„Staging the IG Farben Building“ is a site-specific interdisciplinary project to be developed as a result of a two week work phase in September 2022. The scenic project will be based on preparatory research work on the history of the building, the practices related to it (teaching, learning, telling and re-telling of its history), the location of the building and its embeddedness in a larger web connecting it to other buildings and places in the city and beyond. The workshop will further address the building’s mythology, the rumors about it, and provide the framework to conduct research on the contemporary everyday life use of the building, its placement in local and international culture, its symbology, memories, collective and personal emotions and much more. A substantial part of this preparatory work will be done in the class on “Site-specific dramaturgy” held by Prof. Nikolaus Müller-Schöll and in the workshop taught by Daphna Ben-Shaul.
The workshop on the 18th of May is the kick-off meeting for the scenic project and will be held on site in order to get a sense of the dramaturgy of space which shall be explored in the research and in possible projects. It will be devoted to working with the participants in a way to allow each of them to find and develop his or her own path. After getting to know each other and constituting the group, in the second part of the day, the participants will be asked to come up with thoughts about different projects, texts as well as historical or personal memories based on the research which has already been done and in connection with a specific site or a room on the IG Farben campus. We will tour the premises and discuss first ideas on site. Thus, we will get a sense of movement in and around the building which will help us to further develop on possible projects.
During the two-week long work phase of the scenic project, we will work on the development of artworks in different media and genre (performance, text, audio-works, tours, video-works, installations). We will be working as individuals as well as in groups based on the material which was studied and collected during the research. This second phase of the scenic project will be about the dramaturgy of an aesthetic and coherent event: mapping, constructing and structuring it ‘as a whole’ with and through the individual works as well as besides them. The assemblage of the different projects is to be presented as part of the festival „Politik im Freien Theater”.