Dialog & Video Performance,
German, 70 Min.,
double-projection,
2012

Kuhle Wampe Remix, Live Dialogs & Video Performance, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2012

Kuhle Wampe Remix. Or To Whom Belongs the City?

Brecht’s/Dudow’s/Ottwalt’s and Eisler’s film Kuhle Wampe, or To Whom Belongs the World? from 1932, one of the first German sound movies, tells about the fate of workers who, during the economic crises of the twenties and early thirties of the twentieth century, are losing their homes. Kuhle Wampe Remix, a live seventy minutes performance and remix by Ina Wudtke and the Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage, translates this topic to the present day. Much like the authors of Kuhle Wampe at the time, their goal is to demonstrate artistic solidarity with low income households which can no longer afford the rents in an ever faster gentrifying metropolis like Berlin and/or are evicted from their homes. Politicians in Berlin use the rise of the rents to indicate that Berlin is economically on the rise, while the only result is that many Berliners are much worse off than before. Even if people who get evicted do no longer move to ‘Kuhle Wampe’, a tent camp near Müggelsee in the south-east of Berlin, which existed in the twenties of the last century, yet eighty years after Kuhle Wampe, the dislocation of poor households from the city center to the outskirts of the city is a hot issue again.