Strassenbahndepot, BACKUP FESTIVAL, Weimar

November 2002 Luna Nera participated in the Back_Up Media Art Festival in historic Weimar, Germany. Luna Nera, together with other international artists, created the Back_Up LoungeLab. TheLoungelab theme was:"open source - open art." A number of collaborative works as well as discourse about process, came out of this. Curated by Felix Sattler and Carina Linge, with technical direction by Alexander Klosch. see article: "Lab Rats for Art" by Gillian McIver, Year 01 Forum 2002
 

Weimar is a city that loves to recall its past as the Thuringian capital of High German culture. The city can boast Bach, Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche among its former inhabitants. A beautiful town with red roofs and many picturesque winding lanes, it was also Hitler's favourite city in Germany and his ideal of what a German city should be.
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found sites, found objects

What we found in Weimar was a number of sites which though perfectly visible are "hidden" from the city's consciousness as it presents itself as the revived bastion of traditional high culture.

Directly across the street from our site, the E-Werk (a complex of old buildings owned by the Bauhaus University, including a former power station and a former Tram Depot), we found a derelict psychiatric hospital. Durig the DDR regime, political dissidents were frequently sentenced to terms in such hospitals to "re-educate" them to compliance with the system.

Not far away we also found a derelict police station, overgrown by nature. It was totally empty but for an old hospital stretcher, which remained.

From these two elements we made the installation"psychiatric sentence " Julian Ronnefeldt, Gillian McIver, with Pearl Gluck. Sound mixing: Dijgital Riot

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UNBEKANNT

The second project we made was inspired by a visit to the nearby site of the concentration camp Buchenwald. The first camp to be liberated by the Allies at the end of WW2, the horrific images of Buchenwald were imprinted upon several generations. We did not feel that we could begin to address the theme of the camps or directly address the Nazi era in our work. However, behind the main site we found the memorial forest of "Buchenwald 2".

This place consists of a large number of metal poles driven into the ground, each marked with the word "unbekannt" - unknown - a memorial to the unknown people who died in the chaotic time during and after the liberation. These bodies, buried under the ground deep in the beech forest, are camp prisoners, soldiers, even Nazis, and nobody knows who they are. Buchenwald 2 is an interesting site because it brings up questions of "what is a memorial?", "who deserves to be commemorated?" and becuase of this we felt that we could and should work on this place.

So, gaining permission, at night we went into the forest and created a sound perfomance by gently tapping on the metal poles. We exhibited the audio and video of the action in the venue, below.

 


the final evening of the festival was web-cast in an exchange with Luna Nera artists back in London
see WMV clip

http://www.backup-festival.de

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