I am interested in what comes to light when one compares different perspectives, contexts or levels of impact of the word freedom: inner and outer, philosophical, spiritual, personal and social felt and lived freedoms, but also freedom as an advertising promise and as an ideological concept. My explorations of freedom reveal to me the complexity of our world, the limits of our language. Freedom requires us to be aware of the forces at work, including our own. It helps us to critically confront ideology and to recognise other options instead of A or B. However, promises and ideas of freedom can also subjugate, paralyse, divide, lead to wars, self-destruction and addiction. Freedom does something to us and we to it. Exploring and pursuing our own freedom is a balancing act for me. So I do just that. I balance on porcelain, cups that I move around the room at the same time. They form landscapes, scatter in happy disorder, re-form into strict patterns. The suggestions that these different constellations give rise to correspond with the text, which also takes place on several levels. Spoken, projected and from the tape. I submit to the constraint of never touching the floor. A game. Freedom becomes a negotiation with one’s own endurance. But also a homage to ordering and classifying and moving on. Behind the question of freedom is also the question of what we want to do with our lives. For me, working on themes like freedom and courage is a key to hope, my basis for a creative engagement with the fragility of our present.

Concept, choreography, performance: David Brandstätter | Dramaturgic advice: Malgven Gerbes, Howard Katz, Alexandros Mistriotis | Texts: David Brandstätter | Narrator: Martin Clausen (De), Jim Sert (Fr) | Lights: Michael Kunitsch, Thomas Achtner | Video: Thomas Achtner, Max Sautai | Production shifts \ art in movement | More: https://shifts.dance/repertory/freiheit

Born in Wuppertal 1979, David Brandstätter lives and works in Le Havre | France and Berlin.
With Malgven Gerbes he founded shifts \ art in movement : s-h-i-f-t-s.org

Nele-Marie Gräber, born in 1983, grew up in Zurich |CH, lives and works in Berlin.

A squadron of birds fly over the exhibition space. Above them is not the vast sky but the restricting lines and angles of manmade structures. Against this unmoving background, the birds appear trapped and robbed of life. Upon closer look they reveal bodies made of coconut tree bark, iron legs and claws, and heads covered by plastic tanks that turn them into grotesque creatures. With the combination of raw material and man-made products, Christine Henry gazes into the past, into the origin of life on earth, when creatures emerged from water, half-fish, half-bird, as well as into the present and the future, when the human’s total blindness of the way they produce, consume and throw away their waste has become the biggest cause of mass extinction of fauna and flora. The installation sets human excessive use and exploitation of raw material into contrast and relation with plastic, a man-made and non-biodegradable material which is aggravating pollution worldwide. It is necessary to understand the reasons for the great mass extinctions and to invite the visitor to meditate on the transience and precariousness of the environment, in order to take action on the real issues of life.

Wool is a natural product that we humans have been using for thousands of years knew how to use. In the 21st century, sheep are used in Germany for landscape maintenance and on fields and dykes to prevent erosion. Today, as then, the animal produces wool, so it has to be shorn once a year. Shearing used to be financially profitable and was a large part of the shepherd’s income. But a lot has changed in the meantime. The domestic wool is too coarse and rough for the requirements of the textile industry. The infrastructure for processing the wool, which is first washed, then combed and spun, has disappeared from Europe. The clothes that we can buy here in the shops are made from Australian, New Zealand or South African sheep’s wool, which is processed in Southeast Asia. The result is a falling wool price per kilo in Germany.
A sheared wool weighs about 4-5 kg. The shearing costs per animal are around 3-4 €. But in the market, the wool allowance is 10-40 cents per kilo. In addition, when the wool is disposed of, it is considered hazardous waste and its disposal means additional costs. According to the Animal Welfare Carcass Act, wool has to be disposed of these days.
So the question is: What can we do to put this valuable raw material to good use again? Therefore, raw wool is an exciting field of research from an artistic, creative and architectural point of view, which not only belongs scientifically but also aesthetically. For several years I have been exploring raw wool, a material – that insulates, acoustically filters, scents, greases, heals, warms and insulates – to develop new ways of giving this wonderful material a new use. By adding excavated earth, sculptural, constructive, acoustic and insulating possibilities are examined. One possibility is the production of noise barriers from sheep’s wool. Further use as an absorber material makes an alternative possible, since synthetic substances have been used there up to now. The noise barriers that run along railway lines are filled with synthetic materials and easily replaced with sheep’s wool. Sheep’s wool has the advantage that it can be compostable, untreated and a habitat for insects. The structure in the Uferhallen consists of noise protection walls, which will be set up later on the Tempelhofer Feld and from research results of the Institute for Architecture-Related Art TU Braunschweig. At the same time, it is a room that invites you to linger.