short overview day 2

GlogauAir

The idea was a basic German Kaffeeklatsch, Kaffee und Kuchen style, but this being a bit of a Spanish enclave, there were all sorts of exotic goodies being prepared in the kitchen and aside from fruit salad and strawberries there was hearty stuff too, since it was more a late lunch for some of the crew... created a situation that was more picknick like than a stayed and haughty Kaffee session, but valid enough... so we got under way with a simultaneous reading of the newspapers people brought with them, beginning with mutterings on current affairs to downright incredulity on the sports page, ending up in a mixed verbal brawl and the throwing of crumpled newsprint across the table at each other... after which cacophonous exchange we all fell rather silent.

Julien C. then used the calm to explain his morning walk and his harvest, now being hung on the clotheslines suspended across the rooms... where also the crumples newspaper, after being de-creased somewhat, were hanging... next came Lise D. with here packets of seeds, including the marigolds she had been planting along the way, for each and every one of the participants to continue her effort to cover Berlin in soucis... this might take a while she explained, especially since it is on the basis of free will rather than directive from above. Explaining at length the life of plants, humans the stellar conjunctions and the philosophical ramifications of some simple truths, also crumpled and thrown into space for anyone to retrieve at will she made notes on the window as she had at Grüntaler9, so as to connect the two in a spiritual way rather than merely physically and empirically...

We had an interlude of fashion trials, exchanging clothes designed  and sent along for the occasion by Daniel Von Weinberger, Antwerp jewelry and costume designer, and did a few flights of fancy down the runway illuminated by the video of Dialogist-Kantor’s Bowling patchwork at MAC’s Grand Hornu... this took a while and made for some pleasant exchanges... 

The video was turned off and Julien C. presented a series of head projections, celebral slides - investigating the workings of interiorized thought, considering the space in which ideas dwell and come to fruition as well as wither away, as the case may be. Once on this intellectual roll, we continued our forray into academia with a seminar or the spiritual dimension of the boulette, presided by the eminent authority on the subject Michael L. assisted by his ravenous co-researcher Carina G. who took it upon herself to illustrate the theoretical framework being put forward with practical hands-on demonstrations.

This was the central premise to our excursion... the complex interrelationship between the boule, boulette and berliner ballen... as seen from the cosmopolitan monument of atomic progress towering over the  city of Brussels, (les bouls de bruxelles) where the European Commission as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ponder the significance of a reunified Berlin in the sense of how then US-president Kennedy succinctly put it at the height of the Colsd War: “Ik bin ein Berliner” slightly baffling the then still stable anglo-french allies... ‘je suis un boule de Berlin’ and evoking quizzical glances from the international press corps... and sending a shiver of anticipation through the Soviet intelligence community... what does he mean? Fearing it might be something like “Nuts” the Nazi panzerdivisions received as answer to their siege of Bastogne in 1944.... this could go anywhere... 

No lucky for us, this exercise was purely theoretical, and the slight wisp of the spiritual illustrated by the slight vapour rising from the boulette is question  was but a figment of the imagination... nonetheless we proceeded to partake in a duo-dialogist ritual with the accompaniment again of song and chant, this time inducing more than just a few to join in as Dialogist-Kantor cantered about the place under hobby-horse chairs and moveable tables, unwinding headdress and revealing table-clothes... timed just right for the evening peal of bells from a nearly church.

To finish us off Irene P. and Viviane K. collaborated in a drawing and painting performance in which after intitial to-and-fro both merged and also merged into the physical presence of the painting becoming live art sculpture as well as performed video dance... irene disappearing behind, but then reemerging fragmentarily cut out of the canvas still being coloured by Viviane, painting over body parts revealing the budding motherhood and life burgoning inside, arms painted blue offering to each other and ultimately the public that most coveted of fruits: the apple of paradise or what you might want to make of it... rolling half-eaten across the wooden floorboards.

With a thud.

Cleaning up went well and easy since all joined in, emptying the bar and fridge of excess foodstuffs as we went along and ending up all together at a large Italian place around two corners offering the largest pizza’s I ever did see. Here too it was song and merriment.

gearing up day 2

Next day saw us getting back into gear at the Volksbühne. But the initial idea to all meet up there ran into a snag, or rather, the teams had other ideas, other independant street-art activities to perform... M&C went off to the Greenhouse where Zoë was hanging out, and reported on that project later, Dialogist-Kantor had an own mysterious agenda which we were to hear of later, Viviane & Aldo were off somewhere else, Patrick (brought us there) and Irene were doing practical things and we would meet up... so we were but a small équipe, Julien, Lise LL and myself to do the hand-held walkabout to the second venue GlogauAir, where we had a kaffeeklatsch rendez-vous.

Juju dans le metro/ in der U-Bahn

Julien had donned his blonde wig, and we taped his hands with double-sided tape and started our walk from Rosa Luxemburg into the city... past chiqui-mikki galleries gearing up to the onslaught of visitors being chaffered around in sponsor-BMW’s all the way from Bavaria... the local auto-industry only could provide a few stretch-trabbi’s; not nearly enough... anyway, we headed towards the Karl Liebknecht building and then past the resistance memorial into the main thoroughfare going to Alexanderplatz... along the way Julien would stoop and get some lost piece of discarded crap to cling onto his hands, cuffs, lower extremities whatever... Wide boulevards and searing heat soon got to us and we headed down sideways (along a piece of old city wall, which sort of surprised me) for the Spree, where we thought some cool watery breeze might make the trip more enjoyable – we were going to go all the way on foot, collecting rubbish, but in the end we decided a short trip in the U-bahn might save us some energy for later... and cool us off – which it did... the passengers looked somewhat quizzical at this tall blonde with all that dirty smelly garbage in her/his hands, and one could see it did not always meet with approval.

We emerged near the Landwehrkanal and didn’t have so far to go but there was an extended market going on and of course that did slow us down quite a bit – I broke ranks to do some shopping but in the end the GlogauAir was still closed when I got there, so no rush... but there were already some of our group and it didn’t tka long before we were all present, the crew from GlogauAir arrived and things started rolling... 

short description day 1

Berlinrapport A 

Some time now, and already forgetting what we did in fact – high time to give an overall description at least...

The theme Boules de Berlin / Boul de Bruxelles (also meaning mess, as in mess of stuff, things, boul & bagarre) was a bit of a red thread to begin with, at Grüntaler9, where we met up for the first time – since the crew was not made up of only Buktapaktop members it was an interesting project in itself, converging as it were at the first venue, in the kitchen, making and baking boulettes... falafel actually... no meat involved whatsoever, so already a variation of the classic boulette...

We had a situational meeting at G9 when finally all participants showed up, co-coordinating our strategy and playlist as it were, deciding and delegating, getting right into it...

So, the performance commenced in the kitchen, preparing, poisciches in a wonderful double-basin table, made for fifty-fifty it seems, and a great space-saver even today’s high-tech designers couldn’t come up with... everything seemed on track the evening before so we all went out for Chinese, seated around a dervish table eating the house’s specialty – dumplings (the closest we could get to boulette)...

The following morning balls were rolled in all seriousness, (both in the G9-space as well as at home) for we expected quite some hungry visitors- rolling and cooking, it all looked a bit chaotic but worked out quite well... the kitchen aspect took up quite a section of the preparations, since actual arrangement in the space of Grüntaler9 was not necessary- we had decided to adhere to the tradition of intervening where others had left off: so point of departure was the situation at hand:

Removing sections of the text on the ‘blackboard’ standing against the rear wall, the reading the resulting poetry, before reclining the blackboard on to trestles to make a large central table around which we arranged the available chairs... Deuxelles appeared wearing what seemed to be an abstract caftan, unbuttoned it to reveal the two L’s of her name, re-buttoned them together to form one large tablecloth which was then draped on the table as a basis for the developing meal-induced painting to come...

Before beginning the service Julien C. proposed an offering, using a specially crafted ceramic owl for the occasion, filling it with spirits while accompanying the ritual with cranial percussion... to then hand the owl around to the guests to sip communally from this vessel... after which it was placed centrally on the table.

Service could begin and was paired with a presentation by Lise D. concerning the various philosophical and physical aspects of wild plants and our own sojourn on this planet...

In the meantime Carina G. rolled herself into a ‘boule’ on the floor and remained there motionless for quite some time, as long as, in fact people didn’t take notice... once the public had discovered that there was ‘something’ going on there it was over so to speak... and Michael L. proceeded to draw and write onto the wall the basic theme of the operation:

Does the Boulette have a Soul?

Good question, one that stood out and remained on the wall, like the writing on the wall that the representative of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babel, - Balthazar saw but could not read before the city was taken by the Persians... and speaking of the signs on the wall, Viviane K. proceeded to use the shadows of the participants, dancing in the candlelight, to add descriptive drawings to the many-layered graffito-wall, result of umpteen performances before us and which will still absorb umpteen after we have been long gone... it became a rather strange mix of recognizable elements of activities taking place, and chance-drawing, marks left behind after some... well, mishap perhaps...

While dinner got well under way we participated in a proposal by Irene P. to ‘reenact’ scenes from non/existing performers, in which it was entirely unclear how much of the narrative proposed was actually based on fact and how many of the protagonists were actually real... but one must say it all was plausible enough to consider questioning the thin line between empirical research and an imagined reality... where one might consider creativity to have a seminal part...

Julien proceeded to execute the continuation of the yellow wall while incorporating his own image of the owl he had made for the spirited ritual at the table, fronting for the (-artist evoked by Irene and later taking part in a duo-tug-o-war with nylon head-connection... 

Another of these re/enactments was the Cypriot artist  who had made various charred/coal works, of which the performance in the no-man’s land in the DMZ between greek and turkish parts of Cyprus was the most memorable... here in this case he proceeded to use the typically germen ‘Eierbriketts’ left on the windowsill to force a streetdrawing on the sidewalk to infringe on the street, across the street to the other side, effectively drawing a line, border between two parts of a unified (re) Berlin...

Dialogist-Kantor split the difference whit DK1 disbanding a headband made of ripped lengths of cloth in from of a hairdresser (or barber) just further along, while DK2 prepared the ‘niveau d’art’ on the inside... which would measure the height of our culture during the rest of the evening... Viviane continued to draw on the wall,  accomanyed by vocal chant ritual humm and right up there to primal scream type of music - there was another reenactment (details on that project in another article) was performed by Lise D at the and of the table, while also the yellow drawing-painting was going on, modifying the existing ‘factura’ on the walls, which then became subject of investigation: or rather exchange... Heini O proposed to gather some wall  surface fragments by using sticky tape, which he got all messed up, in fact so messed up that he himself became part of the mess and ended up falling out into the street in a panic attack.

To end the evening Irene P. did a try-out run-through of a birth, hoping I guess that here real birthing would also be as easy and quick... since this one was really a case of, one two three push/pull, voilà! Presto. Ah if all life would be as simple... we continued well into the night in a combination of philosophical banter, cleaning up while simultaneously making a mess, and dancing a bit in the glare of the midnight sunrise, but all in all it was quite civilized...

Next day saw us getting back into gear at the Volksbühne.

(next report)