Neues Forum der Töne

In the organizer's words:

Anna Zett, Joshua Wicke with Waltraud Blischke, Jule Flierl, Matti Gajek, Agathe Israel, Elske Rosenfeld, Manuel Sekóu, Günter Baby Sommer and other guests
New Forum of Tones // New Forum of Tones
Performative Installation and Assembly // Performative Installation and Assembly

As part of a performative installation by artist Anna Zett and a program co-curated with Joshua Wicke, dissident relationships will be reimagined. How can a purely linguistically defined and politically polarized discourse space be expanded to include sensual perception and emotional awareness?

Over three days, artistic, musical and social practices come together here, drawing inspiration from grassroots democratic GDR experiences, subcultures of self-organization and methods of group analysis. Listening sessions, film screenings, conversations and improvisations will explore listening as a fundamental force of democracy in a sensory and dialogical way, rather than voting.

Within a performative installation by the artist Anna Zett and a programme co-curated by Joshua Wicke dissident forms of relationship are envisaged afresh. How can a discursive space that is defined purely by language and remains politically polarized be extended through sensory perception and emotional awareness?

Over three days, artistic, musical and social practices converge here to be inspired by GDR experiences of basic democracy, subcultures of self-organization and methods of group analysis. In listening sessions, film screenings, conversations and improvisations, the fundamental democratic force subjected to sensory and dialogue examination is not voting but listening.

Thursday, 26.06.

18:00-23:00 New Forum of Sounds - Exhibition

Videos by Dana Kavelina, Gabriele Stötzer and Anna Zett. Room installation: Anna Zett

19:00 Screening "There is no fear"

An archive thriller by Anna Zett (D 2023, 31 min.)

In the Berlin archive of the GDR opposition, Anna Zett traces known and unknown fears of her childhood. The artist interweaves a disturbing collage of underground music from the late GDR (composition: Matti Gajek) with archive material from a police state that has come to an end. Video recordings of the East Berlin environmental library and punk scene, fragments from the televised revolution and highly condensed voices from a poetry cassette recorded in 1986 are combined without commentary to create an associative and intimate narrative. Activist video footage bears close witness to the second occupation of the Berlin Stasi headquarters with a hunger strike in September 1990 - a far-reaching and yet little-known political event. In contact with people who insist on emotional connection and political self-determination despite profound experiences of violence, the archive thriller opens up a pulsating resonance chamber that resonates for a long time.

19:30 Film talk with Anna Zett and Joshua Wicke

The screening will be followed by a discussion about the film and its role as a starting point for the performative and installative program "Neues Forum der Töne", which Anna Zett has conceived and compiled together with Joshua Wicke.

20:30-23:00 "Tape Jam" (AT)

Talk, listening session with Waltraud Blischke and Matti Gajek

In this listening session and talk, GAJEK and Waltraud Blischke get entangled in the tape salad of electronic music archives in East and West. They bring songs with them to talk about the different developments of experimental music in the late GDR and late FRG. This raises questions about the politics of experimentation, different production conditions and, last but not least, the conspicuous lack of relationship between the scenes in East and West.

Friday, 27.06.

16:00-00:00 New Forum of Sounds - Exhibition

Videos by Dana Kavelina, Gabriele Stötzer and Anna Zett. Room installation: Anna Zett

18:00 Screening "Former East / Former West"

A documentary film by Shelly Silver (D 1994, 64 min.)

"Former East / Former West" is a documentary film by the US-American artist Shelly Silver. She came to Berlin on a DAAD scholarship in 1991. With camera and microphone, she interviewed hundreds of passers-by on the street about their personal opinions on the buzzwords of the time, such as homeland, socialism, capitalism and welcome money. The result was a 62-minute, essayistic documentary and an open-hearted, disturbing portrait of a city that was far from united. Silver had a very fine sense for nuances and thus documented the beginnings of developments such as increasing racism, right-wing populist ideas and an incipient democratic fatigue in united Germany, which still have an effect today. (Source: Federal Agency for Civic Education/bpb)

19:00-20:00 "We are not the problem, we are part of the solution"

Performative situation with Jule Flierl

Using elements of story-telling, re-enactment and an audience warm-up, Jule Flierl creates a situation in which public speech, public money and public discourse can be reflected upon. With reference to her own memories of the 1990s in East Berlin, the clay dancer Flierl repeatedly took to the streets last year to issue invitations to self-empowerment in public discourse at demonstrations. Back in the dance space, her re-enactment reflects political feelings that were active in the post-reunification period and are still present today or can be reactivated.

22:00 "I LOST MY GEMS"

Listening session by Manuel Sékou

In this live adaptation of two found-footage audio pieces, Manuel Sékou explores the extravagant complexity of Saxon - its phonetic peculiarities, metaphorical leaps, interjections and recurring linguistic images. Parallel to the investigation by Soko Epaulette into the theft of historical jewelry from the Green Vault of the Dresden Residenzschloss in 2019, Sékou is attempting to secure auditory evidence. In the reporting on the theft at the time, descriptions of the burglary were quickly mixed with suspicious vocabulary, projections and prejudices against the city of Dresden. The discrepancy between personal experiences and mediated attributions of Dresden, some of which seem to condense into mythical images of the "East", form the leitmotif of the simultaneously observational and affirmative project "I LOST MY GEMS".

Saturday, 28.06.

12:00-00:00 New Forum of Sounds - Exhibition

Videos by Dana Kavelina, Gabriele Stötzer and Anna Zett. Room installation: Anna Zett

14:00-16:30 "Wanting to hear"

Dialogic and vocal forum with Anna Bromley, Agathe Israel, Anna Zett

In this discussion format, all those present are invited to participate if they want to: as listeners, speakers, tones. The thematic starting point is the history of psychodynamic self-awareness groups in the GDR, about which the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Agathe Israel - in a transgenerational dialog with Anna Zett - will report from her own experience: How is it possible to stay alive in authoritarian circumstances? In which spaces and groups is it possible to hear others, to want to hear, to become audible yourself? Starting with a vocal warm-up, we will move into speaking and listening and from there into a practice of collective and individual sounding, which the musician Pauline Oliveros has described as listening out loud.

17:00-18:30 "Dissonant Gestures, Dissident Movements"

Conversation between Tamara Antonjević and Elske Rosenfeld

In this dialog, Elske Rosenfeld and Tamara Antonjević will address the question of how the experiences of a past revolution and political dead ends become embedded in the body. Using images of collective hope in the archive of the GDR opposition and images of the current protests and their repression in Serbia, they will discuss hope, despair and anger as political feelings: Feelings with the inherent promise to move the collective body.

22:00 GAJEK x Günter Baby Sommer

Double concert and encounter

In two solo concerts, two musicians who look at the musical world of the GDR from generations far removed from each other present their musical practice to each other. In the transition from one solo concert to the other, they meet in an intergenerational improvisation.
Jazz drummer and dedicated soloist Günter Baby Sommer brings decades of experience with acoustic percussion to Cologne. To this day, he has kept all the instruments and objects that he has used in concerts as sound bodies in his studio in Radebeul near Dresden.
Born in the GDR, GAJEK performs and produces electronic music. He reflects on the emotional echo of ruptures and discontinuities - music about strange timelines, grief and ecstasy, weird youth cultures, hidden fashion codes, personal tragedies and strange haircuts.

To the exhibition

Local destination Erfurt

Gabriele Stötzer, 1982, 15 min., Super 8

The author herself speaks a text in the first person. The text revolves around language and speechlessness, the impossibility of closeness and the attempt to overcome distance. It is accompanied by images from Gabriele Stötzer's home town of Erfurt, and later also from Jena and East Berlin: streetscapes, facades, passers-by, workers, tourists, police officers. These are restless images that only come to rest when individual women are brought into focus - friends of the artist who enter into a dialog with the camera with their movements. The shots change from black and white to color. The sounds of tearing paper and a text can be heard off-screen, carried by a sense of foreboding and yet immediately withdrawn confidence: "... the continuation of the continuation / don't think twice / turn everything against your own body again ...".

Why there are no monuments to monuments

Dana Kavelina, 2021, 35 min., 2-channel video installation

In this poetic video work, Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina embarks on a narrative and physical search for meaning in contact with superhumanly large monuments of historical memory, as they are omnipresent in post-Soviet societies. Street interviews with various people about an unknown monument, presumably erected to commemorate a catastrophe, can be heard and seen on one of the screens. Their statements are disjointed and it is difficult to get a clear picture of the monument or the disaster that happened to these people. In a parallel video channel, the artist climbs various monuments, touches them and tries to interact with them.

The group was present

Anna Zett, 2025, 25 min., video

Various voices gather around an empty square and report, one after the other, on a recent group experience in this place. Drawings in black and white refer to a process of personal engagement with the GDR. Vocal free play makes an emotional group dynamic tangible. What happened? The video goes back to the deliberately reduced documentation of a research project by the artist Anna Zett and the dancer Hermann Heisig. Under the title "Resonance - Post-Socialist Group Improvisation", they developed a dialogical and physical play format for groups of up to 30 people from 2020 onwards in order to open up the ideologically fixed discourse on the East - often due to their own experiences of violence - to new encounters with the unknown, both on a personal and social level.

Post-socialist group improvisation, playing field

Dance floor, 4 chairs, Anna Zett & Hermann Heisig in collaboration with wkc, 2020-22

The playing field was created in the course of an experimental research process and contains the four playing positions "Question", "Narrative", "Recording" and "Design", represented by modified chairs from the GDR. The rules of the game were defined, tried out, changed and further developed by Anna Zett and the dancer Hermann Heisig in a polyphonic group process. The result is a format that makes it possible to experience one's own associations with socialism, freedom, security, spontaneity, adaptation and loss in an open group process.

GOOD TO KNOW // GOOD TO KNOW

• Language: German and English // Language: German and English

• All information on accessibility can be found at www.impulsefestival.de/barrierefreiheit //
  All information on accessibility can be found at www.impulsefestival.de/en/accessibility

IMPULSE FESTIVAL FOR PERFORMANCE, THEATER & DANCE

Over three long festival weekends - one each in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Cologne and Düsseldorf - outstanding independent productions from Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be presented. This showcase will be supplemented by positions on the relationship between East and West Germany as part of a post-West focus as well as views from and on the host region of NRW.

We are looking forward to our first joint festival season!

During three long festival weekends - one each in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Cologne and Düsseldorf - outstanding productions from the independent theater scene from Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be presented. This showcase will be complemented by positions on the relationship between East and West Germany as part of a Post-West focus as well as views from and on the host region of NRW.

We look forward to our first festival season with you!

LOCATION // VENUE

TanzFaktur
Siegburger Straße 233w
50679 Cologne