Staging the Real: A seminar about research based artistic/performative work.

How can exploring a neighborhood or following a theme lead to an artistic work? The three artists of the German-Swiss collective Rimini Protokoll have been doing pioneer work in this field since 1995. Often labeled as pioneers of contemporary documentary performance, Rimini Protokoll look back on about 120 different works ranging from staged performances featuring “real people” instead of artists to installations, radio and TV pieces as well as formats they call parasitical, in which the host event is undermined the people who follow its procedures from the viewpoint of a performance audience (at the court, the parliament or a shareholders conference, to name examples).
In the seminar, Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll offers both a theoretical viewpoint, by looking back on 25 years of exploring the documentary performative, as well as a process of learning-by-doing. Complementary, Kostis Stafylakis focuses on historical examples of collaboration between artists and a variety of social agents (group, communities, individuals, professionals etc) to contextualize the ideas and methods of Rimini Protokoll in wider “social turn” in art, from early 90s to the present.

Duration: April, May and June 2020

—

About Daniel Wetzel

Daniel Wetzel was born in Constance in 1969, studied Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and now lives in Athens and Berlin.
Since 2000 he forms an author and director-team with Helgard Haug and Stefan Kaegi, running under the name Rimini Protokoll. Their projects in duo or trio-constellations as well as solo works cover the fields of theatre, audio play, film and installation.
Central to their work is the further development of the respective art fields to allow for unconventional views on our reality. For example, Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel declared an annual meeting of the Daimler company a theater piece and made their audience temporary share holders (“Annual Shareholders Meeting“, Berlin 2009) and they staged “100% City“ in more than 25 cities around the world with 100 local inhabitants statistically representing their city. In Berlin and Dresden they developed interactive Stasi-audio plays (“50 kilometers of files”, 2011 or “10 kilometers of files”, 2013). Since the 90s their work with “experts of the everyday life” is described as groundbreaking and leading the path to new forms of documentary theater.