In a hurry? Hinter uns der Nebel(The Fog Behind Us) could change that. On 13 October 2024, the collective Here we are,with its interdisciplinary project, once again invites us to a space where time moves differently. The venue is the Alte Neuendorfer Church in Babelsberg.
It takes one hour to get from Kreuzberg to Babelsberg by S-Bahn. Enough time to doze off, particularly if it’s late and you’ve had a busy day. My walk from the station to the church is short, but pitch black and desolate. As I enter into the octagonal church, after a welcome tea and shoeless, with an extra pair of warm socks, my gaze is drawn to the sky blue ceiling, where 997 golden stars shimmer.
As I get my bearings, three of the Here we are performers have formed a caravan of sorts, which constantly loops through the space. It moves up and down the galleries and along the eight walls before starting all over. Their hands simultaneously tap, caress, and graze everything in their path: wooden railings, organ pipes, my shoulders. The caravan’s motions remind of Janosch’s journey in the children’s book, a search for beautiful Panama, which ends where it began.
Anita Twarowska and Murillo Basso (dance), Nicolas Schulze (sound), and Oscar Loeser (video) along with Lena Gätjens (light), Clemens Kowalski (staging) and the audience have been on this unusual journey in this unique space for a few hours now. While their guests come and go, they remain for 24 hours. Watches that can count down the hours must be left outside. Instead, a metallic sculpture with two whisk-like arms spins around, ticking away like a clock without a dial. Meanwhile, its sounds are recorded with a microphone, distorted, and woven into a soundscape whose crescendi lead us nowhere.
Basso’s 20-minute slow-mo solo, which simply ends flat on the floor, is similarly anti-spectacular. After what seems like another eternity, during which all the others are sitting around doing nothing, Basso moves over to a bean bag chair at the edge of the space. “How can you move so slow?”. Twarowska asks him over the microphone with childish simplicity. I only understand bits of the answer and the resulting discussion in Portuguese and Polish.
What I now understand: it’s not about understanding something. It’s not about getting somewhere, achieving something, not even about experiencing something special.
On the contrary, Hinter uns der Nebel is drawing me into an experiment, which seems to be exploring how it would be to leave behind every standard and every norm associated with time, success, beauty, harmony, social togetherness, etc. To forget how the world functions, what things mean, how clocks tick. A motto or motif for this experiment, which relentlessly forces everyone in the room to reflect on themselves, could be a sentence from John Cage: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.” (Lecture On Nothing, 1959)
Hinter uns der Nebel by Here we are collective was performed on October 2/3, 2024 at Alte Neuendorfer Church in Babelsberg (fabrik Potsdam). Another performance takes place on October 13, 2024, 11 am. Tickets
