Hermannstrasse 178. Berlin. June 23/24 2023
Rote Drecksau. Bona Kollektiv Edition 2023 Neon, copy of spray paint on residential building 100 × 30 cm.
“A Long Night of Emptying the Language” offers a psychogeography – and psychoanalysis – of Neukölln. This is carried out by a few plain manoeuvres. 1) We hack the urban space, turning a tiny café into a stage. Right after its daily operations, we move in with audio-visual installations, with musical instruments and spoken word, and we begin our performance. It’s a silk-smooth, almost invisible transition. 2) The leading voice is the café’s employee. For the time of the show, he is a subject and the object, delivering his lines or selling you a drink. 3) The whole jam session (spoken word, guitar, looper, live electronics) is as much a musical as a conceptual event. Our jewel of a shop opens to the street, exhibiting its innards. During the breaks, we’ll talk with the audience about our proceedings. 4) The libretto is based on the daily drift, a daily situationist dérive, inscribed into the everyday commute. Here, the café’s employee describes the landscape he encounters on the way to work, freely improvising on the psychic contours of the terrain, with all the slogans, prompts, injunctions that pervade the Kiez. 5) This freely floating speech, its associations and détournements, will last long enough to empty itself out and to switch the registers of sense. What does it mean, today, when “PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST” and “BUILT TO OUTPERFORM” share the grammar of the neighbouring billboards? 6) The presence of the band, the setting of the play(ground), serve to galvanize the processes and to let the affects shape our experience. Finally, it’s a gig – experimental music in an unconventional location – we talk about here. 7) The drifting speech of an immigrant is seismic-sensitive. It’s not insensitive, that is, to the far-right resurgences, witnessed by the posters on Späti displays. The shop itself is a historical site – an outlet of “Das Volk”, a post-war SPD newspaper & Karl Ingar Røys’s installation ROTE DRECKSAU/RED BASTARD will yield a little extra from ideological hum.
Text Pawel Jankiewicz
Biography 1. Pawel Jankiewicz is a writer and a café employee. 2. Ohad Shabi is a passionate guitarist combining live instrumentation with electronic synthesiser-like instruments. 3. Nìcola Mazzocchi synthesized various musical experiences as a self-taught guitarist. His sound is a mish-mash drawing from jazz, feeding into world music elements. 4. Ashar Mumtaz is a composer conducting respectful sessions of live electronics. Belonging to the psychogeographies of interest, he'll be in charge of the sonic personality of the project. 5. Karl Ingar Røys is an artist/filmmaker whose practice consists of creating platforms for speculative thought, knowledge building and exchange, as well as research of cultural activism in transitional societies.
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