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In “Evros Walk Water pt.1” a music performance by John Cage is transformed into the story of underage refugees.
The first exhibition room appears very untidy and incoherent. At the entrance you come across a bed from a military hospital. On the other side of the large room is the office desk of a company boss.
And in between, among lots of other furniture and props, is a casually placed submachine gun, a boardroom table with large monitors, and a section of a Mexican cemetery with three burial grounds.
But these set pieces are definitely related. They are parts of the multiplayer docu-theater walk “Situation Rooms”, with which Rimini Protokoll have been showing the connections between the economic and ultimately fatal cycles of weapons since 2013. This ranges from the executive chair of an unnamed company in Oerlikon to the grave of a Mexican drug lord lined with victims of the drug war.
The installation is a testament to the unique working methods of Rimini Protokoll, whose members break up the protected space of cultural institutions with documentary theater projects or art installations, but are now returning to the art space in Solothurn. Rimini Protokoll builds on the core troupe of three artists stationed in Berlin. One of them, Stefan Kaegi, was born in Solothurn.
Rimini Protokoll achieved fame in 2008, when the collective declared a general meeting of the large German corporation Daimler a theater project. The public was invited to gain access to the meeting by purchasing a share. The exhibition features a TV documentary filmed by 3sat about the action at the time, which was subversive but ultimately only really disturbed the minds of business bosses.
They are always highly enigmatic and political works that move on the fringes of activism. For example, the space-filling installation «Evros Walk Water pt.1», which transforms a former concert by John Cage into musically accompanied stories about underage refugees from Pakistan who were picked up on the Turkish-Greek border river Evros.
Another space-filling presentation bears the title «100% Solothurn», which it intends to be as an installation testimony to an artistic-sociological research project. Personal objects belonging to 100 Solothurn residents are lined up on a long table, forming a statistical reflection of the city’s population.
“100% Solothurn” is the local part of a series of statistical population portraits that Rimini Protokoll has compiled in a wide variety of cities around the world – from Tokyo and Melbourne to Jakarta, Paris and Berlin.
On the table, a wide variety of characters come together through the objects shown, showing Solothurn from a different, very personal side: A sewing machine stands next to a puppet, a FC Basel jersey next to a spray can, a baroque wig next to a badly weathered garden gnome .
The Rimini Protokoll exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn can be seen until April 30th. A printed documentation with portraits of all 100 participants will be published for the “100% Solothurn” project.
(SDA)