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one hectare one night /video/ Joachim Mühleisen- canara

12 hours. 1000 bodies/ long durational performance on May 25  9am to 9 pm

with:
Yannis Pappas- Costume design

Joachim Mühleisen- Film

Yiannis Pappas- Costume design

Land. Provides for the fundamental need of all animals. Rest. For it is a human right to sleep securely and soundly, and to be sheltered during this period of utter vulnerability.

How much space does a human being need in order to sleep safe and sound?  And how many sleepers could the 1 Ha provide?  A short film, one hectare one night,  shot from above shows  a person sleeping in the Gleisdreieck Park- canopied by site specific soundscapes, lights, moods, passersby, and body positions of the sleeper in a green dress.

One hectare one day – long durational performance will begin to fill the hectare with the shapes of those who could sleep there. The positions of the performer  marked with chalk, and documented.1000 positions  in 12 hours. Such markings reference also  crime scenes, and sleeping positions of masses of people transported at different times in history forced into such a migration. Due to slavery they have lost  their protection and security. The intervention highlights the need to protect the right to shelter for all people.

One hectare one night

Working from the premise that it is a human right to have enough space to sleep and to be sheltered during this period of utter vulnerability, this piece investigates land and soil in its capacity and duty to provide shelter.

This twofold piece, consisting of a video and long durational performance, explores the questions: How much space does a human being need in order to sleep safe and sound?  And how many places for sleeping could the 1 Ha provide?  A short film will be produced from documentation of a person sleeping in the Gleisdreieck Park- canopied by site specific soundscapes, lights, moods, passersby, and body positions of the sleeper in a green dress. A film team will shoot the sleeper from above

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Rolf Sudmann (Germany)

Installation of a raised garden bed, mobile telephones, metal

A high security crop of 17 mobile telephones are growing in the raised bed before you.

17 telephone numbers  for 17 rare earth elements.

Dial the numbers at no cost to find out what these wonders of nature can do for you.

Rare Earth Elements are a group of 17 elements, whose special magnetic, phosphorescent, and catalytic properties are central to technological advances in x-ray devices, aircrafts, and lasers to green technologies such as wind turbines and electric cars.  Nine different rare elements can be found in an iPhone alone, used for the color screen, the phone’s circuitry, the speakers, and the vibration unit.

Technically speaking, rare earth elements are not rare at all, but rather they are diffuse and not easily extracted from the earth. The environmental impacts of the extraction process are high, due to large amounts of toxic   waste products including radioactivity.

China is currently the world’s leading producer and consumer of Rare Earth Elements, responsible for 95% of production in 2010.  A monopoly on precious resources generates  geo-political power.  This year China finally eliminated export quotas for Rare Earth Elements, whose fluctuations throughout the past decade created a nervous market and inspired many countries to reduce their reliance.

Recycling processes are being developed to harvest rare earth elements from electrical and electronic waste known as WEEE. The trend towards smaller chips will mean a reduction in of the use of rare earth elements, but also a more difficult and costly waste extraction process.  Intelligent product design, which plans for the recycling of rare earth elements s is crucial.

Photo credit: CC Terence Wright@Flickr

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Lerato Shadi (Berlin/South Africa)

Medium: video, single channel video projection; to be shown in the Container

Duration 5‘

Video camera & editing: Erik Dettwiler

The video Matsogo shows a pair of hands crumbling a piece of cake and reshaping it into the same triangle shape that references the beginning slice.

Through the process of deconstruction to reconstruction, the essence and consumability of the piece of cake is undermined and lost. Although it is reformed into an object that resembles and has the same elements, as the cake it has lost its original function.

The sound track combines two songs from two different popular Setswana folktales. The songs are mixed together, thereby confusing and convoluting the narratives of the folktales in such a way, that there are three to five characters in an ongoing polylogue, that revolves around belief and disbelief, trust and betrayal.

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Andreas Greiner

A figurative sculpture representing the goddess of agriculture, grain crops, and fertility is displayed inside a glass case. This goddess was worshipped as Demeter in Greek and Ceres in Roman religion. Cast in a mixture of plaster and a nutrient solution imbued with microorganisms, colonies of lush and delicate fungi and mold colonize the statue decomposing it during the course of the exhibition. The sculpture is in a continuous process of change as the nutrients are transformed into living biomass. The deity´s body with its classical proportion succumbs to the seemingly chaotic natural process of nutrient cycling. According to antique mythology, Ceres embodies both the aspects of life and death- the awakening of life in nature as well the breakdown and decay of organic matter, and thus the entire cycle of life.  Offering a basis for sustenance, and thus allowing growth and proliferation, the sculpture of Ceres is broken down and re-organized by the microorganisms.

Fertility, or nature’s ability to sustain itself, has been an important object of adoration until today. For modern urbanites, fertility sculptures have lost their significance, as we continually lose our connection to the sustaining force of nature as well as to our food. Carrying out important destructive natural processes, highlighted by The Sixth Distinction (Ceres), fungi and mycorrhiza play a very important role in our food security as they enable the nutrient cycling in soils.

The title The Sixth Extinction (Ceres) refers to the concept of Holocene extinction, describing the disappearance of species, caused by the human impact on the environment in our present epoch of the Anthropocene.

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A film by Oliver Ressler, 18 min., 2013

In recent years, countless extreme weather events clearly indicate that climate change is not only a future phenomenon but is already taking place. Some effects of global warming—desertification, more frequent droughts, less frequent but more intense precipitation, lower crop yields—inflame existing social conflicts. In the Global South, climate change aggravates the crises of poverty, violence, and unrest that result from the legacies of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. This vicious circle fuels humanitarian crises and civil wars that amplify political, economic and environmental disasters.

Despite clear warnings, the ruling powers do not have a political agenda with a serious strategy to reduce use of fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. A fossil-fuel fundamentalism seems to dominate throughout the globe.

Recently, some of Norway’s politicians have advocated extracting petroleum in one of the largest fish and aquatic life spawning grounds on the planet, the sea encircling the Lofoten archipelago. The deepwater drilling would have unpredictable effects on the fish populations and some of the world’s cleanest waters. With the idyllic landscapes of the Lofoten archipelago as its background, Leave It in the Ground describes the climate crisis not as a technical and scientific problem, but as a political problem. The film discusses how ecological and humanitarian disasters caused through global warming might topple old orders and open up possibilities that could lead to long-term social and political transformations, both positive and negative.

The film is accompanied by three photographic works evoking scenarios of a post-oil world.

Director and producer: Oliver Ressler
Narration text: Oliver Ressler & John Barker
The text is partly inspired by Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011); Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009); Naomi Klein, Capitalism vs. the Climate (2011).
Narrator: Andrew Golder
Camera, film editing: Oliver Ressler
Sound design, mix and color correction: Rudolf Gottsberger
Music from the album: Kate Carr, Songs from a Cold Place (2013)
Footage: Mosireen; Anonymous video makers
Special thanks to: Bassam el Baroni, Dorian Batycka, Derek Jarman, Tadzio Müller, Maren Richter, Odd Arne Sandberg, Berte Tungodden Ynnesdal

The film was commissioned by LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival 2013, supported by BMUKK.

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Stoll and Wachall (Berlin)

Performance

Is soil dirty? Do we need to clean the soil around us in order to touch it? Do we get dirty if we sit on the ground? Soil contains bacteria! Two figures in protective clothing have come to help us with this dilemma. Acting for public health, and national security, ensuring hygienic standards are met. Protection from Ebola, radiation from mobile electronic devises, climate change, bird flu- which may well break out, or may not…
Imaginary instruments deflect virus and rays. Invisible dangers, possibly not yet discovered by science are deflected in a thorough action.

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Shahram Entekhabi (Parasite Architecture) and Amy Green (Sound Installation)

Bird Cage is a meditation on transition, urban nature, urban encroachment, and the relevance of soil for biodiversity and nature conservation.

Bird Cage is an auditory abstraction of an ecological succession in time and space. It is based on the results of the study of the urban-rural gradient of bird species in Berlin (Simon et al. 2006)

Urban land development has pushed many of our long term avian companions like the grey partridge, an animal which featured prominently in the stories of the brothers Grimm , out of the city center. As we go into our city centers, the number of species declines. At the same time, at the outskirts of the city, in nature or what is left of it, intensive agriculture has led to the mechanization and simplification of the landscape. Birds are being pushed out of agricultural areas as well turning urban parks into pockets of high biodiversity.

In 2015, the International Year of Soils, one in eight species of birds in Germany are at risk of extinction. One quarter of the bird species could be extinct by 2100.

Parasite Architecture surrounds Nature

The structure of the installation is informal, temporary, weak, imperfect, unfinished, and formless. Informal things can change faster and provide more room for change. Expressions of the transience of the informal are migration and cultural diversity.

One vulnerable patch of nature in public space – surrounded by a wall of caution tape – evokes concepts of safety zones and no-go areas. It addresses the notions of exclusivity and inclusivity.

The musical composition is made up of bird calls and devices used by humans in cities. The piece begins with an aria of endemic species of the Berlin area which are no longer found in the area. The music of song birds, woodpeckers, car alarms, mobile telephones, nightingales, subway trains, and doves fill the bird cage.

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Celia Eslamieh Shohmal (Iran)

Performance

Wearing a dress made of sticks and fishing net, the artist performs an almost lost traditional Persian “Rice Harvest Dance.” She moves to private music through headphones, while the sounds of her dress act as accompaniment for the audience. Throughout the performance she casts grass and grains to the ground spelling out her message: you reap what you sow.

This performance explores the relationship between the physical and the cultural environment, as a manifestation of the rural exodus driven by globalization, the industrialization of agriculture and the agricultural collapse due to climate change. Loss of land is a loss of culture. The world stands witness to large numbers of people, forced to leave their homes. Their names: migrants and refugees. We are left with one of the most important dividing political and moral issues in Europe today—how to deal with a steady stream of refugees.

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