PIONEERS OF CHANGE
LESSONS FROM THE SUSTAINABILITY PROJECT »DOWN TO EARTH”
Thomas Oberender
Our sustainability project »Down to Earth” took place within a larger programme series that began in 2015 and since then has been devoted to the phenomenon of immersion— a word that has no true equivalent in German and was previously very rarely used. A little of the hype around this term in this country has also been caused by us and this programme series. But also, of course, because so many changes were in the air and could be explained well by this term. For us, from the beginning the theme of immersion was associated with more than VR tools or online culture. From our point of view, immersion was defined by two things: one was the particular moment in an aesthetic experience when the medium vanishes. Because wherever something becomes immersive, we forget the entity that communicates it and are completely absorbed by the thing itself—love and horror may break down boundaries but a moving film will ensure that something gets under my skin and I laugh or cry along with the characters. A different kind of knowledge is connected with this: one that is intuitive and holistic, one that is familiar from states of intoxication and meditation. The second aspect that interested us was that, in contemporary art, an increasing number of work forms are being developed that are dispensing with frameworks and instead building worlds that we can enter. From this perspective, immersion appears to be a genre of its own that is radically changing the classic ways in which we encounter art and, with them, our institutions too. In this new genre, we have the experience of being in the middle of things, situating us inside a living interaction.
In the last five years we have applied the phenomenon of immersion to entirely different areas—for example, to changes in the scientific worldview, such as in the context of the discovery of gravitational waves, as well as to social and political processes. In our view, German reunification was the ultimate example of a border disappearing and allowing two cultures to flow into each other. In reconstructing East Berlin’s Palast der Republik, we asked ourselves what happened in this meeting, how each side shaped the other, what fell by the wayside and what forces had shaped this encounter and still do shape it. One very moving example of an immersive process is climate change—the climate is an extremely large system that we cannot look at from the outside because we are embedded inside it. On one hand we influence the climate through our behaviours: through burning fossil fuels, extensive deforestation, building with concrete and much more, we are the main causes of global warming—and at the same time nothing has such a large impact on our everyday lives as the climate.
A project on this theme can never only be an artistic project. One of our original ideas aimed to set up a large camp in the Gropius Bau and to dedicate our prestigious exhibition space to those actors who have represented a shift in practice and lived change in a radical way over a sustained period. My basic idea was to bring together many divergent social groups and to »exhibit” their specific expertise—which in this context can only be done in inverted commas. The point was for them to share and practice their knowledge. I then quickly accepted a piece of advice from Tino Sehgal. He told me: »If you want to do that, you will spend a year mainly trying to make yourself appear credible in the eyes of these actors.” The possibility of conflict between the participants was just as real as the question: »Who are we?” As an institution that is perceived to be so powerful, for other actors we always appear to be looking down from above, and we have to ask ourselves what we have to show for ourselves and what we can offer. This means we are constantly in a situation—also entirely justifiably—in which we have to prove to ourselves and others that this intention and also our own efforts have some form of legitimacy. This costs a lot of energy, a lot of time and it subsequently led to a different idea. We moved on from the camp idea, although it was a charming thought to hand over such a luxurious building as the prestigious exhibition space of the Gropius Bau to other players. Instead of this, we invented a system to include these actors in a different way. We included them in a structure devoted to the thesis that everything has to start with questioning and changing our own operating system. This ultimately led to a modular concept that facilitated entirely different experiential worlds to convey our thesis.
The largest module was a classic, walk-through exhibition that covered 2,000 m2. In addition to this, we invited two academies—Avtonomi Akadimia from Athens, run by the artist Joulia Strauss, and the study programme Expérimentation en Arts et Politique from Paris that had been founded by Bruno Latour—who worked together with us for five weeks, most of all, of course, with the audience. Another module consisted of workshops with practical experts who we regarded as innovative because they were pioneers of a different behaviour and possess knowledge about how to find alternative solutions to problems. We invited them to give workshops for us. This was the camp part of »Down To Earth”. To achieve this, we gave space to the carpenters from the Tiny House movement and urban gardeners and lawyers from Atmosfair, the world field movement, and from Client Earth: so that all the visitors who came to us could be offered many different experiences on each day at all times within this modular structure, all revolving around one question: climate change, sustainability, change— how does that work? Which experiences can help us?
A Positive State
One of the main questions that we asked at the beginning was: how can change be fun? Where can I experience it as an increase in my quality of life and as a positive experience? The topic of sustainability is naturally accompanied by substantial feelings of guilt and is intuitively linked with the notion of loss. For many people, sustainability primarily means doing without things: »Oh dear, I can’t fly any more, I can’t drive a car any more, I can’t eat meat any more, I can’t leave the light on, do I have to keep on unplugging everything?” All you think of is no longer being allowed to do things. That’s not nice, at least to begin with. A lot of people are then told by their consciences, their better superego: »But this is very important, we have to start doing this now.” Nevertheless, their gut says: »What a shame.” It is often true that, in all our efforts at more sustainable practices, the greatest challenge is translating action into a positive experience.
»Down to Earth” took this emotional situation as the starting point to develop a different event structure, one that was intended to create a more positive experience firstly for us but above all for the public. But how did we achieve this positive experience? To put it most simply: we went analogue. We created an analogue experience of community and art—the opposite of digital: analogue, without electricity, unplugged, directly relating to and encountering artistic work and social competences. This position provided the fundamental impulse behind the overarching concept for the event and it had three consequences. Firstly: no electricity. No electricity was used in the exhibition, which at first does not seem especially challenging. But in our programme and its architecture, the decision not only to plan a classic exhibition but also to invite theatre plays and concerts was crucial. Within the various modules, our visitors experienced the theme in the form of dance, lectures, workshops, communal meals and rituals: all things that we had gathered together from the most diverse worlds so that our visitors could have the greatest range of interesting and, if possible, positive experiences when they came to our luxurious building. These experiences were intended to offer the visitors new perspectives on the theme and welcome them in a gesture of inclusion, with a different experience of presence—both their own but also that of the theme, embodied and sensualised in the widest variety of ways. It is a pleasure to come into a room where a live artist is playing the double bass. This touches us in a different way from music that comes out of a loudspeaker. It calms us down and puts us in contact with something living.
Thus, we translated our mission and our theme into an atmospheric experience of a different kind of space, large sections of which were an aesthetic experience. And this aesthetic experience was an analogue one. We gave all the performances we invited a special budget to have the music for the show, which would have otherwise been played by computer, played by live musicians. As a result of the decision to use no screens, no projections, no spotlights on objects—and also no lighting—, no microphones and no loudspeakers, some additional costs were generated for adaptation and rehearsals. Overall, however, this decision contributed to a different atmosphere in the spaces whose mixture of reduction and heightened sensuality was also appreciated as an asset by the artists themselves.
The principle of »no electricity” radically changed what normally takes place in a white cube. For example, we had coloured curtains made for François Chaignaud’s dance and concert production. Our performance space was deliberately situated on the south side of the building. When the coloured curtains were drawn in front of the windows at the appropriate points in the performance, they admitted a warm, coloured light. Refraining from the use of electric light also led to another important experience: it gets dark in the evenings—and this was interesting because exhibition professionals normally say: »You can’t do that: nobody will be able to see anything!” Of course not. That’s exactly what makes it interesting—you can’t see anything. Our exhibition took place in August and September and was open every day until 8 pm. So, it got dark relatively early. Some people then took out their mobile phones and started using them to illuminate the pictures. In this way they had an entirely real experience of the time of year and having to make something possible for themselves. »Oh, it’s eight o’clock already” was suddenly linked to a specific place on a particular occasion. This active experience of location was also part of »Down to Earth” and was inspired directly by a key idea we had derived from one of Bruno Latour’s works. Where are we at which point in time? What is it really like there right now? Bruno Latour, whose book Down to Earth had provided the title of our exhibition, argues very strongly that if we want to change the world, we must first of all put down roots in a very specific place that has its own taste, its own light, its own living creatures and its own history.
Our experience with the people we had told in advance about our plans for the exhibition was very positive and often even enthusiastic. None of our visitors com- plained afterwards that there was no artificial light in our rooms. And the artists did not say: »Oh, don’t I get a microphone?” Instead, they regarded it much more as an interest- ing experiment. All this is quite minor, but overall it produced a different type of event. We did not exhibit any photos of melting glaciers, but created a situation that made an effort to avoid doing anything that would make the glaciers melt faster. One big picture issue was how to deal with our air conditioning system. For most exhibitions this accounts for 80 per cent of our energy bills. The air conditioning marked a defeat for our project, but a very interesting one: we did not manage to switch off the air conditioning in the Gropius Bau completely, only sections of it. One architectural peculiarity of the Gropius Bau is its central atrium, its »Lichthof” (literally: »courtyard of light”), into which temperate and cooled air is compressed that is then distributed from there into the respective rooms on two floors through the open doors. For this reason, we could not simply switch off the air conditioning on the ground floor because the system works for both floors at the same time.
The Partisan Approach
Because we did not know this to begin with, we started out by negotiating contracts with all the lenders and insurers which stated that there was no air conditioning system. For contemporary art it is only required in a few cases. Hardly any of the galleries that sell contemporary art in this country have one. And equally few of the homes of buyers usually have them. But when an exhibition space like the Gropius Bau, which does not have its own collection and is reliant on loans, wants to borrow a painting from MoMa, for example, it must be able to demonstrate a flat line of temperature and humidity levels using an air conditioning system. The institution cannot display any fluctuations over the course of the year—otherwise it will not receive any loans. Of course, this is a nightmare for curators and exhibition makers. As a result of this overall situation, the air conditioning system stayed switched on, even though we reduced its use as much as possible on the ground floor by keeping smaller devices in these rooms switched off.
Nevertheless, changes are possible. For »Down to Earth” it was generally surprisingly uncomplicated to gain support from lenders of contemporary art for the option of exhibiting the works in un-air conditioned spaces. On an individual level this was not a problem, nor was it one in negotiations with the artists, the lenders and insurance companies—however, the institutional system as a whole is a problem. And dealing with this global system itself is indispensable when we look at the issue of the climate.
Another side effect of this effort to switch off the main user of energy—the air conditioning system—was the question: where does a standard level like the requirement for a museum to maintain a constant temperature of 20 degrees come from, and why do we need 50 degrees humidity? Who set this as a general rule? It is obvious that this is necessary for ethnological and archaeological objects, and for photographs and particularly delicate paper-based art it is also understandable. But the contents of our current exhibitions at Gropius Bau are usually entirely different. So, in the future we will need buildings and air conditioning systems that permit such differences, and we should create sections within our museums that operate without air conditioning as a matter of principle and permit the planning of different kinds of exhibitions. Until we have reached this stage, we are left with the partisan approach— negotiating very specific situations. And questioning the power of large institutions. Of course, they constantly say: »We have to change, become more sustainable, we’re developing wonderful programmes on this.” But then money and fear come into play and this is why I think that the climate issue can only be solved systemically, not on an individual level.
We also imposed the following second constraint on ourselves: no flights were permitted. No artist or curator set foot on a plane for this project. The lone exception was a curator from Norway who was personally unable to make alternative arrange- ments and we accepted that. By and large, refraining from air travel did not present a problem. One side effect was that we placed a stronger emphasis on the international artistic community in the region around Berlin and within reach by train.
The third constraint was an obvious one: the need for sustainability. Everything the institution used and every resource it consumed was recorded and published: how many sheets of paper, how much water, how much and what kind of electricity, which printer inks? On many points we were able to make use of knowledge that had been acquired through the certification process for the EU’s EMAS initiative. The cultural institutions belonging to the platform Kulturbetriebe des Bundes in Berlin (KBB) are EMAS pioneers. We have been certified since 2013. I am not a pioneer of this initiative personally. Of course, I supported it, but in my heart I always felt that the whole thing was an administrative exercise. I did not find it very creative or pleasurable and was a relatively late convert. Before I worked for the Festspiele there had already been a sustainability project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt »Über Lebenskunst”
(»The Art of Survival”) which was a constant point of reference when we were trying to attain EMAS certification. A number of workshops followed with flipcharts and sheets of coloured paper being passed back and forth. It was a little like being at school: basically, everyone is taught to use impact ventilation rather than leaving the windows open for hours, to unplug everything and not leave anything on stand-by when it’s time to go home. You learn a thousand useful things but it does not touch your soul. Though it doesn’t have to. In many respects it is absolutely enough if the standards an institution does not really think about can be changed for the better. Not everyone has to become an environmental activist. It is enough if an institution changes its own rules—and this is what EMAS does.
Stopping plastic cups being used in the canteen and always serving vegetarian dishes are things that everyone agrees with. But does this make us a climate-conscious, sustainable institution? I think EMAS is a good instrument for changing institutional standards. However, to really touch people’s souls, to make our efforts at sustainability creative and to achieve a significant change in working practices within the organisation, we need other instruments.
Art is a very valuable instrument for achieving this because the true pioneers of alternative practices and new thinking are the artists themselves. Therefore, it was our deliberate choice that »Down to Earth” should be an art project first and foremost— we did not conceive our project to satisfy the Ministry of the Environment, but set it in motion from a process of artistic creation and looking at the world. And that is my advice to everyone who, like us, works in a cultural organisation: to look at where the artists themselves are developing alternative practices, bringing new rules and ideas into play and taking them as far as they can. Tino Sehgal’s work was particularly important for »Down to Earth” because for the last thirty years he has been putting together art works that leave no traces or objects behind them. This is his answer to the capitalism that is eating up the world. Artists like him are not only pioneers in terms of content but≈also pioneers in their practice. For 20 years, Tino Sehgal has only travelled by train or ship. Therefore, I would propose using him as a guide when changing our operating systems. And the interesting question also arises of how we can not only change our service systems but also manufacture products that themselves require and facilitate sustainable rules. Because we create art. And with art we reach people.
Artists are probably fundamentally, but particularly right now, very conspicuously interested in other mindsets that are no longer the ones that want to build rockets. I think we are currently experiencing a neo-archaic revival—a leap away from our way of living and working that is destroying the world. However, this is not a leap back to the Neolithic age but one that views technology differently—as something that is becoming ever more life-defining and that can help us, in Latour’s words, to earth ourselves anew. Things start to get interesting where what was known about the world in the Neolithic Age coalesces with the superpower of new technology. This is the work of the most advanced artists of our time. When we decide to do without electricity, this has a neo- archaic aspect. It offers the prospect of a new immediacy and direct connection. At the same time, it makes us think about technology in a different way and creates an incredible system of alternative wisdom.
The question about positivity is one I would answer with another question: what will be immediately beneficial? Not in the sense of being purely pleasant, but: where can structures be established in which it’s easier to make connections? What does a work by Claire Vivianne Sobottke feel like? What does she do differently from a large city theatre with its huge organisation? I’m afraid I can’t put this in more general terms. Real change requires a very intense experience of alienation. This might sound a little odd but it is the only way to gain some distance to our own routines. The pandemic was an eye-opener. It is Gaia’s self-defence. First of all, I need to slowly unravel for myself the obscenity of what we regard as normal. This will produce my intrinsic motivation not to perpetuate this. That is one process. The other is building the right surroundings. Eventually we will notice who this is possible with and who it is not. Do we take people with us? We have to set up cells. The HAU Hebbel am Ufer has just printed the slogan »Nischen bilden!” (»Form niches!”) on the cover of its magazine—I think that’s wonderful because it is the right answer to our current situation: form niches, you can’t do everything straight away but do what you can achieve with positivity and those niches are bound to catch on.
A Dehierarchisation Project
In »Down to Earth” we brought several of these niches together. This was also the reason for the camp idea at the beginning—we wanted to see our institution as a platform for bringing together communities that do not otherwise meet. This is something that festivals, for example, do very well. We broadened this out and invited people who build Tiny Houses, for example—not because they like small homes but because they see this as an alternative concept for urban living. They spent four weeks at Gropius Bau building a house with the visitors. We also set up a Repair Café where people could have their bicycle or broken radio repaired. We asked ourselves how we can do a project about sustainability without reproducing the generally sanctimonious tone of the cultural establishment, which is constantly saying: »Right, now we have got to do something on this theme.” And then the photos of melting glaciers go up on the walls and there are glass cases with sculptures of extinct species, maps of white colonialists and all kinds of statistics. And, of course, we could do that and it will tell people something. But then we would be continuing to work in the same mode as before. We would use up exactly the same resources and fly half way around the globe to spend six hours seeing an Indigenous art festival in Sydney.
This is why we have to address the cheerful cynicism of the establishment, of a system that is based on shopping, on buying and selling, on full shop windows, on exploration, on disposal and constantly seeking what is new. And not only with coffee mugs. Recognising the perversity of this normal logic is the main task—and here the artists and all the experts who have already been doing things differently in their
own fields for a long time help us enormously.
One of the most important things we learned was that you have to know your own building. Frequently we don’t even know where the air conditioning in our own building is located. I’m sorry to say that it was only because of »Down to Earth” that I went to see the air conditioning experts in our own organisation and got them to explain to me how a lot of things in our exhibition space actually work technically. Suddenly I was in the basement standing in front of six gigantic immersion heaters in which, in a crazy, old-fashioned way, water is boiled up and the steam is then mixed into fresh air from the ventilation system—and this is how that 50 per cent humidity is achieved. When you see this and talk to the people who supervise this apparatus every day, it immediately makes a big impression on you. I knew that we have solar panels on the roof but I had never seen them and I did not know that they only supply eight per cent of what the building uses. Or, of course, that they have been obsolete for some time. For our technicians, this is day-to-day stuff. They know exactly what different kinds of light bulbs there are, how long they last and how much energy they use.
We can therefore also view sustainability as a dehierarchisation project, where you need to leave the director’s office and go down to the basement to visit the departments and talk to the staff whose daily business includes many activities that have an impact on sustainability. These are the co-workers who order catering, book travel and service the technology. It is imperative to truly embrace an organisation and not to restrict the discussion of noble objectives to the dramaturgy department. This was an important lesson for me. For many of us, respecting all parts of the organisation for their competence was the first step in a very serious discovery of our own infrastructure— the same one we want to change.
One further point is all the tiny creative details that were changed first and foremost by the artists. I had never previously reflected on which part of our digital communications uses the most electricity: and guess what—it is the colour on the screen. Black and white images reduce energy use. If you then take the step to create all your printed products in black and white on recycled paper, you will also save a great deal. Algae ink is a sustainable alternative to traditional inks. It costs a little more but if a lot of institutions order it, it will get cheaper. We were the first people in Berlin to persuade printers to stock algae ink. This is a small but significant detail. Just as the fetish for original photographs can and must be questioned. Do we have to ship a framed photo by Andreas Gursky from Basel to Berlin? It can be printed out here
at the venue. Our relationship to the original is a big issue in the world of exhibitions: it is connected to questions of packaging, transportation and air conditioning in the space. We have often heard: »You can’t do that, there is no way, artist X will never allow that.” But surprisingly: he will allow it and he’s even pleased about it.
There are a lot of these small adjustments. For example, we also decided not to do any streaming during the pandemic. Streaming takes up a lot of electricity. Simply sending an email uses as much electricity as making a cup of tea. What does that mean for streaming complete performances? Our fear as an institution of losing visibility during the period of the pandemic led to an initial streaming craze which meant that not only did we consume a great deal of energy, the capacities of our team who were hybrid working were also exhausted far beyond their limits. We therefore took a deliberate decision not to stream our ICC project »The Sun Machine Is Coming Down”, which had ten days of continuous concerts.
Our Body is a Resource Like the Earth
There is no point in wanting to be sustainable and giving all those taking part burnout. Sustainability has a great deal to do with the question of living well. Now this is associated with reducing production—doing less, having more time, producing cleverly and smartly instead of full throttle. Sustainability has a great deal to do with conserving energy and resources. This has been another learning process from our work on the »Immersion” programme series. We cannot talk about sustainability without understanding that our bodies and minds are just as much of a resource as the earth beneath our feet.
Coming full circle: our project »Immersion” is the attempt to recognise that we are part of a whole and to use the experience of being embedded as a starting point. With all ecological issues this is the initial question: how do I overcome an understanding of the world that views the world as a resource that is alienated from me, as expendable material, as something that I extract and only see as raw material—how can I escape from this Anthropocene attitude? This is not an appeal for irrationality but one to think of and establish different modes of responsibility.
Over the five years of our project, we have attempted to apply this thinking in holistic and boundary-blurring terms to fields that are not usually associated with the theme of immersion—for example our scrutiny of history and identity politics led to an examination of German reunification within the format »Palast der Republik”. We created a palace of counter-narratives of Germany’s past and present. Intuitive forms of knowledge led to the exhibition project »Limits of Knowing” and Bruno Latour’s thinking enabled us to make climate change the topic of »Down to Earth”. Our interest in immersive processes was the key through which we began to be interested in new forms of work, different formats and ultimately also in alternative operating systems inour buildings. »Down to Earth” meant a different operating system—as a way of looking, as a practice and a format. This also frightened some of our co-workers because it went a step further than feelgood updates on a content level. This restructuring of the operating system will determine the success and credibility of a transformation in sustainability. And not what is hanging on the walls in the museum. This is what we have learned from »Down to Earth”.
After it reopened in the seventies, for a long time Gropius Bau had no air con- ditioning. Of course, large and representative exhibitions were shown there never- theless. In the summer, when it was too hot, the floors were mopped and the windows opened just before the building opened. This cooling effect was the air conditioning. Now you cannot open any of the windows for fear of insects that could cause damage. After we had invited him to contribute an artistic work to our exhibition, the first thing Tomás Saraceno did was to walk through the exhibition spaces and look for spiders in the top corners of the windows and underneath the radiator covers. »Where is there still life in this building?” And he was able to protect a beautiful spider’s web that he found in Room 9 for three months. Two days after the exhibition closed, it was cleaned away. That is the power of the system that we need to talk about. I actually believe the kilowatt hours used in our project were not the most important thing. It was not about saving as much energy as possible, but it was about staging an atmospheric difference that communicated alternative experiences and alternative wisdom on a great many different levels. This climate project was about creating a different climate—inside our own building. This is why we collaborated with the academies, but also presented performances, classical exhibitions, rituals, workshops and half an hour of communal
qi gong every morning.
Finally, I would like to address another big picture topic: the topic of the responsibility of the individual in relation to systemic issues. It is highly problematic to place all fault on the individual and to constantly be saying: »You have to drink organic coffee and you have to stop this irresponsible meat eating.” It is possible to change all these things but we remain imprisoned in this logic of Me Incorporated. This
is a continuation of Schröder’s policy of always looking for guilt and responsibility in individuals only. However, at the same time we must also question the system, find politicians who will listen and take practical steps to combat isolation and virtualisation. The answer is solidarity. If you look at the index of our book on »Down to Earth”, you will see everyone represented in that book: people who practice animism and cultivate salt water roof gardens, activists and lawyers. New and different alliances are needed. Our institutions can bring these various publics together.
CHANGES Formats Digital Culture Identity Politics Immersion Sustainability
Berliner Festspiele 2012–2021 Edited by Thomas Oberender © 2022 Theater der Zeit