A gesture calls my attention, right after I entered the exhibition space: Slavoj Zizek is waving his hands fervently, his double-portrait performs an a-synchronized choreography, two Zizeks drawing invisible lines in the air. I cross the space and reach the TV sets on top of two columns; I sit down, take the earphones and try to follow Slavoj Zizek’s performance on both screens, while his persistent word cascades drop into my ears. After a few minutes the two Zizeks disappear and I see a crowd of students demonstrating and fighting with the police on one screen, while the second screen is filled by red light and electronic improvisations on Communist texts. I’m back in the Frankfurt of 68.
The performance might have taken place in the 90s, though. It is part of the two-channeled video “Ghost Loop”, the artist Pedro Lagoa had created in collaboration with the two artists of the exhibition, Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind. All material was found in the vast amount of video material collected and recorded by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm during the 20 years of its existence. Having fought for a community centre as cultural and political hub of Frankfurts neighbourhood Bornheim since the 70s, the young team of culture makers and technicians part of whom are still working there today, finally managed to open the freshly renovated tower of the former Mouson Soap Factory in 1988.
In the meantime things have changed in Frankfurt: the ambitious project of placing newly-built museums and culture institutions in a row along the riverside, had given a brand new face to Frankfurts “high culture”. The team of the interdisciplinary culture centre Mousonturm had given its culture factory a more humble look, but nevertheless had developed ambitious plans and visions as well. The initial idea was to provide rehearsal spaces and a stage for Frankfurt-based theatre companies, musicians, and street artists, as well as to produce international festivals in the tower and in the streets and squares of Frankfurt. The place ran run its own printing workshop, hosed a primary school, offered residency spaces to visual artists, and invited former professionals to exchange with the younger generation… not exactly the activities and events Mousonturm is known for by now: concerts of pop, independent, jazz, world, electronic, theatre, performance, and dance productions by international companies, seminars, workshops and book presentations, in short: a diverse range of activities attracting a diverse range of publics. Not to mention the programs and initiatives that came and went during the years in between…
So my first question when invited to write an essay on “40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive” was, how to select material and moments from a 20-years history of a place that had hosted thousands of artists, writers, musicians, performers, from Blixa Bargeld to Amos Oz, from Susanne Linke to Lone Twins? I asked to have a look on the material, the two artists Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind had gathered during their research in the tower’s archive on the top floor of the building. It turned out to be an endless amount of scans and copies of reviews, of technical information, photos, protocols and prints, of emails and letters sent to artists, producers, sponsors, and institutions. I did not get a clear image of what Mousonturm really was about, but a vast imagination of what the artist’s workload has been.
When I visited the exhibition finally on its opening night, I was surprised by the bright, transparent space, structured by grey wall areas, a yellow tape marking a possible parcour, and card boxes, open and closed. Some old wooden boards I recognized as shelves to store posters in the archive, served as basic structure upon which the boxes and their content were displayed. I followed the yellow tape line through the first years of Mousonturm up to the farthest future of 2028, when the line passed the window and faded out in the streets outside the building. In-between I found: a miniature theatre, a dictionary, a collection of photos and of strange objects, lists of technical devices and aesthetical principles, some games, a string-based model, a booklet telling 10 different stories about the “40 years of Mousonturm”… every element revealed another aspect of the centre’s results of continuous programming and networking. There was a period during which the program got dense and connected to discourses on art and politics that surpassed local debates and reached out towards the interconnected European scene of culture and theory. There were handmade technical devices that now served as a kind of “homage” to artists who have continuously developed their work at Mousonturm: Rui Horta, director of the dance company S.O.A.P. that had challenged the theatre’s technical and production capacities by international tours in the 90s; Brigitta Linde’s poetical theatre and sound pieces; Helena Waldmann’s excentric performance experiments. Names of contemporary choreographers and conceptual performers re-appear in boxes, leaflets and posters: Raimund Hoghe, Xavier LeRoy, VA Wölf, Frankfurter Küche… it would take too long to mention everybody who had left traces in the archive and the installation itself. What all of them have in common, though, is the nature of traces they left: not materialized but imaginary ones; not clear manifestations but vague memories, recalling an intensity in movement, an emotion caught in a moment, or a voice passing.
In this sense, the around twenty card boxes spread in the exhibition space remind of “time capsules” guarding what was essential at one moment, but gone in the next one. The drawings of gestures, the photos of empty guest apartments, and the texts reconstructing events do not only refer to past activities, but also to temporality and disappearance, twin sisters accompanying any kind of performance. Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years, if the last ones have brought already so many changes, so many waves of styles and fashions? Performance and music history has a short breath, though the artists themselves need to sustain their own breath during a much longer period. The exhibition, even in its playful mood of presenting different games and tracks for an imaginary future, reflects not only on time and on possible narratives to tell the past, but also on the future of a fragile landscape of culture, open to hope, fear, and wild speculations.
There is no truth in history. “To find is to invent, to work with the resistance of things”, write the artists in their first announcement. Everybody might find something else in what they found and invented. They proposed a changing site in which every week new boxes are being opened and others closed; an open labyrinth of hints and stories, that do not exactly tell the history of a culture centre, but that evoke an imagination of how a place has been shaped and filled with professional life during the last 20 years - and hopefully the future ones as well.
February 2009, Simone Sasmayoux
