In his work ‘mapping the past’, the director and visual artist Sebastian Hirn examines the construction of German identity. In a physical, cinematic approach, four monumental structures are measured.
Image gallery
The monuments are an expression of a newly awakened national consciousness and powerfully and oversizedly stage Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II as successors to the medieval emperors of the Holy Roman Empire.
Exposed to the powerful staging
In a three-channel video installation, dancers encounter these monuments of power, which were created in the course of the founding of the German Empire, and relate to the structures.
The encounter reveals the fragility of the human body in the face of the enormous monumental architecture and puts the structures in a new light.
The videos were shot at the Kyffhäuser Monument, the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, the Kaiser Wilhelm Monument at Porta Westfalica and the Deutsches Eck.
Sebastian Hirn combines the film material with photographs from the former colony of German South West Africa.
These images give an impression of the international impact of the Wilhelmine claim to power.
In addition, the dancers Alessandra Defazio and Julia Keren Turban perform live in the former church space in Studio 1 of the Kunstquartier Bethanien in ‘mapping the past’.
They extend the video's playing surface into real space.
Together with the musician Niko De Paula Lefort and Sebastian Hirn, the visual material is re-examined with electronic sounds and live percussion.
At the end, the space opens up for Herero poet and performer Prince Marenga Kamaazengi, who will recite a poem about Waterberg Mountain, where in 1904 German ‘protection troops’ fought the Ovaherero in a decisive battle that forced them to flee into the Omaheke Desert.
A gigantomania in which the human body disappears
Before and after the performance, the performance is framed by an exhibition of interviews that Sebastian Hirn conducted in Namibia between 2022 and 2024. On six monitors, you can follow various voices from Namibia through headphones.
The interviewees include, among others, a large-scale landowner and descendant of a soldier of the Schutztruppe, a Nama and a Herero chief, a minister for land reform, a descendant of the Hamburg shipping family Woermann and the chairwoman of the Nama Genocide Technical Committee.
In his work, Sebastian Hirn focuses on interview and research projects, interweaving theatre, dance, film and visual arts. In ‘mapping the past. Deutschlandskizzen 2’, he deals for the second time with the pathology of German identity construction.
In ‘reenacting the reenactment. Deutschlandskizzen 1’, he focused on the suicides of German poets and writers.
Additional information
We do apologize that the following information is currently only available in German.
Dates
December 2024
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