Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2022 presents
A Room of Our Own – Performance for Browser and variable audience
by Swoosh Lieu
Country: Germany | Language: German | Year Of Inception: 2021
About A Room of Our Own – Performance for Browser and variable audience
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Over 90 years later this allegory of financial and spatial independence is more relevant than ever. While we experience an antifeminist backlash during the crisis caused by the Corona virus, women are repeatedly finding that doors are being closed to them and their spaces are becoming smaller or being taken away entirely. In an audio-visual adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s text, Swoosh Lieu inquire into what the spaces must look like where we can emancipate ourselves and find self-fulfilment. What means do we need to use to talk about and imagine these spaces in order to actually allow them to come into being? Based on these questions, the camera moves through the empty theatre space during lockdown, exploring places and perspectives, visibilities and volumes, points of access and limitations. In between, it dives into real and virtual imaginary spaces, disappears into green screens and disco balls – until it finally takes off to a new horizon, beyond which there is room for everyone and we are not alone.
Johanna Castell: Concept, Scenography, Lights
Katharina Pelosi: Concept, Composition, Sound Design, Text
Rosa Wernecke: Concept, Edit, Lab Camera, Text
Verena Katz: Assistant and Dramaturgical Advisor
Katharina Olt: Assistant Scenographer
Jones Seitz, Stine Hertel: Technical Support
Marie Zahir: Camera
Birte Schnöink: Voice
Mariana Senne: Lab Actress
Iphigenie: Dog
Barbara Lanzarote: Animation
Sally Shamas: Colorist
Freya Kathmann: Drone Footage
Francesca d‘Ath: Implementation Website
ehrliche arbeit – freelance office for culture: Translation
Sebastian Schackert: Lighting Technician
Manuel Glowczewski: Audio Mix
Planet Earth Studio, Berlin: Voice Recordings
Johanna Castell: Production Management
Gefährliche Arbeit: Technical Production
Team Willy Brandt Platz: Johanna Castell, Stine Hertel, Katharina Olt, Verena Katz, Katharina Pelosi, Jones Seitz, Rosa Wernecke, Marie Zahir
Wombx Families: Jamila Adler, Johannes Aue, Elena Barta, Johanna Castell, BeyondTech featuring nichtichx2, Ben Hartmann, Ranyana Herzog, Heinrich Horwitz, Henri Jakobs, Anna Kellermann, Mahtab Khedri, Daniel Loick, Katharina Pelosi, Carola Schaal, Emel Schattner, Marie Simms, Joel Vogel, Laura Villalba y Weinberg, Rosa Wernecke
We wish to thank: Dr. Susanne Brey, Dietrich Krüger, Frieder Miller, Selina Stefaniak, Daniel Zimmermann, das Team vom Frankfurt LAB, das Team vom Mousonturm.
Based on texts by: Virginia Woolf, Donna Haraway, Legacy Russell, Ursula K. Le Guin, Paul B. Preciado, Margarita Tsomou, LECKEN, VNS Matrix, Antonia Baehr
A Swoosh Lieu production, produced in context of the webresidency “Home – Frankfurt – Tel Aviv” and coproduced by the Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm. Swoosh Lieu is funded by the Department of Culture of the City of Frankfurt am Main.
“SWOOSH LIEU are theatre operators, workshop specialists, agents of theatricalities, explorers of peripheral forms. The queer-feminist collective creates temporary spaces and images in real time, while simultaneously highlighting their conditions of creation. This form of performative practice allows them to open up the theatre space to socio-political analogies, while always also negotiating and making them tangible via their own means. Swoosh Lieu steadily continue to work on constructing a machine that produces and dismantles images and narratives. The components of this practice are space, light, sound and video. The blueprint comprises the politics of representation, political issues and audiovisual set-ups, which are continuously modified from a queer-feminist perspective while the machine is running. The theatre machine is a utopian perceptual space, our imagination an engine of liberation. It seeks to evoke its own associations and narratives instead of presenting ready-made truths. The machine is constantly being overhauled in order to question the basic assumptions of theatre.
The operators work as equal partners composing their work outside of hierarchies, far removed from a male-connoted idea of genius. They shred the geeky gestures of the male nerd and tinker with demo’ cratic grassroots methods of working in a steady review of their own expertise within a situation of solidarity and community.” -Swoosh Lieu
About Swoosh Lieu
SWOOSH LIEU (Johanna Castell, Katharina Pelosi and Rosa Wernecke) was founded in 2009 at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen and has since worked continuously in various constellations and different forms of cooperation.
From 2016 to 2018 they worked with their team at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm on the trilogy What is the Plural of Crisis – ein Krisenbericht in verteilten Rollen, in which they dealt in various formats with the effects of the financial crisis from a queer-feminist perspective. The first part Who Cares?! – eine vielstimmige Personalversammlung der Sorgetragenden is about care work and role models based on interview material. In 2017, it was invited to the Stückemarkt of the Berlin Theatertreffen and the Impulse Festival. The second part Who Moves?! – eine performative Montage der Beweggründe was created at the Frankfurt LAB in late 2017. Swoosh Lieu again used interviews to address the production of images in connection with migration. In 2018, the piece was invited to the “Politik im freien Theater” festival at the Kammerspiele in Munich and then toured to Kampnagel/Hamburg, the Sophiensaele/Berlin and the Theater Rampe/Stuttgart. The third part Who Reclaims?! – ein collagierter Streifzug durch die Raumfrage premiered in September 2018 as a performative walk with the audience through the city of Frankfurt and through feminist spatial politics. Who Cares?! (2018) and Who Moves?! (2019) were also produced as radio plays in cooperation with NDR, Who Cares?! was nominated for the Juliane Bartel Media Prize in 2018.
Due to the pandemic they produced their first video work A Room of Our Own in the beginning of 2021 in coproduction with the Digital Mousonturm Frankfurt, which was invited to the Hessische Theatertage, the Heidelberger Stückemarkt and was screened at nachtkritik.de and Kampnagel Hamburg among others. In december 2021 their performance Dea Ex Machina about gender, technology, witches and glitches was premiered at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt.
Swoosh Lieu spent 2018 as artists in residence at the Villa Kamogawa/Goethe-Institut Kyoto/Japan. While there, they began working on their project A Feminist Guide to Nerdom, which aims to feature international female media artists and build a network among them. A Feminist Guide to Nerdom was presented as an installation at Künstler*innhaus Mousonturm and Tanzhaus NRW in 2019. 2020/21, Swoosh Lieu continue working on this project as artists in residence at the Cultural Academy Tarabya/Goethe-Institut Istanbul/Turkey.
About The Festival
The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. The 7th annual festival will focus on work for the screen created by theatre artists during the Time of Corona. The festival will be held digitally from March 1st – 15th 2022.
Explore projects created under A Room of Our Own – Performance for Browser and variable audience from March 1st to March 15th 2022 on the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) website.
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Read more about Swoosh Lieu and A Room of Our Own – Performance for Browser and variable audience at (https://swooshlieu.com/en) or get in touch at swooshlieu@gmail.com / Instagram @swooshlieu / Twitter @swooshlieu / Facebook @swooshlieu.
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