Robinson Crusoe, that old colonial hero, turned anything and everything on his desert island into a project. Planting, making wheelbarrows or setting up a border – the man turned everything into plans and projects so he would not succumb to overwhelming self-pity, loneliness and thoughts of death.
Many years ago, we staged this material and were amused to find that our lives are also filled with a wide range of projects, also creating a kind of defence against the fact of mortality. ‘You have to have fun – or no one will come along to your funeral,’ one of our elderly aunts used to say, laughing heartily.
Almost certainly, this island art concept is due in part to our biography. We spent the first decades of our lives in the GDR, where the so-called ‘East Bohemian counterculture’ was our only refuge from the dull, musty micro-dictatorship: we were compelled to enjoy music, art and punk under the radar.
Political upheaval brought a longed-for freedom. We belong to the generation which, according to Heiner Müller, is the "undead of the Cold War, no longer able to grasp history as granting meaning to the meaningless through ideology, but seeing it as simply meaningless."
We were also the first media generation to be interested in the media‘s overwriting of reality. Driven by the electronic beats of club culture, we founded illegal clubs, and from then onward, art, music and an intoxicating and affirmative attitude to life were merged in image creation machines and sound collages, with which we filled our screens and the DJs filled our loudspeakers on a weekly basis. Fashion, lifestyle, science, history, dictatorship – it was all a pop-cultural, ironic treasure trove of quotations, a wild game with symbols and signs that we had appropriated.
In the following 30 years, we have staged, collaged, and deconstructed reality in over 50 productions at many art and theatre venues. We see art as a kind of transformation machine; using art, we approach the subject under investigation with the means of imagination and intellectual speculation. Instead of imitating reality, we highlight a question, an oddity, an anomaly ... whatever. Eventually, our passion for film got the upper hand, and we founded the film production company MauserFilm in 2018. We have stayed true to the subjects that have characterized our work to date: an interest in science and the future, in clues and ambiguity – a sense of humor with a sharp edge, and the quiet existential failure of our small yet so special species – because:
During this special, the artists Harriet Maria, Rebecca and Peter Meining will talk about their work with Thorsten Schaumman, Artistic Director of the Hof International Film Festival. The short film EDEN 3030 will be screened. After the film, Veit Sprenger, theater maker and author, and Prof. Dirk Baecker, sociologist, will discuss the topic “Do we want to live forever”, cryonics and future worlds.
During this special, the artists Harriet Maria and Peter Meining present their short films DER KOPF DER KATZE and FALTER. During the audience discussion, moderated by Veit Sprenger, theater maker and author, you will learn everything you want to know about the two artists.
During this special, the artists Harriet Maria and Peter Meining present their short films DER KOPF DER KATZE, EDEN 3030 and FALTER.