#steffi hensel

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 7th July (letter1 #steffi)

 Dear Alice,

I love the smell of sun lotion mixed with beer and sweat. This is summer to me. The big stairs at Strandbad Müggelsee, bright and white, and how they burn themselves in my eyes the moment I pack up my belongings and start the ride home after a long day at the beach. I stand in front of the stairs that lead up from the lake towards the street level where the woods start and the little tram stop that awaits me, back towards the city centre. The white glow of the stairs humbles me every time. I take a moment and feel the buzzing crowd of fellow Berliners still enjoying the lake, kids playing, voices mumbling, laughter, the wind, the water … all in my back. Everything is slow, I’m a little drugged out by the sun, the beer and the people. And there it is, the big staircase in front of my eyes. The promise of what? I’m going to leave this reflection out for you, Alice.

Liebe Grüße,

Steffi

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 6th July 2012 (letter #steffi)

Dear Sophia, Céline and my fellow WOWs,

thanks for all your letters! I would like to start my reply by picking up something you said Sophia. You wrote how last year in WOW we wrote about what we ‘needed’ to work and now you almost feel inspired to say what you want in order to work. And you wonder who will listen?

I am listening.

And I think the shift in perspective, the shift of attention that is needed can be done by us. There will never be an ideal political situation, funding situation etc. (and we should aim for improvement and express criticism and work towards change!) But also I would like to stress, that there will always be interactions between people, and this is were the possibility of political action – the political action I'm interested in – can occur. Work is one mode of this interaction, so to reflect about work and to actually work together -writing together - is very exciting for me right now.

I really like some of the writing of Simone Weil for the way she was focusing on how we have to improve our ability to pay attention. In „The Iliad, a poem of force“ she looks at a piece of literature more than 2000 years old and concludes that the Iliad can teach us to „look at power and learn not to admire it“. A difficult task but not impossible. A shift to be desired I believe and imagining it in my head: suddenly there would be a lot of free space in the spotlight of our attention. Room for a new group ( a new kind?) of protagonists to shine.

Our writing residency is special in the way that it links the change of perspective with a focus on putting it into words, writing about it. The link between political action and its narrative quality has been discussed since Aristotle. Hannah Arendt sums her take on it up in „The human condition“ when she writes:

„The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zoê, that Aristotle said that it somehow is a kind of praxis.“

And this leads me to your notion of „stuttering“ Céline. The stuttering you were describing so beautifully. I'm wondering if stuttering in this sense could be an indicator for the lack of training of a certain muscle. A muscle that (luckily) still exists within us but (unfortunately) is severely underdeveloped.

Oh my, this has become very abstract and my break is nearly over. I'm writing this letter from my office and I really regret that I'm not in the same room at Sophiensaele with you today. It was, as Litó stressed a very special atmosphere, to be in the same room, to think about a similar field but ultimately express something individually. It was kind of celebratory, it added a layer of meaning to what we did. And that is a very powerful tool we have as artists, that we can create meaning. However, I am sure I would have written a different letter at Sophiensaele and I'm looking forward to be there again Saturday and Sunday.

Liebe Grüße,

Steffi

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 5th July 2012 (letter #steffi)

 Hello,

I am looking forward to reading all your letters, a lot more than actually writing one myself. To be honest I cannot stand my own writing at the moment. I am so tired of it. For example I developed the habit to write in an essayistic style using quotations to kick-start a stream of thought that makes the conversations visible (readable) that happen inside my head. A style that – I would hope - hints maybe a little bit to how I research and create a text. All the dead ends I explored all the hours I wasted staring blankly out of my window into the same old courtyard, all the lack of being articulate of hitting the nail on the head. Schwarzarbeit. I would like to include more of the “dirty labour” of writing into my writing.

Butterkellertreppengefalle. When I wrote the warm-up letter to you guys I accidently kept the old working-title as the actual name of the file. I had intended to write to you about how I am busy with exploring the Berlin-accent for one current project of mine. How the accent used to be a uniting thing – something that helped people who moved to Berlin to bond and identify locally and digest tension with humour and most importantly in conversation, in spoken interaction. Something I feel is painfully absent in the everyday life on the streets of Berlin right now. But instead I opted to write a different warm-up letter. It felt easier to fall back into my usual language, my usual tone and flow. I was hurried. I had little time. I couldn’t be bothered. But what’s the rush? One reason for me to be involved with wow is to straighten my priorities, to consciously commit to something and clarify for myself: I have time. In fact I have all the time in the world.

Butterkellertreppengefalle is a word Goethe used when asked to specify what the Berlin people and their accent were all about. (I strongly dislike to drop the name Goethe. I feel like I have to balance out the powers of the universe by also saying: Inge Müller, Simone Weil, Chris Kraus.) But to continue with my thought: Butterkellertreppengefalle is a word not known in the contemporary vocabulary it points to the treasure of the old and unique vocabulary of the Berlin-accent (ultimately a reservoir of the spoken interactions of Berlin's inhabitants). It is a word invented by adding together lots of words. In combination they sound very dynamic. If pronounced correctly, you verbally fall down a flight of stairs into the cellar where the butter is stored. And that is what the word means where it derived from. An invention only to be made with the sense for language that has been developed in Berlin over the centuries. And of course it can be applied to a variety of different scenarios. Like I’m going to approach your letters with all the Butterkellertreppengefalle I can find inside of me.

Liebe Grüße,

Steffi

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 1.06.12 (warm-up letter #alice)

Dear Siegmar, dear Steffi,

the time is very short right now to start developing all the threads you open in your letters. One of them though, about situated practices, directly meets an interest of mine which I started contemplating a few months ago and definitely want to investigate further. Here some lines from last January:

“I want to become a local artist

  (…) I would like to open my imagination about the notion of context-specificity and introduce the idea of a situated practice.

  The work of performance as described above can be considered as a practice composed of many interrelated activities, to which I must add physical practices, readings, partying etc.

Can living somewhere, with neighbors, local shops and specific social-economic issues be integrated into our understanding of practice? We do have neighbors, families, friendships and other relations outside the business of course. But could these activities become integrated and become an effective component of our performance practice? Effective as in one that has an effect and that is also changed by the other parts of the practice. (...)

  (…) I'm as much interested in the possibility of integrating my lives into each other as of making my contexts part of each other. I guess this will necessitate the weaving of practices in order to build relations with people on various levels, nourishing relations across life areas that could include raising children, body exercise, conceptual imagination and shopping to name a few. (...)”

You know, the thing about contexts is that they're permeable to each other, that we weave them together through our multiple commitments. We sometimes even share several contexts, for example Siegmar and I share a young Berlin artists families circle and an international performance circle. Steffi, we don't even know each other but it seems we could meet on several grounds as well. Yet the addition of these individual cross-overs doesn't make enough of a change on a wider scale; we need to think of it as an “art project” and a “society project”, i.e. a common project on the general understanding of our position within society, in which more people recognize themselves. Not to represent themselves but to act and activate concerns that cross over sections of our lives.

I would like to share and produce together a bit more of the Berlin (art) practitioners as well as citizen commitments. Maybe a shared garden?

Warm greetings,

Alice

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin, 31.05.2012 (warm-up letter #steffi)

 Dear Siegmar, dear Alice!

Thanks for your letter Siegmar, it feels great to get this started. Please excuse my brief reply, there is more to come in July.

So, I was thinking about this neighbor I once had. She was this old lady probably around 90 and quite a character. Whenever I happened to check my mailbox she would magically appear and always ask the same question in the most casual and charming way “Liebesbriefe?” (Any love letters?) I mostly received bills or other boring mail but her insistence on me receiving love letters was all kinds of adorable. Why not go for gold? She sure did, dressed to the nines in her housecoat with floral prints, a rotation of different wigs, a confident smile and red fingernails.

I think the way we work and how we do things is very rich. Isn’t that wonderful to use the word rich in connection with our work every now and then? There is -and this is one aspect of what you wrote Siegmar- a hidden economy in the shadow of the monetary aspects of our work. Maybe economy is not the right word. Let’s say there is a basement baby down there and it deserves a little limelight, too. Limelight as in attention.  Attention as in shared time. In that sense every letter is a love letter. I’m looking forward to them!

Yours,

Steffi

[wowberlin-blog]

Berlin 30.5.2012 (warm-up letter #siegmar)

Dear Alice, dear Steffi,

Two weeks ago I was invited to chair a debate on the question of what are artistic strategies to create continuity in the fragmented in Brussels. It was an event of OPEN HOUSE, 24 artistic laboratories and alternative management offices, which joined together to show their practices and research. It was an event dedicated to both public & professionals. Link

FOR FUCKS SAKE can you imagine 24 !!! structures in one city – and these are only the subsidised ones. THIS IS WHY WE GO ABROAD TO WORK. But exactelly the question of continuity in the fragmented is why we started WOW – WIR ARBEITEN HIER! We are sick of easy-jetting around the globe. We are sick of not giving value to the work we do here. Here in Berlin. Everybody is talking about sustainability but nobody seems to want to invest into or to care about sustainability in the arts. This sustainability is economical, it allows you to live and to work, is an organizational one, that allows for structural continuity, and an artistic one, that allows for continuity in the development of ones own artistic practice.

If we think about the ecology of practice we have to think about what the surrounding is that allows a practice to exist. How can a practice itself be a space of appearance, that in itself co-creates its environment and finally what are the sensitivities that put a practice at risk. By insisting on the situatedness of a practice WOW – WIR ARBEITEN HIER also insists on a certain gravity of the local, and on the gravity of the community, no matter how dissensual it is. These concerns of artists nowadays are a public issue that should be discussed publicly. We have to claim and occupy these public spaces of visibility and value and share our artistic knowledges and tools, and forms of research and development. This is why we need a community of practice. That formulate a practice around articulating and communicating ones own practice. A conversation piece practice. Where practice is the conversation piece that ignites conversation and at the same time the practice of developing parameters, formats of these conversations.

This is a letter writing practice. We don’t have to write a solitary thesis but reactions to one another. We address the other. The other here being another peer, another thought, another practice, another public. Thus creating an ecology dealing with processes and adaptations, distribution and abundance, movement of materials and energy through living communities, successional development of ecosystems, and abundance and distribution of diversity in context of the environment.

This is why I’m writing this

Sincerely yours

siegmar