-- BilderWerfer? - 24 Aug 2006
Chinese Whispers
In Beijing, May 2006, Daniel Aschwanden and Peter Stamer have realised the urban project ‚Head Room’, which for 4 weeks fathomed the borderline between private and public space. Besides a series of discussions, they have also visited 7 Beijing residents with different social backgrounds (from migrant workers to managing directors) and reconstructed their favourite living space to become a so called home box, being portable on the shoulders of two interlocutors. Each Beijing host then has invited a guest to lead a private conversation in this ‚head room’, somewhere in Beijing.
7 boxes, documentary videos, sound recordings, stories form the starting point of Environment and Performance in ‚Chinese Whispers’. In Studio 2 of Tanzquartier Wien, the 7 boxes will be assembled to become one fictitious Beijing living space, in which the bearly audible whispers of private conversations resonate. An imaginary space for the ‚other’ opens up in this environment, whereas the black box of the stage in Halle G transforms itself into a public waiting place for cultural difference. Chinese Whispers deals with misunderstanding in communicating with an-other. Who’s talking here in Chinese?
On stage, Daniel Aschwanden and Peter Stamer install a sound studio, creating and performing a radio play. Together with audio t(h)inker Oliver Stotz, they create sound images, editing them live both out of ready-made texts, dialogues, found footage, and improvisations being created on the spot.
Their stories and narratives are nurtured both by personal experience, the artists have gathered in their previous China projects, and by rigorous facts about China from newspapers, records, or archives. In the interplay of subjective experience and objective data, a playground opens up for futuristic visions on China. The country, being a projection screen of Western hopes for economic growth as well as cultural fear, and envisioning itself as the future super power, thereby is rendered and renders itself fictitious, already being a fiction for expectations, anxieties, tales: Chinese Whispers, a science fiction rhapsody by two narrators.