Dear Hamburg, lange Zeit bin ich früh schlafen gegangen, 2021
lnvited to participate with a performance, students predominantly from Jutta Koether's HfbK class turned their c/ass reading into a source from which to work. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is the basis of a performance and its accompanying prop, a book imagined as a bed (or a bed imagined as a book) recalling Man Ray's photograph of Proust on his deathbed (1922). As a prop for a performative reading, they transform the bed as a symbol of rest (and potentially laziness) into a p/ace of productivity and performance. The first two chapters of their collaborative text „dear Hamburg, lange Zeit bin ich früh schlafen gegangen" [Dear Hamburg, for a long time I went to bed early] will be performed by the group inside and outside the Kunstverein using this mobile bed as a stage.
The text itself was collaboratively written as a way to find artistic strategies that took group processes of artistic work into consideration. Bertold Brecht's Lehrstücke Theatre was one such inspiration, where performers are involved in a process of producing a work that is not necessarlly made for an audience but for the performers to find something out for themselves. While on the other hand, the "potboiler" novel All the King's Horses by Michele Bernstein (Situationist International), serves as an example of how an artist might write a piece of fiction about their own social milieu within the framework of popular taste-a form taken up by the collective Bernadette Corporation with their 2001 collective novel Reena Spaulings which represented a fictional gallerist in the early 2000s New York art world and another point of reference for the group.
Magnus Hvidtfeldt, Leon Keller, Anne Meerpohl, Aidan Pontarini, Philipp Joy Reinhardt, Anna Victoria Regner, Carla-Luisa Reuter, Kastania Waldmüller, Mirjam Walter
