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Performing Public Spaces, Staging Collective Memory

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Performing Public Spaces, Staging Collective Memory Performing Public Spaces, Staging Collective Memory 50 Kilometres of Files by Rimini Protokoll Daniela Hahn In early December 1989, the communication center of the Ministry for State Security of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) registers an incoming phone call regard- ing a political demonstration, which is allegedly scheduled to take place the next afternoon on Alexanderplatz in Berlin and then proceed as a protest march to the Ministry’s headquar- ters located farther East in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the symbol of the police state and its bloated bureaucratic apparatus.Information from a reliable source — as the informer affirms — attests to the official instruction from Wolfgang Schwanitz, who had succeeded Erich Mielke as head of the Ministry for State Security in November 1989, to take all necessary measures to secure the State Security’s buildings.1 Has this phone call announced the crucial blow against the GDR’s secret police, the Stasi, which fell after protesters stormed its headquarters in mid-January 1990 to prevent the 1. The Stasi headquarters consisted of a huge complex the size of a city block comprised of 20 buildings, including the office of Erich Mielke, who was head of the Ministry for State Security between 1957 and 1989. The complex was hermetically sealed off and protected by armed forces. Figure 1. Audience members for Rimini Protokoll’s 50 Kilometres of Files. Berlin, Germany, 2011. (Photo ©Dorothea Tuch) TDR: The Drama Review 58:3 (T223) Fall 2014. ©2014 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 27 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00371 by guest on 02 October 2021 destruction of files? The audio fragment, consisting of an original recording of the phone call that was stored on tape and had ended up in the Stasi files, has the effect of blending differ- ent periods of time, for it makes the past uncannily reappear in the present. The taped conver- sation between an informer and an official, pulled from the vast quantity of documents and data produced and gathered by the State Security Service, thus conjures a strange return, which I experience as I cross Alexanderplatz on a late October afternoon in 2011 during the audio walk 50 Kilometres of Files, created by the German performance collective Rimini Protokoll.2 Rimini Protokoll was founded in 2000 by the theatre-makers Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel. The group produces theatre, film, audio, and installation works with exper- imental dramaturgies, which they create by interweaving documentary and literary strategies as well as by working with nonprofessional performers — for whom Rimini Protokoll coined the term “experts of everyday life” (Dreysse/Malzacher 2007). The result is a hybrid theatrical form that Florian Malzacher has succinctly described as “scripted realities” (Malzacher 2010:80). Since its founding, Rimini Protokoll has repeatedly engaged with perceptions of the city as dwelling place, built visual landscape, statistical unit, social phenomenon, and historically shaped place.3 In 50 Kilometres of Files, Rimini Protokoll explores the city’s streets through a walk-in audio-installation, using mobile technology to bring documentary material into pres- ent-day Berlin, a place that is a repository of stories and memories. The audio play leads walk- ers back to the atmosphere of the Cold War and the political and military tensions between the Western and the Eastern bloc after World War II: participants hear observation protocols of the State Security Service, recordings of telephone conversations, notes about events and meet- ings, as well as interviews with and accounts of the victims of the dictatorial system who (re)read their dossiers from the State Security’s files.4 These revived voices demonstrate how the history of a city can be made manifest through reading the traces of the past — even as that past is rein- vented through a present-day performance. 2. This audio walk was part of a series of radio plays entitled Radioortung — Hörspiele für Selbstläufer, produced by the national radio station Deutschlandradio Kultur (www.dradio-ortung.de). Three performance collec- tives — Rimini Protokoll, LIGNA, and Hofmann&Lindholm — were invited to develop audio plays as inter- ventions into urban spaces in Berlin and Cologne in order to investigate the technologies of mobile internet and geolocation on mobile phones for experimental radio projects. 3. Examples are Sonde Hannover (2002), an observation piece from a bird’s-eye view in which spectators, equipped with binoculars and earphones, are placed at the windows on the 10th floor of a skyscraper in Hanover and turn into voyeurs; Cargo Sofia-X (2006), a truck ride through European cities; Call Cutta in a Box (2008), a walking tour guided by telephone; Ciudades Paralelas (2010), a portable festival for urban interventions; 100% City (since 2008) in which different cities are represented by 100 statistically representative residents; or Remote X (2013), an online game staged on the city’s streets. 4. In October 1990, the Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR was founded in order to organize the disclosure of information and the inspection and delivery of records from the State Security’s archive. According to the Stasi Records Act of 29 December 1991, the commission “regulates the custody, preparation, administration and use of records of the Ministry for State Security of the former German Democratic Republic [...] in order to facilitate access to personal data which the State Security Service has stored regarding them, so that they can clarify what influence the State Security Service has had on their personal des- tiny” (BSTU 2012). Daniela Hahn is a 2013/14 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. In 2011, she received her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on movement experiments in art and science around 1900. Her research and teaching entangle theatre studies, cultural studies, and the history of science and is dedicated to performance and visual art focusing on documentary art, the relations between art and archive, as well as on movement studies, environmental art, and artistic research. [email protected] Daniela Hahn 28 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00371 by guest on 02 October 2021 As the participants walk the streets, over a hundred audio fragments are accessible to them via a mobile phone with location-based technology (Global Positioning System) and mobile internet. At the walker’s fingertips is a data-map facilitating access to historical knowledge, con- densed in audio files and scattered across the city, so that the performance as a “technology of remembrance” (Bleeker 2012:2) is based both on walking and on the activation of data the walk- ing generates. In this way, the audio files are doubly territorialized: in the topology of the city as well as in the virtual topology of the internet in which the files are being placed and retraced. In bringing together these audio files,50 Kilometres of Files turns the city into a sonic space open to peripatetic exploration. The walkers follow a documentary audio parcours that trans- lates the vast expanse of the State Security’s 111 kilometers of archival records into a durational audio walking performance of up to several hours. The duration for each participant depends upon how slowly or quickly they walk, on the length of the time they spend in each spot where a new audio can be received, how many of the audios they listen to, how far they wan- der around, and if they are taking breaks between stations. After having received the equipment for the audio walk (headphones, smartphone, map) and some basic instructions on how to use the smartphone, the participants go off alone or in small groups that tend to dissolve quickly, as soon as the audio play begins. When walkers near particular locations, audio files automatically start to play, thus transforming movement into sound and setting stories in motion in specific places. The bulky headphones separate the walker from ambient noises and thus induce a split of perception: the present surroundings are perceived through sight, while the audio track lures the walker into the past. The documents and interviews that comprise the participatory perfor- mance can only be rendered audible through the kind of dis-cursive practice that Roland Barthes describes as the “action of running here and there, of comings and goings, of steps” (1984:15). The walking tour takes place in central Berlin, roughly circumscribed by the Alexanderplatz and the Brandenburger Tor, the Berliner Ensemble and Checkpoint Charlie, a space once bisected by the border between East Germany and West Germany and today known as Berlin- Mitte. It is the heart of the city, for both tourism and commerce, and is traversed by the two main boulevards, Unter den Linden (connecting east and west) and Friedrichstraße (running from south to north). To “deal with the city,” as the British performance collective Wrights & Sites proposes in “A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture,” is to envision “a walking that is neither a functional necessity (to shop, to work) nor a passive appreciation of (or complaint about) the urban envi- ronment. Instead we present a manifesto for a walking that engages with and changes the city, particularly using the arts” (Wrights & Sites 2006). In a similar vein, 50 Kilometres of Files nei- ther uses the city simply as decor for the audio-installation, nor does it describe a neutral space or a neutral time. Walking, accompanied by the taped stories that capture and recall events that happened at specific places in the city, creates an opportunity to see and interrogate the city as a chronotope, charged with traces of the past, personal experiences, affective qualities, and social regimes.
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