2011
Most beautiful is what’s already gone
Where am I actually at home: in the body to which I wish not to belong, or in the city that is always something different?
“Most beautiful is what’s already gone.” But disappearing is not an option. People don’t want to live at the margins; they want to construct a safe place as a comfortable home, an environment that provides for a good life, where people are versed in human rhetoric, where people construct a common rhetoric in which everyone can be versed. And if you’re not, you don’t exist. You disappear. A man strolls through Graz constructing his Graz, ignoring what doesn’t fit, formulating his world anew. If one’s life eludes control, there is at least pride in the remaining despair. A Graz of monumental grandiosity. A metropolis. Megalomania resulting from a lack of alternatives. A total work of art.
(Gerhild Steinbuch)
Most beautiful is what’s already gone is a performance that repeats in a loop. The stage is built and then dismantled; it’s an installation that’s recorded from four sides and always offers a new perspective. Inspired by Pepper’s Ghost Illusion – a well-known optical trick that popularized in the theater of the late 1800s before the invention of cinema – the construction functions as both a camera and projector: a glass wall serves as a window and a reflective surface, which produces various cinematographic spatial sequences depending on the lighting conditions.
With Shila Anaraki and Sebastian Straub
Text/concept Gerhild Steinbuch, Direction/concept Julie Pfleiderer, Set design/concept Philine Rinnert, Sound design noid, Assistant Pia Derler
A coproduction by steirischer herbst & uniT (Graz), with support from BUDA Kortrijk und Kunsten en Erfgoed Brüssel, inspired by VIEWMASTER_THE SERIES
