out of the glasshouse, but from the outside, the audience can observe the action of extracting and transplanting the hair follicles. The LCD screens display images of natural disasters, demolitions, wars, babies falling asleep, amusement parks, fireworks, aeroplane crashes, cats, and so on. For adults only
The Black Lake | Collective Action by Egotec Two-Channel Video Projection, 32 minutes. During the famous Feel Festival in August 2019 at the Bergheider See in Lausitz which attracted 30,000 people, visitors were asked to empty the lake. The Bergheider See is an artificial lake which was created in a former coal mine. For the duration of the festival, each visitor received a 15-litre watering can, which, multiplied by 30,000, is the precise amount of water the lake contains. Visitors poured the water they collected on the sand dunes that surround the lake. Trees started to grow. The lake became a black hole, uncovering the layer of coal underneath the water. The anonymous art collective Egotec is internationally renowned for its radical invasive land art. After a collective grilling on top of a dying volcano and collectively licking away a melting Icelandic glacier, their current project in Germany aims to artificially reverse the post-industrial rewilding process happening in Lausitz. As in all their projects, they also aim to shift the hybrid border between nature and culture on a gigantic scale.
BICYCLE RIDE by Albert Hofman Film This film shows faces of people letting go after emotionally intense experiences. Upon letting go of emotional, intellectual and behavioural patterns, consciousness dilates. The subject experiences a profound sensitivity and emotionality. We aimed to capture this very precise moment, when the face revealed the release of the unconscious tensions produced by those patterns, yet is still marked by the form they leave, embedded in the flesh. Some of these films show real-life moments (people coming off addictive drugs, people who have experienced a bereavement, people who have just had sex, etc), while others have been recreated for the purposes of the film (drug consumption, sleep deprivation, going through Grinberg treatments, clubbing, fasting, psychoanalysis, Osho meditations, etc) for long periods between 12 hours and two weeks.
RED OR DEAD by Beatrix Grisela Bally Shot on 8mm film Running time : 12 min Red or dead is a video work depicting a vampire hiding in a tree and jumping on a table where 2 people have a casual drink, one is running away aaaaaahhh, the other one is screaming ah aaahhh, a toddler is passing in a trolley aaaaaaahhhhaaaaahhh, a wild turkey is gobbling ahahahhahaha and so on and so on. The complete scenography, characters and surrounding are fully red. It is barely possible to see anything except red but the sound is clear. R (Restricted) – Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
UNTITLED By Moritz Majce + Sandra Man Performance In their ongoing quest to transgress the borders of choreographic conventions, Moritz Majce and Sandra Man collaborated with Japanese robotics company Boston Dynamics to build a space chorus of twelve humanoid robot performers. The piece also includes immersive, 360° video material shot at the Ancient Greek theatre of Thorikos, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the Hungarian Puszta.
THE BODY STRETCH by Clémentine Mensonge 90-minute performance for one spectator In the 1990s, Clémentine Mensonge was invited to NASA for a few months as an observer of the “Earth Observing System” (EOS) programme. Ever since, she has maintained a strong desire to push the boundaries of human experience and the limits of space. In this performance installation, which she has created for one spectator, the audience will wear 3D glasses and enter a new world designed to redefine the borders of the body. While the visitor travels through various landscapes in the film installation, their body is manipulated by three performers. The disruption between image and sensation creates a trance-like state which allows the visitor to re-experience the ways the body is felt and perceived, taking them to a new dimension. Not recommended to those with heart conditions or epilepsy.
UNTITLED By Usaen Travis Performance A stone falls every 13 minutes, rolling from the roof of the Flutgraben. Four minutes later, it is carried back to its starting point on top of the roof where it is secured with a strong rope. This will happen during the evening at: go: 8:37 back: 8:41 go: 8:54 back: 8:58 go: 9:11 back: 9:15 go: 9:28 back: 9:32 At exactly the moment the stone is carried back to its position for the fourth and final time, a Jazz quartet will start playing in the entrance of the building. After 15 minutes, the music will become psychedelic. The quartet will consist of three women and one man. Towards the end of the psychedelic music, a window will open and a bucket of water will be poured through it. As it hits the floor, the water will reveal the words: Why is it not burning?
Text by the artists in order: Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Uri Turkenich, Jasna L. Vinovrški, André Uerba, Sandra Man, Charlie Fouchier, Cécile Bally, Moritz Majce, Clément Layes, Arantxa Martinez, and guests.
Flutgraben Performances is a series of four events per year, located at Am Flutgraben Berlin and dedicated to the growth of artistic works. It focuses on choreographic, dance, and performance works in the broadest sense of the term. It challenges the ways artworks are presented to the audience. This by presenting works closer to the way they are produced and constantly transformed. Flutgraben Performances aims to go beyond the premiere as the only encounter between an artwork and an audience, and attempts to create engagements that are more intimate and fragile yet simultaneously more continuous and consistent. Flutgraben Performances is an artist-run and self-organised event series. The participating artists in 2019 are Cécile Bally, Charlie Fouchier, Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Arantxa Martinez, Uri Turkenich, André Uerba, Clément Layes, Jasna L. Vinovrški, Moritz Majce and Sandra Man.
Publisher: ClĂŠment Layes Design and layout: Mia Stark Proof reading: Aslan Richard
Production: Katharina Wallisch and Magda Zielinska Technical support: Helmut Rilinger Lights: Milos Vujkovic Cover photo: Eva Schmidhuber Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Supported by Flutgraben e.V. and Public in Private Studio thanks to the artists