sarma

One. Two. Three. Once again.

Alter Ego asks the twin.

A.E.: How did you get into your shared vocabulary?

Twin: Via taking the train of the identical protocol. One of us tells a story, the other one listens, retells it or writes it down. The written becomes an agent like our pictures, the music, the performance work. The work itself reknits the protocol.

A.E.: Does this procedure represent your own private postpolitical hermeneutical circle?

Twin: It does, but in a pathological way. In the end there is no end. We turn our own biography into fiction. Ghosts reappear! Don't forget: what we are afraid to loose is what belongs to you.

A.E.: Thank you for this conversation.

(deufert + plischke)

In the summer of 2005 Sarma-editors Jeroen Peeters and Myriam Van Imschoot visited the artistic twin deufert + plischke in their home base in Leipzig to prepare for an afternoon in deSingel (Antwerp) on their work. Three days of collaboration, meeting, writing and discussion. Of Lebenskunst, too: drinking coffee, cooking, swimming in the lake, sauna, watching films, and having more coffee. A method was devised for writing collectively a text on working methods and collaboration. Taking the form of the interview, Jeroen Peeters and Myriam Van Imschoot formulated questions in a notebook, Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke answered them. Every player in this interview score would see only the preceding part and respond to it – not unlike a cadavre exquis, where a view on the totality eludes the player. Two notebooks (and thus two interview tracks) would be circulating (and happening) simultaneously, resulting in two texts. It was these texts that became the basis of a series of posters that was on display in the arts centre deSingel in Antwerp on November 9th, 2005. In the middle of the poster gallery deufert + plischke could be approached by people from the audience for an open and continuously changing interview. Theatre Topics invited Sarma and Frankfurter Küche now to contribute to its theme of the artist as a researcher. We took this opportunity to translate the poster event from the walls onto the page. Are we researchers? For sure, we are reformulators. May your reading further alter and fracture the texts and lead to more questions and imagined answers. Enter the protocol. Rewrite. The game has already started.

Concept and text: Kattrin Deufert, Jeroen Peeters, Thomas Plischke, Myriam Van Imschoot Design: Julie Peeters Production: Sarma (Brussels – www.sarma.be) Co-production: deSingel (Antwerp), Frankfurter Küche (Leipzig), Department of Theatre Studies, Ghent University

The Blue and Yellow Notebooks can be downloaded here.