MEDIATHEK

Global homogenization by means of gentrification is a widespread phenomena of the present day. But what does it mean to translate one place into another? How exactly do spaces facilitate functions? Relations? Is an empty space destined to become an H&M? A Starbucks? What role do artists play in such processes? These were the questions on the minds of Bill Dietz and Janina Janke upon the invitation from the LOFFT Theater to create a new work for the Lindenau neighborhood of Leipzig (a district on the cusp of gentrification). Over the five weeks in residence, Janke and Dietz created a site-specific participatory work that was performed by both a choir of local inhabitants of the district as well as the theater audience four times throughout a massive, empty department store. Dietz and Janke gathered material from interviews with diverse members of the local community (from members of political commune to a bourgeois planning to build a private house), as well as historical documents of experimental and utopian architectural models for radical modes of togetherness (Charles Fourier, the Shakers), and in a series of workshops for community members and local artists. Each evening of the final performances, members of the ad hoc choir faciliated the 1:1 scale construction and singing of various local and historical architectural models solely with the bodies of the assembled community. Audience members and choir were constantly repositioned throughout the 4,000 square meter floors of the empty department store in the shapes of existing and utopian architectures. Once in these positions, the dimensions of these virtual spaces were sung by the audience while members of the choir recited transcripts from the interviews with local inhabitants. Using a specially adapted formula for interpreting spatial distances as tones (wavelengths), the blueprints of particular buildings become inhabitable scores for embodied articulation. From one moment to another, an audience member might be a part of a „wall“ of an East German studio apartment (which might sound like an E and a F-sharp) or Thomas More’s utopian island (all A-s) or of a new single-family home (a D and an F). For the duration of the project the empty department store waiting to be filled with new content or to be torn down, became a laboratory for members of the surroundings as well as the audience to join together in a form of auditory community and to test out various models and structures for being together.