A performance in the form of an installation on building façades. Hovering between architecture and everyday urban life, the project focuses on the elderly members of our society. White chairs made of steel are mounted on buildings at the height of four to seven meters. People in the age of 60 to 80 years sit on these chairs high above passers-by and perform everyday activities such as reading a newspaper, cutting vegetables or listening to the radio…
By relocating the everyday experience from private to public space, the viewer is able to actually see an experienced moment of life. Thus an individual story inscribed in the body engages in a dialogue with the audience.
Angie Hiesl + Roland Kaiser | Germany
Choreographer, performance and installation artist Angie Hiesl has been presenting her projects since the 1980s. In 1997 she started artistic collaboration with Roland Kaiser and since then they have developed all of their interdisciplinary projects together, that is all concepts, choreographies and installations, presented mostly in private and public urban spaces distant to art, were created jointly. Their shows condense local peculiarities and put them in social context, focusing on the relationship between the human body and space/ architecture, as well as in the relationship between humans and their respective cultural, social, political, and global environment. Their unique means of expression, as well as their concepts, turn into sensual provocations inviting the audience and the passers-by to take a new look at reality.
concept, direction:
Angie Hiesl
co-direction:
Roland Kaiser
technical director:
Lutz Dunsing
project manager:
Silvia Werner
performers:
Katharina Sehnert, Ralf Harster, Birgitta Altermann, Edeltraud Sonneck, Hedda Kage, Josef Geiser, Bert Voiss, Robert Firgau, Gerhard Schrempf, Elfriede Schalk, Walter Cadek
premiere:
Cologne, 1995
duration:
60’
reviews:
While Christo, the Bulgarian pop artist, wraps buildings in white, Hiesl, from Cologne, aims to intrigue onlookers by displaying people in pursuit of ordinary life in an extraordinary way.
„The Daily Telegraph”, Wielka Brytania
(…) we have someone in Munich spectacularly occupying the city’s public space with mesmerizing performance art.
