Unity of Oppression - Nexus Arts Gallery

Adelaide, SA

Change Media and Nexus Arts, in collaboration with the Regional Gallery of Murray Bridge, present this experimental art exhibition as part of its national What Privilege? Initiative. Here is a sneak preview slideshow from the opening at Nexus Arts on April 5th:.

Update: Missed out? The Unity of Oppression will be on tour at the Regional Art Gallery Murray Bridge June 15 - July 22 2018.

 And here is the slide show from the launch at Nexus Arts in April 2018:

‘What Privilege? - The unity of oppression’ explores what unites and divides us: We share a finite planet, what futures will we forge from the infinity of darkness? Each artist took up the challenge to respond to  What Privilege? and find creative responses to the Unity of Oppression...

Playing with the duality of light and dark, using acrylics, sculpture and multi-media, five artists from culturally diverse backgrounds create a journey into the complexities of power, privilege and oppression - inviting you to peel away hidden layers and join them on a creative crime scene investigation of our shared humanity.

The Unity of Oppression works are co-led with interdisciplinary Ngarrindjeri-Chinese artist Damien Shen [painting, mixed media] and feature emerging artists Emilijia Kasumovic [drawing, mixed media] and Jelena Vujnovic [drawing], alongside work from Jen Lyons-Reid [line art, poetry, mixed media, sculpture] and Carl Kuddell [poetry, mixed media, sculpture]. 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and by the South Australian Government through Arts SA, with support by Nexus Arts and the Regional Gallery Murray Bridge.

 List of Works for ‘What Privilege? - The unity of oppression’:

Damien Shen:

‘A message from God to the Blackfellow’, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 4 x 160x100cm

Emilija Kasumovic:

‘Interbeing’, 2017, mixed media on tulle, 100x70cm

‘Messenger from inner space’, 2018, mixed media on tulle, 80x150cm

Jelena Vujnovic:

'A person who returns’, 2018, mixed media on canvas, 5mx2m

Jen Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell:

’The Handshake’, 2018, mixed media on canvas, 294cmx207m

’Insert Face Here’, 2003/ 2018, sculpture, acrylic on wood, 1.8mx2mx1m

‘What Privilege?’, 2017, 50 printed character cards

Artists Statements:

Damien Shen: ‘A message from God to the Blackfellow’

A message from God to the Blackfellow, is an ongoing significant body of work by Ngarrindjeri-Chinese artist Damien Shen. In continuing his engagement with archives and museums, Shen draws on the encounters between Reverend George Taplin and the Ngarrindjeri people, to establish a thematic framework for this series. These encounters are drawn from Taplin’s diaries and give great detail on his engagement with Ngarrindjeri. Shen was particularly drawn to Taplin’s entry about a discussion with a ‘native’ on April the 7th, 1859.

“I then endeavoured to explain to him that I had a message from God to the Blackfellows, and what it was, and asked him to tell the others about it. He seemed to understand me but was evidently surprised. It is my impression at present that more will be done by individualising the natives than by teaching them collectively. I shall see how this idea is confirmed or otherwise bye-and-bye.”[1]

For these new works, Shen’s response to the righteous and paternalistic views of the times, which position his ancestors as inferior black subjects, takes the form of a series of large digital portraits, depicting his Ngarrindjeri elders, whom were photographed by Norman TIndal at Raukkan in South Australia. These mixed media works depict his family, displayed in a monochromatic and sombre palette.

A stark background frame their figures, a visual cue to the anthropological methods utilised in ‘documenting’ the Ngarrindjeri community. Whiteness didn’t just surround each of his forebears, but pervaded into their very being. They are submerged underneath a sheath of pale rhythmic dotting, ghosted in the virtues of whiteness while their selfhood was simultaneously erased by ‘well-meaning’ messengers of God, in state-sanctioned, publically funded assimilation machines.

Damien Shen is represented by MARS Gallery (Melbourne)

[1] Reverend George Taplin, The Journals of the Reverend George Taplin, Missionary to the Ngarrindjeri People of the Lower Murray, Lakes and the Coorong,1859 – 1879, 7 April 1859, http://www.firstsources.info/uploads/3/4/5/4/34544232/taplins_diary_1859-79.pdf

Emilija Kasumovic: ‘Interbeings’

 “The head is the universe, it’s where everything happens. It’s where thoughts happen. Its shape, an oval, like an egg, is symbolic to suggest infinity.” David Altmejd, artist

Using painting and drawing on layers of sheer fabric, Emilija explores the mind’s ability to stretch beyond what we are conditioned to believe about our privileged state and position in the society.

The need for violence, war and division are all distorted search by us for pleasure and happiness, and therefore, generated by the egoistic principle and our identification with ‘form’.  Our need for possession and dominance is how ego feeds and continually generates its power. Once we realize that our true self is not conditioned by form, or anything we can name, categorize and identify with, we dissolve into boundlessness.

‘Unless we get rid of our ego, there is no peace either for ourselves or for the others.”

Jelena Vujnovic: 'A person who returns’

Within this work I invite the audience to explore the fragmented nature of the remembered landscapes in my mind. I have used the forms of the Yugoslav monuments that sit in stark contrast to their organic landscapes. Monuments that stand grand and strong to commemorate lives affected and lost in times of war. The works invite the audience to engage, without offering the opportunity to be deciphered entirely.

We all have an endless layering of memories from experiences in different environments, while simultaneously, the environments are influenced by events that unfold in them. My travels back to Serbia and Croatia are a catalyst for new engagement with my old homes and the feedback between memory and environment continues, with each leaving a mark on the other.

My upbringing, exile and migrations are unique to me even though they are a common story. What we all share is the unique nature of experience, what divides us is the inability to fully understand each other’s experiences. To develop tolerance, I believe we need to let go of the need to define each other in absolutes and focus instead on acceptance. Acceptance gives way to respect, and therefore tolerance will grow.

Jen Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell:

What Privilege? cards, ’The Handshake’ and ’Insert Face Here’

We are exploring how to depict the messy, entangled interdependence and connectivity of power and privilege to renegotiate and reinvent our shared humanity.

50 What Privilege? cards, 2017

The satirical cards depict inevitable power and privileged behaviors we have identified over 20 years of co-creative practice. They are the provocation for our 2017-18 national project, ‘Creating Together – what can possibly go wrong?’ We invite audiences and collaborators to notice, disrupt and reframe colonizing mindsets through a series of Power-Tarot and role-play games.

‘The Handshake’, work-in-progress, 2018.

The laughable clowns of power shake hands, clothed in the emperor’s old quotes, a deal ritualized. The corporate wallpaper backdrop displays a thousand cartoons, an iconographic map of supremacy beliefs and oppressive slogans encoded in the fabric of culture. These colonizing mindsets are interconnected and simultaneously absurd and inevitable. The rules are rigged. Everyone is a player. We all know the game. In a global confluence of moral and metaphysical bankruptcy, what are we going to do about it? Pick a card, any card.

We focus on the wall as a negotiated space, using dialectical satire, street-art murals and branding to mirror the absurd wallpaper commodification of art. We believe Enlightenment philosophy is a colonial frame we are all acculturated into - class power, sexism, racism, ableism, capitalism… are all narratives that privilege selected people, who benefit from the oppression of the targeted. These stories are so deeply woven into our daily lives as natural, and/or historic, it can be confronting to explore our personal involvement, easier to blame it on a few bullies, ‘it’s not me’. Yet every human interaction is a negotiation, defining how we have control in our lives. We use cartoons as a playful tool to explore how we maintain power through ignorance.

‘Insert Face Here’, 2003/ 2018

All the interactivity of a funfair selfie, the foldout scene from the Woomera Detention Centre jailbreak in 2002 offers the viewer the opportunity to get into the picture. Will you be immortalized as the detainee or the enforcer, with the power to maintain the status quo? There were 21 million people seeking refuge worldwide 15 years ago, now there are 60 million. Australia detains thousands overseas, to protect ‘our’ borders.

In a Kafkaesque, out of sight, out of mind, bureaucratic brutality, people are destroyed to maintain the delusion of ‘our way of life’. We think the work, first shown at SALA 2003, remains disturbingly relevant 15 years later. Selfies welcome.

Artist Bios

Damien Shen:

Damien Shen is a South Australian man of Ngarrindjeri (Aboriginal) and Chinese descent. As an artist he draws on both of these powerful cultural influences to create works of intense personal meaning. In using his artistic talent to share his story he aims to open the eyes of viewers to new ways of seeing Australian identity and Aboriginal art.

Emilijia Kasumovic:

Emilija Kasumovic is Serbian born, living in Adelaide. Her work is concerned with human condition and what defines us as human beings beyond our biological bodies.

Jelena Vujnovic:

Fascinated by natural and artificial structures, Jelena Vujnovic sees the building blocks of our bodies and our urban environment as the scaffolding on which we construct our lives. Focused on an uninterrupted and organic development of her work, she is constantly playing and experimenting with new materials and forms.

Jen Lyons-Reid and Carl Kuddell:

Artistic director and graphic artist, Jen Lyons-Reid, and creative producer and writer, Carl Kuddell, are Tallstoreez Productionz co-founders and award-winning multidisciplinary artists and filmmakers. Since 2002 they have explored satire across art forms, from poetry, cartoons, sculptures, live art, to documentaries and several TV series. They run Change Media as a national arts initiative, focusing on critical literacy through arts and media. They have delivered hundreds of workshops and performances with thousands of participants across Australia. Their strategic advisory work includes investigations into value, equity and harm in socially engaged arts, as part of an ARC Linkage partnership with VCA in 2013-14 and Jen’s 2-year Australia Council Fellowship 2015-16.

Photos by Wild Light Projects - thanks Amanda for your amazing support.

©2018 Tallstoreez Productionz Pty Ltd and Change Media

What Privilege - Arts Access Victoria

My body is fantastic

We are working with Arts Access Victoria, arts and disbalilties workers and artists living with disabiliy in a series of workshops to develop provocative memes, mindbombs and public interventions for the disability and arts sectors.

Togehter we developed several frames and concept to speak to issues of social framing of disability vs the medical health model and how to bring new ways of thinking and engagement into the wider community.

We played several disruptive power and privilege games and went through the 50 cards to re-work some of the poetry and imagery.

Arts Access used the cards for several intensive workshops to examine their practice and audit projects, which Veronica Pardo, AAV's executitve director, described as an amazing experience and resounding success.

The next stage of the project will involve the development of a fully accessible tool kit based on the What Privilege cards and games, including a re-work of all text elements in Plan Langauge.

Creating Together

Creating Together 2017 July - SA

Creating Together is now integrated into our new What Privilege page here.

We have been successful with our recent Australia Council for the Arts funding submission. We are working now with our national partners [Arts Access Victoria, Weave Movement Disability Theatre, Visionary Images, Darwin Community Arts, Nexus Arts, University of Western Sydney and Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority] to develop the roll out with a diverse range of communities and new partners.

We are developing a prototype art-game to explore how we create better together. We will identify old patterns of power and privilege and explore how we can disrupt and reframe those values to collaboratively develop new narratives to work more equitably together. Our aim is to develop a wicked world engine for personal and collaborative systemic change through playful art-making, called 'Creating Together - what can possibly go wrong?', to be launched as a standalone initiative with a range of partners in 2018.

Creating Together - what can possibly go wrong?

Change Media will collaborate with a range of national partners on a cultural and creative competency / critical literacy initiative: ‘Creating Together  - what can possible go wrong?’

Our initiative examines how privilege, power and underlying values determine our lenses/ frames - which impacts on our play, negotiation skills, solidarity, creative process and outcomes and advocacy across arts and social sectors.

Over the last two decades we have created frameworks to speak to power and privilege and with this project we want to explore and share the efficacy of this approach with frontline organisations.

Our current aim in collaborating with progressive culture organisations and their communities is to tailor the project, as a tool to positively challenge your project partners, community participants, funders and supporters, to reflect and reframe privileged narratives.

Our key aim is to provide imaginative tools for artists and advocates to increase critical literacy, playful self-determination and to enable creative re-imagining of our values.

We want to provoke and take risks together. We will creatively challenge project partners, funders and supporters, to address privilege, power and solidarity, so that we can build respectful, equitable and robust partnerships, that are able to withstand the push towards fear, bigotry and hatred and contribute to a progressive reframing of our shared narratives with our community participants.

We see an urgent need for an intersectional approach to social justice across arts and culture and we believe we need to create and improve on the tools now to change the conversations that will take place, even if we are not prepared...

Our current questions for the Creating Together tool kit:

Over the coming years, what are the key ingredients needed for solidarity across arts and social sectors?

How can we intersect with Arts Front campaigns and ensure mindfulness about privilege and power and ensure improve inclusive and accessible practice is implemented?

We want people who are dealing directly with the  consequences of various forms of oppression to be involved in determining our strategies, and that the resulting tools are relevant for their campaigns and partnerships strategies.

After exploring this concept with our partners, we have identified solidarity and intersectionality as a great starting point to contribute to this urgently needed conversation across sectors and silos.
 

What is our process?

Solidarity

 We will negotiate an effective working group to shape the lens of our creative toolkit - to explore power, privilege and the solidarity required to create together.

We will collaborate with progressive culture organisations [First Peoples, Disability, Youth, Migrants, Refugees, Diversity, Gender, Health, Advocacy] so that the creative tools embody and respond with an authentic, diverse voice.

Inter-connectivity

 We will link to other values discussions, creative responses and campaigns running across the arts and social sectors, to enhance intersectionality, we will initiate this through our partners at Feral Arts and their Arts Front 2030 campaigns.

We will support the integration of these solidarity training toolkits/ recipes into our partners outreach and cultural competencies programs, as an artist-led awareness-raising program for partners and support agencies

Privilege Narratives

We will discuss and workshop our shared values and explore how privileged assumptions and systematic violence are baked into our practice and shared discourse.

Power Games

We will explore playful responses to open up the space to train and challenge ourselves, our participants, partners and the service agencies.

We will explore and create games that expose privilege narratives [my rights, good intentions, no choice, omission] – the thinking behind the thinking that drives oppressive actions that are often hidden from the privileged narrators.

Notice, Disrupt, Reframe, Negotiate, Create

We will create question thinking disruptions and reframes to create a new language of respect and justice that addresses all stages of arts production and partnership models

Other benefits

We want to co-create, have fun and play with creative thinkers and doers, to share and reflect on our practice and develop new actions and campaigns.

Please contact us if you and your organisation want to get involved.

Power and Privilege - Arts Front 2030

After 2 days with 200+ people creating together we suggested a power and privilege working group - funny the only space left was the cafe...It's going to be an interesting journey...

We presented a 2-hour playful examination of privilege, fear and power to reclaim and reframe the cultural value debate.

Over the last two years, as part of Jen’s Australia Council for the Arts CACD Fellowship, we have been thinking about the new - and old - crisis in our sector and what tools we might need for effective change. We have focused on what it means to co-create and how colonizing mindsets can impact our best intentions.

And here are the questions we brought to the event:
• How do we create together equitably in times of crisis, when access and capacity are stratified?
• How can we open up a discussion about reclaiming and reframing values and solidarity, beyond the neo-liberal frames we are all currently trapped in? In the Arts we see it permeate through all levels of involvement, [arts admin, practitioners, participants, stakeholders, audience] with shifts towards risk avoidance and fear-driven self-censorship that inhibit our ability to imagine.
• What would be required to avoid bringing old assumptions and crusty power structures into a new network?
• How can we increase our awareness of the values and beliefs we bring (caring and harmful) and explore how they impact on all stages of the co-creative process?
• How can we co-create a shared vision that clearly separates the values from the hidden and overt violence that manifests in colonial collaborations?
• How do we create a space to consider absent voices and chaos, (the new, the unknown) which arise when creating a collective vision?

We are developing a prototype game to explore how we create better together, to uncover ways to identify old patterns of power and privilege and explore how we can disrupt and reframe those values to collaboratively develop new narratives to work more equitably together. Our aims to develop a wicked world engine for personal and collaborative systemic change, called 'Creating Together - what can possibly go wrong?', to be launched as a standalone initiative with a range of partners in 2017.

This session introduced these concepts:

1. Explore Arts Front current visions and the values that drive socially engaged art projects
2. Explore how we can disrupt internalized and systemic violence, fear and privilege
3. Reframe our power relationships and begin to separate the violence from the values to speak back to bullying on a personal and systematic level

Escape from Cloud 9 - Sydney exhibition

Jen Lyons-Reid Australia Council CACD Fellowship - exploring narratives and digital workflows

Jen collaborated with Francesca Da Rimini and Carl Kuddell on this cartoon work, as a contribution to the Affliated Text's exhibition 'Selfie: Image Narrative Opiate', curated by Bronia Iwanczak and Lynne Barwick.

Together we developed the concept and text work, and Jennifer produced the graphic art and lettering.

The Selfie exhibition took place between Sep 9th 2015 and Oct 16th 2015, at Cross Art Books, at 33 Rosluyn Street, Kings Cross, Sydney.

Contribution to Hexen zine

2015 April - SA

Jen and Carl were invited by artist Francesca Da Rimini to contribute to her collaborative zine 'Hexen', presented at Copenhagen, Denmark and London. This collaboration was part of the first stage artistic exploration for Jen's 2-year Australia Council Fellowship.

The invitation was to respond to a series of challenges and to a selection of medieval art works, referenced in the final magazine art work.

Jen's graphic art Hex, This Is Not A Trap:

Carl's poetic Hex, Nine Reflections:

Love Referendum - Adelaide Fringe

Love Referendum - public art game 2007 March - SA

Developed as an interactive alternative reality game ARG for the public realm, the initial phase included a series of video clips, viral postcards and an interactive website. Is Adelaide in the grip of a potentially fatal pandemic called lovesickness…?

Has it become a sentimental slave to romance or a slick metropolis for the cool and uncaring? In an urgent call to action, the Department of Deliberation is conducting a statewide referendum in December 2007.

It will ask the public to decide whether they are lovestruck or lovesick. Results will be tallied and citizens will be officially (and spectacularly) notified during opening night of the 2008 Adelaide Fringe.

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Artistic Director - Jennifer Lyons-Reid

Producer - Carl Kuddell

Game development mentor - Christy Dena

Graphic design - Working Images, Drew Joyce

Love Referendum was supported by Arts SA Public Art

Partners

Adelaide City Council

Arts SA

dreamcatcher - Adelaide Fringe

dreamcatcher - Adelaide Fringe multmedia project 2007 February - SA

An art exhibition, public mobile video projection, provocative art interventions, a limited series of 20 unique resin sculptures and 2000 postcards competition across South Australia.

Marvel at the sheer beauty of a dancing plastic bag, the most ‘beautiful thing’ on a magical flight through the City of Adelaide. It twirls to a modern Pied Piper’s tune, peddling imperishable dreams and subtly transforms the City’s structures, leaving behind small icons of suburban utopia.

Dreamcatcher is testament to our capacity to see beauty in the mundane and dangerous, and just when you think its over, the bag lifts again, sporting its insignia: Eternity.

Dreamcatcher sculptures

Grotesque yet strangely alluring… Recent archaeological digs in Adelaide [code named dreamcatcher] have uncovered several petrified objects from an epoch which the Dreamcatcher Museum have classified as ‘Oil Age: Plastic Era’. The objects appear to be flimsy plastic vessels. Historians believe they were used for trade and exchange and were probably associated with human sacrifice and mass rituals.

The limited series of 20 unique sculptures, lusciously translucent and seductively textural, are made from plastic bags - stamped with Eternity - each manipulated and set in a large block of glassy resin, with its own custom made iron stand, labeled with the work’s edition number. 10 sculptures were publicly auctioned as part of the Adelaide Fringe 2007, raising funds for SA students clean up the beaches and remove plastic bags from the ocean.

If you are interested to buy one of the remaining artworks or want to exhibit the work, please email us

Commissioned for the Surface Tension Public Art Program of the Adelaide City Council and Australian Network for Art & Technology; as part of the 2006 Adelaide Fringe Festival.

Partners

Adelaide Fringe

Zero Waste SA

ANAT Surface Tension

Adelaide City Council

s.cam - Adelaide City Public Art

public art project Adelaide City Council 2006 January - SA

s.cam – consuming the gaze is an interactive new media performance for the Adelaide CBD, which explores notions of the ‘see-thru’ citizen, body/gender politics and surveillance.

Initially created as 2 roving cyborgs developed between Jan and July 2006, s.cam became part of the development of the Love Referendum ARG and performance.

s.cam was commissioned by the Adelaide City Council Public Art Program

Partners

Adelaide City Council

Dark Heart - tts australia with pvi

Public art mobile video projection for tts australia 2005 May - Adelaide.

3 site specific interventionist, public video projections about the fear of terror. Created for the Adelaide leg of tts australia, a nationwide provocative performance by PVI collective.

Over 10 nights in May 2005 the work interacted with theatre performers, audience and the public art-guerilla-style, using mobile projectors at 3 different locations, intercepting the tts tour bus during it’s journey through Adelaide’s dark heart.

Partners

Arts SA

pvi collective (Kelli McCluskey, Steve Bull and pvi team members)

drive-by-shooting

Human Pastures - Luminosity Public Art

Adelaide City Council public art Luminosity 2004 July - SA

Human Pastures: Waltz through the weekly ritual of grazing the aisles – from a child’s perspective, chained to the trolley on a consumer roller-coaster, experience the visual extravaganza of product placements.

Commissioned by ANAT and the City of Adelaide, the 3-week shop-front video projection commenced in July 2004 in the shop front of 25 Leigh Street in Adelaide’s CBD.

Commissioned for the Luminosity Public Art Program of the Adelaide City Council and Australian Network for Art & Technology ANAT.

Find more images at: http://www.anat.org.au/luminosity/

Partners

Adelaide City Council

Australian Network for Art & Technology ANAT

Meltdown – the rise & fall of empire

SALA 2004 public video projection 2004 June - SA

Meltdown – the rise & fall of empire: Shop-front video projection, for SALA Festival 2004 Adelaide.

Life size plastic toy soldiers with guns meltdown and resurrect into a tank as a petrol pump meter counts the fuel consumption.

Partners

ANAT

South Australian Living Artists Festival 2004

cheap holiday... - SALA Festival

SALA 2003 mix media installation 2003 June - SA

Interactive video-installation for SALA Festival 2003 Adelaide.

A large screen projection of the harrowing scenes from the Woomera detention prison breakout in 2002 loops to the Australian national anthem, Advance Australia Fair.

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In the foreground a ‘photo-wall’ offers a photo opportunity for the audience and a TV monitor on the lounge chair captures the audience reactions to the event.

Unknown Germany - experimental theatre tour

Unknown Germany (Unbekanntes Deutschland) - 1999-2001 Germany/ Spain / USA

Unknown Germany is an experimental performance, combining theatre, clandestine actors, audience provocations with video projection, slideshows, installations and absurd dance events.

This multi-modal work is based on sculptural component made from several bags of wet clothing and shoes discarded by refugees crossing the Straits of Gibraltar from Marocco and recovered by Carl and his collaborators on Spain’s southern beaches near Tarifa, Andalusia, in 1999. The overall show tells a story about Fortress Europe, racism, whiteness and sexualised violence and its underlying normalised role models.

In a tour de force it pushes the audience to relinquish their shoes, essentially taking them hostage, mixing their belongings with those found on the beach and hoisting them above their heads - a promise and a threat.

A hidden provocateur half way through the show challenges the performers to stop the show and come clean on their white supremacist privilege - the audience is forced to take sides, the hall lights coming on turning their seats into the stage…will they decide for the show to continue or will they shut it down?

In each performance somehow the show continues, carrying the audience’s pity into a runway modeling refugee clothing. Borders are being crossed, in internalised escape and real refuge, a fitted kitchen explodes in a parody of pornographic phantasies, problem zones on body surfaces and in-and-exclusion are being examined. Audience are advised to avoid the front rows.

Unknown Germany toured six cities in northern Germany in summer 2001, with 6 sold-out shows. An excerpt of the show was performed in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA, at the national underground publishing conference.

hydrax productions presents:

Writers and Artistic Directors - Gesine Knuth and Carl Kuddell

Creative Producer - Carl Kuddell

Lights - Sabine Schmidt

Performers - Gesine Knuth, Carl Kuddell, Bjorn

Music and DJ - Ulli Bowmans

Support - Rassmus Eulenberger

Video - Martina

Talking Realities - teenage parenting

Talking Realities Teenage Mums - educational design campaign 1998 October - SA

Talking Realities 1998-2003: Concept, development, design and construction of an innovative visual performance display for a national youth peer education program about teenage parenting.

Arche Nova - public art and theatre tour

Arche Nova - performance tour - June-July 1998 - Germany/ The Netherlands

Carl Kuddell was commissioned as one of 50 artists to collaborate on an experimental art touring show, called ‘Arche Nova - a Peace Caravan’, celebrating the 350th anniversary of the European Peace of Westphalia. The 100+ artists and support crew toured 30 cities in four weeks, criss-crossing the border between Western Germany and the Netherlands, after a two-week rehearsal period.

Carl performed solo as a high-stilts puppeteer, engaging members of the public on markets and streets in a role-reversal of a scarred child in pyjamas turned 4m high giant, playing with traffic and scary adults. He also participated in several ensemble works, using a variety of techniques from abseiling, stilts acrobatics, butoh street dance to fireshows. Every night Carl performed the human version of his solo act during the grand show in each city’s medieaval square, on a collapsable stage, bringing all 50 artists together in an extravagant spectacle about illusive peace and experiences of war.

The tour employed over 100 artists and support workers, combining Germany’s fluxus scene and artists living in squats, trucks and old circus trailers. The resulting tour, under the joint direction of Willem Schulz and Marcello Monaco, was a great success, encouraging Carl to pursue his creative career professionally.

Partners

Wilde Rose EV