Big Golden Zeppelin


This performance was conceived as a staged conversation between Friedrich Liechtenstein and Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier in a format of a radio show. This co-production of the Anhaltisches Theatre Dessau and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (“Funk Project”) appeared live on local TV as well as on stage in Dessau, Germany.

“On the pile of rubble of information, speculation and desires, not finished lines of thought, stories only incompletely told and anecdotes from a post modern approach to the subject of airship travel, or put in other words: in the light of failure, accidents and fantasms … the fact still remains that these airships managed reasonably well to establish a regular global air service for a couple of years and once airborne with an absolutely stunning scenic view.

Friedrich Liechtenstein and Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier take it from there, and throughout the show they develop this fragile but grand airy castle of splendour: The Big Golden Zeppelin. But this time in order to come back the Zeppelin must be bigger than its predecessors and golden.

Amusing as well as touching and during the performance one is tempted to think from time to time: … why not?

Liechtenstein and Brüggemeier are very serious dedicated to it – no question. This radio-play, which is partly a collage and partly a documentation of a series of real events. It includes footage from a very hot summer day in the German City of Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt, editorial commentary, kitchen conversations, telephone call ins, music and original bits of recordings. All put together in a classic radio feature style. This mix of spontaneous ideas and sensible thoughts leaves us on a roller-coaster ride through the cosmos of the Big Golden Zeppelin and how Liechtenstein and Brüggemeier understand it.”

This radio play (in German) is work-in-progress and develops as the project continues to evolve:

  • The Big Golden Zeppelin (53’30”)

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Photo credit: video stills from the TV appearance 2010

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Liturgy for Radio

related post:
The Big Golden Zeppelin

Here a short excerpt from the Big Golden Zeppelin TV appearance:


Tuning In Before the Show (Based on Gregory Whiteheads Liturgy for Radio):

Liturgy for Radio Utopia (Gregory Whitehead)

Communication is community.
The technology of transmission
is the promise of one world
made whole, brought together,
all languages, all races, all cultures.

I dream of a time
when everybody on the planet lives,
breathes, and touches each other air.

A glorious communion
A celebration to end all celebrations
in a language to end all languages.

Communication is community.
The technology of transmission
is the promise of one world
made whole, brought together,
all languages, all races, all cultures.
I dream of a time
when everybody on the planet lives,
breathes, and touches each other on air.
A glorious communion, communion, communion.

A celebration to end all celebrations
in a language to end all languages.

Finnegan’s Wake!
Here Comes Everybody.

Finnegan’s Wake!
Here Comes Everybody.

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The Circle is red



An interactive installation composed of Light, Words and Sound based on the diaries and private letters of Oskar Schlemmer

On stage Oskar Schlemmer brought the painting in motion. His costume designs and space compositions taught the abstract form language of painting to jump and run. With the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer the theatre found connection with the artistic avantgarde of that time. The diarist Schlemmer is a witty and seismographic observer of a nervous epoch between the world wars aside from propaganda and party lines. He reveals his uncertainess, his doubts as modern protagonist at the breaking point of tradition and innovation.

The Circle is red is an interactive light and sound installation. The project was conceived and dramaturgically supervised by Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier. The listening environment by Ulrike Haage is based on the letters and diaries of Oskar Schlemmer. The Circle is red was produced for the Crash!Boom!Bau! Festival at the Nalepa Studios in Berlin.  In this radio play the actors Leslie Malton and Gerd Wameling perform as the speaking voices. The light designer Mattjakob dal Pozzo created a versatile spatial light zone, with which he will live interact during the performance.

“The Circle is red”, quote: Oskar Schlemmer, diary Octobre 1923

Artists

composition/radio play: Ulrike Haage (D)
concept/dramaturgy: Jan H. Brüggemeier (D)
light design: Matt Jakob dal Pozzo (I/GB)
voice/radio play: Leslie Malton (US/D)
voice/radio play: Gerd Wameling (D)
sound engineer: Philipp Reitberger (D)


with the friendly support of U. Jaïna Schlemmer and C. Raman Schlemmer, Oggebbio, Italy
(The Oskar Schlemmer Theatre Estate)

photo credit: Anke Neugebauer
For promotional and educational usage only, out of copyright reasons without sound:

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black clouds

In this installation at the Kuenstlerhaus Schloß Wiepersdorf designed Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier two ‘black clouds’ out of 420 small loudspeaker to display 6 discrete audio channels.

As a topic, clouds trigger manifold associations and are a largely known cultural phenomenon. ‘As-Sahab’, the name of the alleged media production unit of Al-Qaeda means “The Cloud” in Arabic. In the old testament it is reported, that god liked to hide his appearance behind a cloud when calling Moses on the seventh day of the creation of the earth. The cloud also serves as an analogy for radio and the more recent phenomenon of wifi and wireless culture. It describes how the reception area is spread out. As well, it leads to the first days of the radio, when people experienced radio as a god-like appearance – a disembodied voice addressed to them directly.

Radio, today, is on one hand a synonym for popular culture and mass distribution. On the other hand, it can be tagged with politics of territory and strategic warfare. It may be surprising, but to a certain degree radio is culturally and technologically rooted in war and military invention – similar to the Internet.

Along with this installation, a series of soundtracks shall follow: Love is in the Air is the initiation and first issue of the series of soundtracks dedicated to the Black Clouds installation.

Love is in the Air is composed of bits and fragments of recordings of the Lebanese radio dial during my stay in Beirut, and an audio collage of sound bits of popular love songs, that wildly and at certain points desperately spin between the right and the left channel of the audio-signal.

Love is in the Air – soundtrack:

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photo credit: Elina Julin

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RADIOSAUNA .. (don’t strip your clothes, unzip your communication!)

steamy radiosauna











graphics: Daniel Guischard

For the Meteor-Festival in Bergen, Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier produced the RADIOSAUNA performance together with the architect Daniel Guischard.

The RADIOSAUNA is an art installation for the public space and a common hotspot for social interaction and exchange in the city.

A mobile sauna (Finnish style) was positioned on a public square close to the harbour in Bergen, Norway. The sauna was equipped with microphones inside. The conversations inside and the atmospheric noises of the public sauna sessions were transmitted live on the local radio and online.

The RADIOSAUNA aimed to explore the similarities as well as the contradictions that unfold today in our distinction of the local and the global and the private and the public.

It combined the experience of traditional social places like the bathhouse or the sauna with the modern means of telecommunication and new media. It offered one possible notion of what a neighbourhood community action could feel like in the beginning of the 21st Century.

A playlist of audio snippets from the RADIOSAUNA sessions

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Single bits of audio from the RADIOSAUNA sessions

# Italian intro -

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# Singing -

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# Poetry round -

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# Chatting (excerpt 1) -

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# Moderation -

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# Chatting (excerpt 2) -

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# ‘my loneliness is killing me’ -

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The Buchenwald Series

The Buchenwald memorial place is located at the former Nazi Concentration Camp “KZ Buchenwald” in Weimar, Germany. The ‘Buchenwald series‘ includes two works by Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier for cultural projects commissioned by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, as well as one radio contribution to the EU projects Heritage Radio Network (HRN) online magazine:

• Es ist hier eine andere Welt – This here is a different World (2005) – a 4 channel audio installation for the travelling exhibition The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’. Topf & Sons – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens
• Optimistic Disease Facility (2003) – sound design and music for the documentary film about the fine artist Boris Lurie, a co-founder of the art movement NO!Art and Nazi concentration camp prisoner
• Are Museums just digging in the Past? The Buchenwald Memorial – about current-history memorial work in Germany (2005) – including interviews -beside others- with: Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau, Director of the Buchenwald Memorial, Curator of “Topf & Sons: The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’, the Builder of the Auschwitz-ovens”

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Buchenwald memorial place



From the foundation’s regulatory statutes:
“The foundation’s purpose is to preserve the sites of the crimes as sites of mourning and commemoration, to provide these sites with a scientifically founded form and outward appearance and to make them accessible to the public in an appropriate manner, as well as to promote the research of the respective historical occurrences and their conveyance to the public. …

At the Buchenwald Memorial, the history of the Nazi concentration camp is to receive priority within this context. The history of the Soviet internment camp is to be integrated into the scientific and museum work to an appropriate degree. At the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, special attention is to be devoted to the subject of the exploitation of inmates for the production of weapons of destruction. The history of the two memorials’ political instrumentalisation during the era of the German Democratic Republic is also to be represented. …

The foundation’s obligations include the organisation and realisation of permanent and temporary exhibitions, scientific colloquia and cultural events on the national and international level, the educational guidance of the visitors with a special focus on young people, and scientific documentation, research and publication in connection with the work of the memorial.”

Article 2 of the Thuringian Act providing for the establishment of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

source: www.buchenwald.de

photo credits: Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorial Foundation

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Es ist hier eine andere Welt – This here is a different World (2005)

Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation
topf & sons, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

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(short excerpt of the recorded texts in German)

A 4 channel audio installation which was designed for the travelling exhibition
The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’. Topf & Sons – Builders of the
Auschwitz Ovens by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.

In this work, actors read text fragments from historical documents. The fragments
come either from letters written by the prisoners in the form of secret
messages or from eye-witness reports at boards of enquiry in 1945 and
after. This work was realised by Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier and Ludger Hennig.

The exhibition has been shown at the following places aside others:
Jewish Museum Berlin, City Museum of Erfurt, Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, LWL
Industrial Museum, Ziegeleimuseum in Lage, Documentation Centre at the site of the Nuremberg Rally.

website: www.topfundsoehne.de

photo credit: Sabeth Stickforth

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optimistic disease facility

optimistic disease facility
optimistic decease facility

Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier was commissioned to design the soundtrack for the film ‘optimistic disease facility’.

A documentary film about the fine artist Boris Lurie, a co-founder of the art movement NO!Art and Nazi concentration camp prisoner.
Directed by Naomi Tereza Salmon.
(c) Buchenwald and Mittelbau- Dora Memorials Foundation
English with German subtitles – 58′ 37” – DVD, PAL

From the NO!art website:
“The life and work of Boris Lurie creates a radical, brusque, and at the same time a poetic cosmos. In New York where Lurie lives within his collages, the experience of the Nazi concentration camps seeps through everything. Apartment studio and laboratory all reflect a very personal artistic view of the past which surrounds him in the present.

After meeting the artist Naomi Tereza Salmon (who lives and works in Germany), at Buchenwald during the retrospective exhibition of his works in 1998/99, he gave her permission to document his apartment, studio and storage space. A dialogue developed, covering a range of issues, mainly about the past, about living in New York, about the Palestinian issue, including discussions on Stalin and capitalism.
The film is a result of this encounter, laconically trying to capture the authentic situation, and was made as a low budget project. Considering the fact that Lurie is the founder of the No!art movement, the making of the film is inspired by its manifest, which presents an opposition to american mass culture and to the commercalizing process of art, putting in question the scene of mainstream and pop art, creating a genuine ideological and fundamental aesthetic approach of its own.

The music, which was composed specifically for this purpose by the German music and internet performer Jan Brüggemeier (pingfm – internet radio broadcasting), serves as an adhesive as well as an interpretative component. An examination of the metaphysical space, focusing on the encounter between the two artists and the experiences of each of them with their immediate surrounding takes place. The film offers no answers but presents the questions which arise in it in a clear way for the viewer to reflect on them.”

More information about Naomi T. Salmon
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Are Museums just digging in the Past? (HRN Magazine No I)


Editor: Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier for Heritage Radio Network (EU)

Chapter 06: The Buchenwald memorial – about current-history memorial work in Germany

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Interviews

  • Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau, Director of the Buchenwald Memorial, Curator of “Topf & Sons: The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’, the Builder of the Auschwitz-ovens”
  • Ronald Hirte, Author of the online-project “Found Objects – a picture-catalogue” of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and fellow of the „Media of History / History of Media Ph.D programme at Bauhaus-University Weimar

Keywords

  • the Foundation memorial-places Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora
  • exhibition on the company “Topf & Sons”: “The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’ – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens”
  • Ronald Hirte, “Offene Befunde – Ausgrabungen in Buchenwald”[ISBN 3-922618-23-2]
  • online image catalogue “Found Objects”
  • audio archaeology, Dr. Friedrich Kittler
  • Dr. Volkhardt Knigge, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

Music

  • “Concerto funebre for violin and string orchestra” from Karl-Amadeus Hartmann [Cd: 65023 AV]
  • Random_Inc with “tales outside the framework of orthodoxy #23″ [Cd: ritornell rit 020 c/o mille plateux]

To listen to the complete programme of “Are Museums just digging in the Past?”:
low version

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high version

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