Program: 

Isabel Lewis and the Class for Performative Arts & Friends
An Occasion to Consider This Library’s Desire
Scores for Inner Movements (That May or May Not Have Outward Expression) in Response to the Moving In-/Ex-teriors of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek

Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek

16. October 2024, 17:00 – 19:00, 14 Uhr – 17 Uhr diffused actions, 17 Uhr – 19 Uhr Salon

Nadja Buttendorf 
OSSI/WESSI Nähcafe - Bring Your Own Pulli
We meet at the Amerika Haus to sew REVERSIBLEsequins onto clothing together and to exchange East West experiences. Everyone is invited!

Amerika Haus 

17. October 2024, drop-in between 15:00 – 17:00

Sasha Amaya
Gifts of Glass – An Offering

Journey from Amerika Haus to HKW

17. October 2024, 17:00 – 18:30

Sophie Yukiko
Ritual BPM

HKW

17. October 2024, 18:30 – 21:00, followd by a discussion

Rike Flämig 
Ist das mein Ort?

Henry-Ford-Bau

19. Oktober 2024, 11:00 – 12:00
Performance with following discussion and transition to the CRC Annual Conference Moving (in) Constellations

The site-specific performance series encounters four of Berlin’s Cold War architectures that speak to the institutionalization of US-American power and knowledge dissemination. From October 16th to 19th, Tracing Influence will take place at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, the Amerika Haus, the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), and the Henry-Ford-Bau, four buildings that were constructed in Berlin in the 1950s with the help of American donations and were intended to expand the educational landscape of the divided city. We engage with these architectures to question their pedagogic mandate, their democratic vision, and their problematic modernist legacy.

Performance artists will engage with these architectural spaces their site-specific histories to reimagine ways of coming together that confront the power-over framework that their past constructs. Isabel Lewis, Nadja Buttendorf, Sahsa Amaya, Sophie Yukiko, and Rike Flämig will create choreographies and new forms of coming together, intervening in the movements and paths shaped and directed by the architecture and thus proposing alternative ways of assembling in space.

How can choreographies be conceived as counter-movements to gather differently in these spaces? How can bodies and movements intervene on a micro scale? How can forms of assembling inscribe alternative social relations and trace hidden histories?

Tracing Influence was conceived by Kirsten Maar, Sophie Schultze-Allen, Hannah Strothmann, and Luise Willer with the support of Mariama Diagne, Friederike Hartge, Martina Kutsch, and Giulia Weis as part of the Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the Berlin Central and Regional Library and HKW Berlin.