I’ve been researching tents of late. Which ones offer the most space for as little money as possible? Which ones are the lightest? Which ones are comfortable to tow around? I came across polyester tents, exceptionally easy to set up and take down: a promise of full freedom in nature. I discovered luxurious safari lodges that offer more comfort than my own apartment. I encountered Corona test-center tents, and tents that offer—often lacking— shelter to people who find themselves on the run.Â
I’ve been researching tents of late. Which ones offer the most space for as little money as possible? Which ones are the lightest? Which ones are comfortable to tow around? I came across polyester tents, exceptionally easy to set up and take down: a promise of full freedom in nature. I discovered luxurious safari lodges that offer more comfort than my own apartment. I encountered Corona test-center tents, and tents that offer—often lacking— shelter to people who find themselves on the run.Â
Metaphorically, a tent represents more than a home found wherever one takes one’s boots off. As a distinct spatial form, it places its poles within a space and raises a membrane between reality and fiction, between the external and the internal. It lets you enter your own ego: a place where the sounds of the outside world are never distant, and always keep you awake – at best, generating comfort as they tumble down like raindrops. The dancer Sarafina Beck often experiences the world as something that is detached from her, as if present on the other side of a tent wall. In the 10th cycle, she makes this perceptual distortion – stemming from a psychotic disorder – the subject of her dance performance Tele(your)vision.
Figuratively speaking, artists regularly pitch their tents at Gessnerallee. They stay here temporarily, only to move on. Some return, but nearly all remain briefly. In the 10th cycle, theater maker and curator Pankaj Tiwari literally pitches a tent on Judith Gessner-Platz, thereby expanding the stages of Gessnerallee. TENT: A School of Performative Practices is a temporary mobile institution, in which three artists from diverse backgrounds live and work together. TENT is a space of negotiation and an appeal for coexistence. It reflects the voices of outsiders and explores how authority responds to them.Â
Dear audience, we invite you into an enlarged Gessnerallee. Community can be as temporary as a home. It need not always be a stage, through which new perspectives are communicated and boundaries are explored. Sometimes a tent – as a home for collectivity, integration, and diversity – is enough.
– Alexander Wilms