Staged by DISAPPEARING BERLIN.

://about blank
Markgrafendamm 24c, 10245 Berlin

What happens when we listen to music collectively? Where do we go to in order to experience this? What is happening to these safe, queer places in Berlin and beyond? Not only did the pandemic give a new urgency to these questions, the changing political landscape in many places across the globe puts to the fore the queries of coming together, participation, connectedness, and visibility. DISAPPEARING BERLIN invites a set of artistic voices into the garden of Berlin club and culture center ://about blank in order to contribute, to start anew, and to push the walls of our imagination and creativity.

Throughout the overgrown garden, the new commission “RHIZOME for saxophone and 160 wireless speakers” by Bendik Giske and Wojtek Blecharz unfolds like territory alliances. Alliances between sound, performers, the bodies of a listening crowd, a space normally packed with bodies, moving to pulsating sounds. A rhizome-like structure is ever queer. It refuses binary thinking, internalized by our society and entrenching social discourses.

“Those sounds can bring memories so vivid, that a vanished place materializes in our imagination for a moment…We tried different tricks to reenact what we miss, either at home, in a park, in a forest…and we keep trying: building another soundscape, another path, another sound field, so we can grasp for a moment what has disappeared.” (Wojtek Blecharz)

While the performance will seize the space temporarily, destined to disappear when its protagonists leave, POLIGONAL – Office for Urban Communication and Noam Brusilovsky have created two sound installations that will tangibly stay at ://about blank. “Nothing that ever was changes” sets out in search of disappearing queer spaces in Berlin: Cultural spaces as sites of political engagement that have written urban history; experimental communes where the residents have negotiated living and working together in a queer setting; bars, clubs, darkrooms as arenas of possibility that even people in other places long to visit. Many of the spaces associated with queer identity have been in a stranglehold of neoliberal commercialization, gentrification, and most recently, the pandemic. Starting from the neighborhood around Ostkreuz and the Schöneberg district, the work explores a city of fragmented change. We will hear protagonists and connoisseurs of the queer scene who will lead us to places of their own past, through spaces of queer city history and, thereby, interweave collective experiences, individual experiences, and personal needs.

RHIZOME for saxophone and 160 wireless speakers
Performance and music: Bendik Giske and Wojtek Blecharz / Lights by Theresa Baumgartner / Costume Wojtek Blecharz: Nicolas Navarro Rueda

Nothing that ever was changes
“Da wo ich bin ist queer” / “Ich bin da jedes mal mit Power raus”
Two sound installations with Oliver Uhlig, Philipp Beyer, and Mahide Lein / POLIGONAL – Office for Urban Communication explores processes of urban transformation and queer environments in the urban space, led by Christian Haid and Lukas Staudinger. In collaboration with Noam Brusilovsky.

DISAPPEARING BERLIN is a performance and music series, organized and produced by Schinkel Pavillon e.V.. It is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.