How limited your imagination actually is, my imagination is.
Ideas for me are somehow also works.
The way we deal with our environment is one hundred percent the relationship that we actually have with ourselves.
Just like white supremacy it's the same with patriarchy and so... this will simply come to an end now.
The old world is in a death rattle.
In the past I have often read up on theories or thesis about the present time
and then spent time applying them to everything I see and experience around me and apply and check them against reality.
And then I often somehow came up with something.
Yes, so ideas are somehow also works for me and
almost the ones that interest me the most.
When I observe everyday scenes and somehow notice what's wrong with them or something, it's relatively easy for me
for me to imagine this scene in my imagination in a completely different way or to just let ideas pass through me like this
and, as short as it is, maybe let them be there longer in the moment and let them have an effect on me or something like that.
So because that's also what happens in the rehearsal room somehow
you notice somehow this doesn't work. Let's try it this way.
It’s quite cringe-y at first but you look at it for 20 minutes, because who knows or something.
And this is a process that often happens in my head, too.
That I can somehow play through scenarios and thereby also sometimes draw courage from them
to really try things differently than before and see what happens.
It has always helped me a lot to deal with it to understand in what kind of history or something I am at the moment.
Where I understand what came before me in a certain area or in a certain topic.
Also socially it's always a certain risk if you decide not to take a closer look at which tradition you're in.
And I believe that no matter what you do you always place yourself in a tradition, whether you notice it or not.
I have always found my themes through theoretical considerations.
I think that is a very important tool for me in my work or a strategy is reduction.
Not to look for things that I can activelly create
but rather the opposite, that is, to check what I can actually take away without the essentials disappearing,
in other words, the essentials of an idea of a thesis or an experience
that I would like to somehow make possible for the audience or that I would like to activate or invite them to.
So I try to say it so simply now that it seems too simple
that everyone would say that's funny but it's far too simple.
And then I try to think through whether something would happen
if you then really implement it somehow in some way.
Yes, you can say striking or even populist somehow
to really put the idea stoically into the world and then to work with what collaterally arises from it or so.
For example concretely with “Mittelreich” until this idea evolved there was a very long process,
during which I have dealt on all possible levels with the question of whiteness or so
or the theoretical conception of whiteness.
The core condition that whiteness is invisible
it's about formulating whiteness as a category in the first place, with which one can also take a perspective on the world.
First of all detecting that it is practically not present as a category in everyday life.
When I started to try to understand things through this category, then somehow explosions in my brain kept happening
because I suddenly perceived things that I had perhaps also perceived as an emotional body before,
but which I could then somehow suddenly classify linguistically.
The invisible choreography that somehow directs social life suddenly became so very clear to me.
I was able to, like a fortune-teller, even before I entered a place I actually knew how the choreography will work.
And I found that fascinating. So if you could negotiate it on the basis of these categories or something, on the linguistic level,
then brought back into the theatre, or brought back into perception and back into the world of experience.
This invisible whiteness, that I now suddenly see everywhere - how can I make it visible? Make it tangible?
And then bring it back into my familiar space in the form of the theatre, the performance.
Yes, and then the idea of simply marking the whiteness for the time being by taking it away so to speak on a banal visual level.
One of the few things I can say about how I work or what my method is
that it has always been very different up until now,
that I have always had to create the conditions or the categories for each new project.
Especially in theatre certain hierarchies and power structures are a big problem.
The problem is that there is always a hierarchy, and if we don't talk about how
exactly it should be structured, then an automatism begins, and this automatism is always bad because it is always conventional.
It is always extremely important for me to simply talk about it at the beginning of a project and to say what is my role, what is yours?
What kind of tasks do I want to take on? Which ones can I take on? And so on...
Director's theatre is a kind of fighting term.
I think director’s theatre is great.
The director is an artist who somehow realises a work.
The form of this work is then, instead of saying sculpture or video, fashion or something like that, the form is performance.
That is somehow the position from which the basic approach is chosen from.
For me the project is very much about the artistic power of assertion, which always plays an important role for me.
After a long process of thinking about and researching various biographies of black people in Germany
that go back a long time in history we eventually came up with the idea: yes, we really need a museum like this.
We actually collected a lot of archive material and also a few artistic works by black people in Germany between 1920 and 2005.
And then we just claimed that it existed and somehow tried to build it up in rudiments and somehow perform an institution.
Now this institution suddenly exists and it surprises us at regular intervals.
It's a bit like a monster that we have created, which now takes us to task again and again.
That's the advantage of it again when several people have the reins in their hands.
Sometimes, for example, you say no to some impulses or suggestions because you can't imagine
what they might look like concretly or where they might lead.
And when someone else is there so to speak who pushes you and forces you to go there and see
what it can look like concretly I think that happened to me more than once in the course of this project,
that I somehow wouldn't have taken some steps or something
because I didn't manage to think them through before taking them or something but then I had to go with it
because it was a group decision, and then a few weeks later I stood there and was like “Okay, sick”.
How limited your imagination is and how limited my imagination is and that somehow, yes, that you are afraid of things
that you can't imagine or things that you can't imagine that you simply don't include at all
somehow into one's own approach.
That's too bad because at some point you inevitably just go round in circles.
It's probably just the conditions in which we're all doing our work right now. The old world is in a death rattle.