Discussing 3 performances @ ‘Friendly Confrontations - Festival of Global Art and Criticism of Institutions,’ hosted by Münchner Kammerspiele (2020-01-16[-19])
Discussed performances: ‘Operation Sunken Sea’ by Heba Y. Amin; ‘Metabit:Metapixel:Metadimension’ by Onyx Ashanti; ‘Birding the Anthropocene’ by Nadir Sourigi Festival curated by: Julia Grosse and Julian Warner
Conversants: Beniamiono Foschini and Victor Sternweiler
... sitting @ Kammerspiele’s Canteen.
Beniamino: We just saw the first two performances.
Victor: The first performance was by Heba Y. Amin, ‘Operation Sunken Sea,’ @ Kammer 3. She’s an Egyptian artist and lecturer living in Berlin. I once attended a performance of hers, which I found very interesting, so I was eager to be here today. The Kammer 3 was designed as follows. There was a rather large projection canvas in the centre functioning as a backcloth, and also two hanging banners from the ceiling, with a cheap logo printed on them, derived from the Mediterranean’s Sea cartography by the 10th century Persian geographer Al-Istakhri. In the foreground there was a simple speaker’s podium with a huge bouquet of flowers. On its side, two flags on poles, recalling the banners in the background. Apart from the bouquet, the scene gave an impression of a black monochrome. Between the audience’s seats, two cameras also stood there.
Beniamino: Isn’t it typical, I mean, for recording?
Victor: No, normally cameras are placed behind the audience at Kammerspiele.
Beniamino: So they were part of the set. Amin’s performance was divided into two main moments. During the first one, she was not present, instead some historical footage was projected onto the blank canvas in the background. It was a collection of different forms of speeches by 20th century political leaders, dealing with the Mediterranean Sea as a place for social, economical and war related issues.
Victor: The projection consisted of six audiovisual documents in a row, all in b/w, showing speeches by Italian Benito Mussolini, an Egyptian political activist whom I did not identify…
Beniamino: Me neither.
Victor: … Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, UK’s Robert Eden, US’s Dwight Eisenhower, and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. Mussolini’s speech during a rally was about Italian Imperialism in the Mediterranean Sea. Nasser, Eden and Eisenhower’s speeches referred to the contemporary Suez Canal crisis. Specifically, Nasser addressed the theme of independence from US money. Eden addressed Nasser’s unreliability and stressed the economical relevance of the Suez Canal for Western interests.
Beniamino: I was quite impressed by Eden’s speech, as he seemed to threaten Egypt with war for a simple reason: oil. The Suez Canal was actually the way through which oil barrels could have been delivered to Western Europe. It made me think how today the threat of war is based on fictive ideology (defense of democracy or whatever), when it is actually a question of resources. That guy Eden was quite clear and paradoxically honest: we do war for economical reasons. On the contrary, a more ideological speech on the crisis was delivered by Eisenhower, I think at the UN in New York.
Victor: And finally, the Erdogan’s speech, more recent of course, but still in b/w, was about the construction of a new canal between the Black and the Mediterranean Sea.
Beniamino: This first moment, the projection ended, and the artist entered the stage, she went behind the speaker’s podium. Thus, HER performance began. All the set up—the stage design and the footage—suggested she was going to play the character of a political leader, dressed up in accordance with an official assembly’s speech. Then she started reading from her paper.
Victor: She adopted the character of a political leader from a North African country (it was not specified which one, again due to the fictive logos on banners and flags). Her speech was a collage of the previous speeches—using the exact propagandistic phrases and chunks as a vocabulary to formulated another speech—intertwined with pseudo-utopian statements by the German architect, Herman Sörgel, who in the 1920s developed Atlantropa, a colossal engineering project aimed at draining the Mediterranean Sea—that later info I got from the press release as he was not mentioned during the performance itself. Thus, uniting the European and African continents, for the sake of European survival. So, the character played by Amin shifts the perspective, proposes to drain the sea and to move it to Sahara.
The Bensplainer: At the very beginning of her speech I was very excited, because I was expecting a parodic function in her delivering speech. You know? You set the premises—the stage design and the actual words by political leaders—in order to play with them and somehow to try to estrange them too. But as a whole it somehow failed: in order to bring the issues, the material, to the point of absurdity, it would have been more insightful if she also parodied the charisma, the styles, the gestures, of the political leaders shown before.
Victor: Yes, the absurdity is very evident, but Amin didn’t act more or less then she usually would ‘act’ in her other (lecture) performances. She wasn’t really acting, thus transcending emotions, like those other leaders did. I think that stage in a house like that really demanded a better actor and I would have loved to see somebody from the Kammerspiele assembly doing her part. There one could see the inherent institution critique: you ‘have’ to literally perform your very own work yourself, or it is easier to make work which you can perform by yourself, because there are very few institutions which are able to inivite work that requires the invitation of several people. I think Kammerspiele initiatives have a bigger budget than at least half of the art institutions that invite her. At the end, it was a bit unconvincing as she was probably performing that piece for the 30th time.
Beniamino: On the other hand, Amin wanted to embody this character as a political stance and from the perspective of a non European artist. Just using her body as a statement. But ideas didn’t help the acting after all.
Beniamino: The second performance we attended was Onyx Ashanti, ‘Metabit:Metapixel:Metadimension,’ @ Workshop Kammerspiele. It was staged—if you could say it was staged—in the unconventional setting of one of Kammerspiele’s workshops. Onyx Ashanti took a portion of the space and made it very comfy, with seats, pillows, carpets, all around his station and working gears, computers, screens, beamers, a 3D printer. He wore his personal set of gadgets, sensors designed and produced by himself, able to fit onto his body. These were connected to an A.I., programmed also by him to produce music based on his body’s vibration.
Victor: I actually know his work from YouTube. So, he was sitting on the floor and around him, some small tables and created a place where he could work. People who just came in could sit on the pillows around the U-form table set. There was no start or an ending, you simply approached him, while he was working or interacting with his guests, answering questions and so on. A very comfortable situation, which made it more like a studio visit rather than a performance. And he had somebody bring him a beer.
Beniamino: Of course, there was a vast range of questions you could ask, especially about his ongoing practice with A.I.,the body and music. This was somehow the device that activated his ‘studio visit’ performance. On one hand, it dealt with personal issues and his DIY attitude of the moment. On the other hand, the way he did wasn’t really direct, and I loved it. For instance, his answers to our questions were often metaphorical. It was inspiring, because I felt active, even if only listening to him. Also his body language was intense, because the way he moved, the way he talked, was very energetic and insightful. So, in a way, it was a performance, but, as you said, he managed to make us feel we were participating in a studio visit.
Victor: It was a studio visit because he arranged the space so that he could have continued working, even if nobody would have interacted with him. I loved how he subverted the system of the hired artist, coming for a gig, being paid and then leaving. He was using Kammerspiele practically and the time slot for his gig as a working space and an opportunity to work.
Beniamino: Very efficient! Working on his stuff, interacting with visitors, and performing for the theater, all at once! And everybody was engaged. Apart from that, he showed us a video addressing the relationship between his A.I./bodily generated music and ‘natural’ music. As he's living in Detroit and owning a little garden, he decided to let it grow by itself. Thus it became a favorite spot for animals and insects. In this video, taken during the night, he and the crickets’ music intertwined their harmonies, with surprising effects. He stated that after some nights playing together, the crickets started to respond to his music, but I wasn’t really able to catch it properly from the video.
Victor: What’s charming is that he made music with the crickets for the sake of just doing it, only at a later point of time did he eventually documented it in the way you document a personal memory with your phone. How he described what happened, made me feel that it wasn’t important at the end, if it was believable or not: the storytelling was inspiring.
Beniamino: I know I’m always annoying bensplaining to all of you about Russian modernism. But still… the poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s father was a trained ornithologist and he was an expert too. In his last supersaga Zangezi (1922), Khlebnikov put in verse actual transliteration of birds’ songs. I don’t know if it makes sense to cite it here, but it came to mind simply by association.
The next day, Beniamino Foschini and Victor Sternweiler @ Brenner, having an espresso.
Beniamino: On a snowy Sunday morning, we went birdwatching. Spooky Khlebnikov!
Victor: It was Nadir Sourigi, ‘Birding the Anthropocene,’ @ Praterinsel. Literally birdwatching, with a ‘but.’ The New York based artist and an ornithology pedagogue Sourigi picked up the group at the Kammerspiele and then we all went together to the Isar, to the Praterinsel. The idea somehow theatricalized birdwatching tours.
Beniamino: I think that it is what Sourigi does, being an artist and an ornithologist, and prefers to do birdwatching with non-white communities in Harlem, those who are underpriviledged. His practice joins birdwatching to related historical and critical issues, the current state of environmental studies too. Of course, this tour was very active and people could freely interact with Sourigi.
Victor: At first he explained to us how urbanization had and has a strong impact on the bird population.
Beniamino: And while we were still on a bridge leading to Praterinsel, looking for birds, he also mentioned the catastrophic statistics that, alone in Germany, 75% of flying insects have disappeared in the last years.
Victor: All of a sudden, after introducing the attendees to some birdwatching techniques, Sourigi started to express his institutional critique: birdwatchers are basically white, and so are members of Life Preservation institutes. And then there were some people who really came for the birdwatching and had their binoculars. The educational system in itself poses barriers for non-white people to access this field of culture. At the same time, he initiated this birdwatching program with kids in Harlem, in order to make them aware of what’s happening near to their neighborhood: Central Park, even if near to Harlem, doesn’t belong to these kids’ spatial perspective.
Beniamino: Like as if it has invisible burdens—I think he used these words—at least some spots of the park.
Victor: But think about it: the Kammerspiele offers a birdwatching tour, so all participants are as white as in the US, as we learned. Instead of really doing birdwatching, he starts a conversation about racism, class, global capitalism and selective education. Issues hit you in the face. This estrangement rendered the tour artistic, if you want, not the facts in themselves. I also find interesting how he manages to increase non-white participation in ornithological tours, both in a social sense (as in Harlem) and in an artistic sense (as here at the Kammerspiele). Audiences and motivations are very diverse, but he somehow tries to get all together.