20.11.2009 – 29.11.2009 / Audio Art Festival, Krakau

DeReKonstruktion Audio Art Festival

17. Audio Art Festival / Krakau, Polen
20.11.2009 - 29.11.2009

Grzegorz G. Zgraja, »De[Re]Konstruktion – Theater« / 3D Videoinstallation
Muzyka Centrum Art Society Krakow // Academy of Music in Krakow // Bunkier Sztuki

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Live Performance
20.11.2009, 18.00 Uhr

Christian Meyerholz, audiovisuelle Improvisation zu »De[Re]Konstruktion – Theater«
Muzyka Centrum Art Society Krakow // Academy of Music in Krakow // Bunkier Sztuki

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De[Re]Konstruktion – Theatre / An intermedia vision against oblivion

In collaboration with the Gliwice music theatre, an interactive video-sound-installation for the ruins of the municipal theatre “Victoria” in the city of Gliwice, Poland has been developed.

Built in 1901 under the name of “Victoria”, the theatre has had a colourful past, ranging from its nationalisation (in 1914) to an almost complete destruction at the end of World War Two followed by failed building operations, and finally, its rediscovery in the 1990ies.

My installation, which has been conceived especially for that place, gathers the particular phases of the theatre’s history and presents them to the spectator in the form of a tesselation. The central theme of the installation is the topic of documentation and the writing of history. Due to the interactive character of the installation, the spectator is given the opportunity to recompose the available fragments again and again to a new overall picture, and thus deduce a new meaning each time. Archive material, which also reflects the heyday of the theatre, is presented as an animated mashup on a projection surface by four films that are alternately showing. Moreover, there are also documantary images which present the current state of the place and which refer to building operations that have been accomplished during the past years in order to preserve the building. As a caesura between past and present, one of the films simulates a burning curtain as an allusion to the interim end of the theatre in consequence of a fire caused by the Soviet soldiers in March 1945.

In the middle of the auditorium there are tubes arranged in a square which refer to the water basin that is situated under the hall and has been used as public swimming baths up to the 1970ies. By approaching any of the tubes, the visitor of the virtual installation induces the projections via “mouse”. Assigned to each of the tubes is one of the four films, so that every move by the visitor between the tubes also triggers a change of the projections which are shown. The chronology of the historical events associated with the films is broken, the mingling of past and present is provoked, two phases which are only through their blending able to adequately represent the whole of the place.

My installation is to be understood as a reflexion of and a tribute to a place which connects German and Polish culture and history.

Grzegorz G. Zgraja, Gliwice/Braunschweig, 2006 – 2009