In Listening Bodies, a performative Audio Walk, Gabriele Reuter, Marcelo Schmittner and Charlotte Virgile are working with a team of six participants who want to engage with the building of the Humboldt Forum and the controversial history of this place. During the audio walk, the visitors will be accompanied by a performer and reminded of earlier architectures such as the Palace of the Republic. Four audio tracks summarise the group’s observations, memories and critical discussions. Together with excerpts from interviews with contemporary witnesses and observation tasks, an exciting kind of audio puzzle is created: an invitation to listen and to create space to relate to each other.
Bodies in space are also encountered in This is not a Game, created together with 32 pupils from class 8b of the Robert Blum Gymnasium by Tamar Grosz, Guilherme Morais, Marcelo Omine and Emilio Gordoa. Using interventions in the public areas of the Humboldt Forum, they express their relationship to the building, and allow the audience to participate in their questions, their interactions, and their personal struggle to influence the public.
In parallel to the long-running and complex operation of transferring artefacts from the collection of the Ethnologisches Museum to the Humboldt Forum, rehearsals towards a counter course of action will take place in Restless Objects by Hagar Ophir, Dana Yahalomi und Itamar Gov. The public is invited to witness members of the restoration team and art handlers of the institution rehearsing a procedure of emptying the vitrines in the new exhibition spaces. Touching upon the complexities of exhibiting ethnological collections in European institutions and in the Humboldt Forum in particular, the work will ask to set a clear reminder that the future of the objects in the collection is questionable and yet to be determined.
Miguel Witzke Pereira’s performance and video installation Warrior traces lost events and reclaims occupied space. The starting point of his artistic research is the Skulpturensaal am Schlüterhof.