Somewhere there´s war

/ Performative Audio Installation / german / 16+yrs /

We encounter war in the news as an everyday fact of horror, as a figure of destruction and death. We encounter war in blockbusters as a heroic epic or as a children's game with plastic weapons. As a story of the past. As neighbours who have fled. In its real tangibility, however, it is mainly characterised by its absence in our everyday lives. Although many people in Germany have experienced war, it often remains unspeakable and invisible. The experiences are too traumatic, too absurd to comprehend, too everyday to talk about.

There is a gap between our images and the real experience of war. A gap between deafening noise and silence. Between speechlessness and the collapse of everyday life. Where is the room for something for which a language must be found? How can we talk about war? How can we talk about it - as a soldier, a contemporary witness, a refugee? How do we listen? What place do real experiences of war and the invisible consequences have in our society today? And what do they tell us about the absurdity in the face of sharpening friend-foe narratives?

In “Somewhere there's war”, a peaceful living situation becomes the sterile, everyday backdrop for a walk-in, performative audio installation. Three groups each enter a location on the estate for 30 minutes in rotation in a trilogy without beginning or end, allowing the absurdity of the incomprehensible to flare up in moments.

Voices: Renate Aris, Anastasia Biefang, Maryna Kicil, einem Leipziger Journalist aus Syrien & Annika Schröder. Performance: Tilla Kratochwil, Konstantin Lehmann. Artistic Director: Clara Minckwitz, Julia Lehmann. Sound Design: Antje Meichsner. Objects + Programming: Sebastian Arnd.  Speakers: Tilla Kratochwil, Olga Taschirewa. Production: Sarah Arndtz. Ramadan Jabar. Technic + Media Technical Design: Robert Gotthard. Translation + Interpreting: Irina Nekrasov. 

A co-production of STUDIO URBANISTAN and LOFFT - DAS THEATER. Supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the City of Leipzig - Cultural Office, the Schulze-Fielitz Foundation Berlin and the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This programme is co-financed by tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.

Many thanks to: Vania Amigo, Karla Löwenhagen & Joachim Köhler, Stephan Schneider & Philipp Thierer, Philip Kraft

STUDIO URBANISTAN stands for performative incidents in urban space and is the joint works of Julia Lehmann and Clara Minckwitz. At the interface of built realities and hidden themes, STUDIO URBANISTAN has been creating new spaces of experience and encounter between everyday life and fiction since 2014, overriding the rules and conventions of contested territories. The individual stories and personal voices of the urban space are an integral part of the projects, which are realised with changing artists, performers and/or the local population. In search of the utopian moments of ordinary life, the results of their research become the documentary basis for playful experiments whose formats oscillate somewhere between audio tour, site-specific performance and research theatre.

Photos: Alina Simmelbauer