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Frankfurter Rundschau, 21.10. 2002
Searching for Traces in the Babble of Voices
The Berlin Volksbühne presents the International Mobile Academy:
"Part 1: The Refugee. Services Rendered to Undesirables"
by Christian Schlüter
........An author and former spokeswoman for the Sans Papier movement
sits in House 1. She studied German and finished her education in Saarbrücken.
She had to abandon her intention of working in Africa as a German teacher.
She was forced to return to Paris, not least due to economic pressures.
Like many immigrants she regards France as a liberal country, as the home
of human rights. At first provided with a residence permit, she has lost
her legal status in the meantime due to a change in the law. She leads
the life of a so-called illegal alien.
.......
The Mobile Academy at the Volksbühne: As soon as one enters the theater,
the babble of voices begins. The audience pushes its way into the sold
out event. The Neustadt is dimly lit. The various destinies are divided
in the houses, lit from inside, seven altogether. The cast changes by
the hour: refugees, politicians, activists, artists and journalists. Headphones
have been distributed at the entrance in order to hear the conversations.
What's happening inside the houses is carried over seven channels. Anybody
who wants to can watch the protagonists through the windows, or settle
down somewhere else, for instance on the large, open staircase that Bert
Neumann has set up over the audience seats. The theater has been turned
into a piazza in the evening.
.........
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Berliner Zeitung 2002
The Aquarium Effect
The International Mobile Academy occupied the Neustadt in the Volksbühne
with conversations about refugees
Sabine Vogel
........ The round of experts on global migration featured functionaries,
politicians, publicists, filmmakers, media activists, curators, representatives
of refugee organizations, social workers, and a few young refugees. Altogether
around 20 talk shows on six stages were carried out over four hours.
........
The brilliant set seemed tailor made for the muddle of parallel discourses.
There were no theatrical scenes presented in the six plywood huts, furnished
with tables, chairs and lamps, rather conversations between real people.
The artistic staging limited itself to the thematic coordination of the
participants and the functional presentation of their contributions. The
simultaneous conversations out of the six "houses" were carried
over a system of six channels. The audience members received a set of
headphones and a little box by which he or she could switch between the
channels while simultaneously moving between the scenes. Like in a big
aquarium, where one loses the ground beneath one's feet after a while,
the "real" conversations become staged images in the soundproof
cubicles; the immediate becomes theatrical.
........
The authenticity of the agents was mixed together with documented reality
on film and video projections. "Its great to sit here and talk",
said a representative of the refugee initiative in Brandenburg. Next to
that, the Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan reported on the aesthetics of representation
in the depiction of genocide. Interferences between image and sound develop.
The synchronicity of the various discourses was further accentuated by
jostles between the channels of perception - that is, that one could be
following the voices from House 4 while watching the people in House 2.
Or the other audience members, who are sitting on the steps, quietly lost
in their own thoughts, or who are chain smoking in the café in
the foyer or who are simply looking at each other. Why are they here?
Certainly not to get informed about the Geneva Convention, the criterion
for hard cases, or the right strategies of argumentation for an asylum
applicant. One gets the impression that all those present are playing
out a contemporary family play called ersatz solidarity.......... The
uneasiness remains unresolved.
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