Oliver Zahn: Crowd Control

In the organizer's words:

To prepare for protests, riots and civil unrest, riot police around the world stage

riot police around the world stage elaborate, scripted simulations of such scenarios.

simulations of such scenarios. In addition to the "practicing" police officers in uniform, balaclava, helmet and armour, police officers also play the roles of the protesters under the guidance of "directing" trainers - they chant political slogans, insult their colleagues, attack them with dummy projectiles and wear identifying symbols of political subcultures - and conversely become the target of police measures themselves. A genuine police theater that aims to make the state's logic of making spaces and people legible and managing them in the service of public safety tangible. In Crowd Control, seven performers transpose these police tactics and practices of embodiment, categorization and rehearsal, which are actually considered "classified information", into the black box of the theater: into an ambiguous simulation arrangement in which the boundaries between the logic of the theater and the police become blurred.