As the season’s finale is in sight, the common focal point of the International Production House Alliance will culminate in the “Live Art Festival #8: Superspaces,” which focuses on the institution of the theatre as it opens up into a utopian scenario. Inspired by “Fun Palace,” the never realized concept of a cultural temple designed by British architect Cedric Price in the 1960s, “Superspaces” offers new and different approaches to the theatre – ranging from the traditional visit to events that last entire days or nights. In the halls, but also at newly established venues on the Kampnagel grounds, they will raise questions about the conditions that govern our leisure activities and artistic productions. The works that are presented here create their own alliances between art, space, and the audience and, in doing so, invite an assembly of vastly different communities – ranging from soccer fans and plants to local residents and teenagers.
The temporary festival architecture, designed by the Hamburg-based artists we are visual, takes center stage here: it is at once a new venue und an architectural (counter)design to the factory halls. In the first festival week, the curator and artist collectives Bubblegum Club and CUSS from Johannesburg will present a program that will use scripted reality formats to deal with urban transformations in South Africa. In the second week of the festival, the international group Mamaza will join artists from Hamburg. Together they will open up the “Garden State*Hamburg,” where residents of the Kampnagel neighborhood will gather with the plotted plants, which they offered to the project as a temporary artistic loan.
Yet the “participatory institution” will also be probed in various other ways: as a rave opera with and by teenagers, as a dating app for a dance event, as a confrontation with soccer fan culture in Mohamed El Khatib’s spectacular piece “Stadium.” Here, more than 50 members of the soccer club Racing Club de Lens from Northern France will ender the k6 stage. A team at Kampnagel conceptualized a discursive program just for them, with extras playing fans of Hamburg’s two second league clubs FC St. Pauli and Hamburger SV.
!It’s not Really a Place. It’s More a Feeling1 was the slogan that led a campaign, half fictional and half real, that Kampnagel used in the 2017/18 season to create its own “brand” as an institution. Such transference processes, in which reality is overwritten with visions of the future, will be expanded during the “Live Art Festival #8: Superspaces” – not just on the artistic level, but also on that of the institution at large.