Berlin, a city with a complicated past but so relaxed today, a true artists’ paradise with the pace of life here allowing for endless reflection, experimentation, reading, thinking, talking, working, researching, testing limits.
Since arriving on August 1st, we have spent the greater part of our time getting settled into a productive groove, addressing the inevitable tech issues that come up almost daily, meeting with dancers and actors and production assistants, identifying our resources, and now, finally, capturing and processing the footage that we shot during our intensive and very emotionally charged 2-month trip to Israel/Palestine, Bosnia and Serbia.
There are several significant strands or themes that are beginning to emerge as we begin work on a series of video, audio and animation sketches that will form the basis of the finished work we want to produce down the road. As part of this sketching process, we recently led a very productive improvisational workshop with 8 hugely talented dancers/performers in a dance studio in Kreuzberg (http://laborgras.com/phpwcms/). (Thanks to Pedro Osorio for putting us in touch with Vincent, Orlando and Manuel, all professionals and such nice guys.)It was a very challenging and revealing process that allowed us to get to know the dancers and to see what might be possible as we plan for other video shoots in various locations in Berlin during the coming weeks.
We have been renting an editing suite at the Medienwerkstatt BBK (http://www.bbk-berlin.de/cms/site/cat34.html) which is an artists’ dream. It is located in a building that was a hospital in the early 20th century and is now entirely converted to artists studios, a printshop, a digital printing lab, a sculpture studio, a cinematheque and a media center with very very affordable rates for editing and shooting video in a green-screen studio. It is an artist-run facility subsidized by the city and its professional artists membership. Its longstanding success is a testament to the commitment that Berlin has to its artists and the importance it gives to contemporary cultural production.
Surprisingly, our work is becoming personal. For years, we have steered away from using ourselves and our own voices directly in our work but after being so deeply affected by the many moving stories we heard and the people we met while traveling, we realize that this can no longer be the case. Something has shifted dramatically in the way we perceive our own practice and what we need to accomplish as artists at this particular moment. This attempt at putting ourselves in the work, to be as honest as we can about what we are attempting to do, began this week in a very literal way by us taking turns interviewing each other for the camera. Somewhat awkwardly at first, we managed to draw stories and emotions and reflections out of each other that we hope can act as a framework or a kind of script for the narrative structure we ultimately want to develop into a multi-channel media landscape.
