CREDITS
Concept & Editor: Tom Engels
Co-editor: Tessa Theisen
Advisor: Myriam Van Imschoot
Producer: Sarma
Co-production: Workspace Brussels and Beursschouwburg Brussels
Supported by: MotionBank/The Forsythe Company (Frankfurt am Main)
BIOGRAPHIES
Marc Siegel
Marc Siegel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He is currently completing a book manuscript that theorizes the role of gossip in queer film culture. He is the co-editor of Synchronisierung der Künste (Fink Verlag, 2013) and Outside. Die Politik queerer Räume (bbooks, 2005). His curatorial projects include the festivals “Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life” (Berlin/Frankfurt, 2012, with Susanne Sachsse) and”LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World” (Berlin, 2009, with Susanne Sachsse and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus). He is a co-founder of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP
Arantxa Martinez
Arantxa Martinez is a performer and choreographer based in Berlin since 2003. Born in Madrid, formed in ballet and contemporary dance in his hometown and in 1999 in the Choreographic Center of Montpellier, France. Her work is concerned with identification and exchange processes between body and the surroundings and it investigates performativity in relation to these processes. Her titles include: Emisiones Cacatúa. Special Issue, 2012 - in collaboration with Nilo Gallego, The Present, 2010/2012 - in collaboration with Lola Rubio -; al oeste del Pecos, 2007, J, a folk-striptease in 4”, 2007; Trofeo, 2003; de l’impatience de celui qui regarde dormir, 1999 - in collaboration with Remi Héritier -. As a performer she has worked with artists such as Petra Sabisch, Sebastian Blasius, Antonia Baehr, Juan Domínguez, Isabelle Schad, Eszter Salamon, Tino Sehgal, Massimo Furlan, Martine Pisani, Alexandre Roccoli, Philippe Saire, Mathilde Monnier and Germana Civera among others.
Isabell Spengler
Isabell Spengler, born in Berlin (Germany), studied experimental film at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (Meisterschülerin 1999) and at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (MFA 2001). She was a recipent of a DAAD grant and a Eastman Kodak stipend. She currently teaches film at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Her filmography includes “Psychic Tequila Tarot” (1998), “Transformation in the Land of Enchantment” (2003), and “The Natural Life of Mermaids” (2004). Her films have received awards at the NoBudget Festival in Hamburg, the Gera International Short Film Festival, and the Göttinger Low Budget Film Festival. Her work has recently been exhibited at Los Angeles Film Forum, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles; the Australian Center for Photografy, Sydney; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and at KunstWerke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
Andrea Neumann
Born 1968 in Freiburg, grew up in Hamburg. Piano lessons since 1974. Studied piano at “Hochschule der Kunste” in Berlin. Since 1996 primarily active as improviser and composer in the areas of experimental and new music.
In the process of exploring the piano for new sound possibilities, she has reduced the instrument to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds (sometimes to make parts of the sound audible which are inaudible without amplification), she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument. Because the original inside piano is very heavy, a piano builder (Bernd Bittmann, Berlin) constructed a new and lighter one for her.
She has worked intensively in the crossover area between composition and improvisation, and in the field between electronic and handmade sounds, with Berlin musicians such as Annette Krebs, Ignaz Schick, Axel Dörner, Robin Hayward and Burkhard Beins. She has composed for inside piano for interdisciplinary projects including film, dance, performance, etc
Sabine Ercklentz
Born in 1967 in Mönchengladbach, Sabine Ercklentz studied law at the FU in Berlin, then earned a degree in instrumental pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin in 1999. Since 1998 she has been working as a musician and composer focusing on jazz and experimental music. Since 1997 Sabine Ercklentz has been developing sounds on the trumpet which border between normal trumpet tone and noise (extended sounds). Furthering the possibilities of extended sound techniques comes from the use of live-electronics and analog electronics remixed from an independent sound source.
Since 2003 she has been developing further possibilities with the use of digital sound processing, and intensive work with Andrea Neumann bordering on composition and improvisation.
Lindy Annis
Inspired by a childhood in front of the television in Boston, Annis became interested in new performance forms at an early age. In New York she studied role-playing at an acting studio, and movement, time and space at New York University’s Experimental Theater Wing. Lindy Annis lives in Berlin, Germany producing performance and theater works, working as Dramaturge and writing texts for the stage. Her current series of works investigates the iconography of body gestures (pathos formulas) and their after-life in modern art and life.
She has worked with such people as: Tim Miller, The Wooster Group, Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, Anne Bogart, Detektor, Xavier Le Roy, Dr. Motte, Kurt Palm, Frieder Butzmann, Marie Goyette. Hans Peter Kuhn, Nicholas Bussmann, and others.
Sabine Ercklentz
A field recording in Sabine’s living room. Berlin, 28/01/2013.
Andrea Neumann
Tea, memories and real time music: a kitchen monologue. Berlin, 28/01/2013.
Arantxa Martinez
Isabell Spengler
Marc Siegel
Lindy Annis
INTRODUCTION
Focussing on a nexus of artists surrounding Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch, More Than One Tie looks through the key hole of affinities into the artistic practices of Ida Wilde, Sabine Ercklentz, Isabell Spengler, Arantxa Martinez, Marc Siegel, Andrea Neumann and Lindy Annis. The publication contains several online essays; a myriad of video, text, sound and images with these artists and how they care to organize (social) relations, make them productive, reflect upon them, criticize them.
More Than One Tie is an attempt to portray a web of affiliations in which artistic creation takes place by focusing on the social relations and the affinities it entails. It speaks about the border between work and life, about professional life and friendship, about alliances and complicity, about art and its context. If one talks about ties, one can try to imagine what these ties consist of, what they produce and how one can turn them into fictions. As Donna Harraway writes: ‘[…] relationships are the smallest possible patterns for analysis; the partners and actors are their still-ongoing products. It is […] exactly how worlds come into being.’ Some of the ties are selected on the base of long-term collaboration, some on friendship, some on shared interest, but all are thought through the framework of Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch. They functioned as the starting point to map out a complex network. What all of the selected people share, is an interest in the organization of (social) relations. In their work they explicitly or implicitly deal with what it means to enter into relations with other individuals, with larger bodies of people, with objects or even with a multiple people located in one biological body.
Concretely the following topoi are addressed: Andrea Neumann and Sabine Ercklentz talk about the development of the Real Time music scene (Echtzeitmusik) in Berlin since the early 90s and how self-organizational and improvisational tactics were applied to establish a platform for musicians to play, come together and share their works with one another. Arantxa Martinez talks in an audio portrait about the development of her radio project Emisiones Cacatua with Nilo Gallego – organized in a public garden in Madrid where artists would mingle with locals. Talking about leisure time, Isabell Spengler created a video contribution consisting out of five different holiday movies, made by the Holiday Movies Initiative. Blurring the borders between work and leisure time, this collective goes on holidays to shoot a movie, encompassing the events and encounters experienced during that holiday. Marc Siegel gives an account of gossip and its community forming potential. Keren Ida Nathan speaks about the Wilde Family: the fictional marriage of Ida Wilde and her husband Henry Wilde (to some known as Antonia Baehr).
This publication does not attempt to provide an overall image of this open nexus nor does it seek to offer a family portrait of Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch. It rather sketches a constellation of people in an ever transforming cloud without aspiring a fixed body of knowledge. For sure, the relations between the people are not fixed either; some lines are stable and some will change. It is impossible to speak about an ‘artistic family’: the roles and positions people take are not marked by hierarchy or arborescent patterns. Inspired by François Noudelmann’s work, affinity (and therefore also disaffinity) might offer a productive way to rethink questions of relatedness beyond blood connections. It offers us the possibility to render the fictions and practices that are created to live or embody those ties.
Any person in this map could have been the starting point of this endeavor: one would end up with different, but also overlapping fields of relations. In this case it was my very own affinity with the work of Antonia Baehr that brought me to portray these crisscrossing lines of (human) interactions. There is always more than one tie – we are nested in our connections, sometimes changing our costume, sometimes going in drag.
