Unter dem Pflaster 2020

Unter dem Pflaster* 2020
A series of film, installation, music, text, and performance

Curated by Frauke Havemann and Peter Stamer

Saturdays, August 8th, 15th, and 29th, and September 5th, 2020, at 8.30 pm

*A word-play which sadly doesn’t translate into English. “Pflaster” is the German word for ‘pavement’, but also for ‘bandage’.

 

Under the pavement lies the beach! Many decades ago, this was a battle-cry against those urban philistines who’d seemingly forgotten that true life exists only beneath the surface of our streets, only behind our concrete facades, and certainly only beyond our consumerist existence; an attempt to throw off the dead weight of these constructs which obstruct our view of an horizon full of potential. This is what a dream of those endless shores of our lives supposedly depends upon,

Though the traces we leave behind may only be faint footprints in the soft sand, gently washed away by the tides, promising eternal beginnings, we know, of course, that the tides carry back to us what we allegedly cast away, They reemerge as all that flotsam and jetsam. This series was the first attempt to dredge the sediment, to sift through the residuum, to test it and put it on display. On selected Saturdays from August 8th and September 5th, Havemann, Stamer, and Whelan presented new and recent works at the Pavillon at Milchhof and took a close look at the curiosities of disappearing and surfacing.

 

In his DIALOGUES on August 8th, Peter Stamer held a fictitious conversation about ominous and incurable wounds which fester beneath our band-aids. On August 15th, Frauke Havemann and Eric Schefter projected their feature film WEATHER HOUSE on the Pavillon’s facade, an apocalyptic chamber play on extreme weather phenomena. While inside the space, on August 29th, A.C. Whelan presented an installation, SUR LA PLAGE, in which – through photography, animation, sculpture and drawing – he explored another sense of a “rapture of the deep”. The series concluded on September 5th with a concert by the performance duo BEIDE MESSIES. Under the title UND ZWAR: OFFENER KÄFIG (In fact: Open Cage), they finally released their long planned, very long prepared, and very very long awaited double album (naturally with lots of cheeky dances, remarks and songs).