CREDITS

Concept & Editor: Tom Engels
Co-editor: Tessa Theisen
Advisor: Myriam Van Imschoot
Producer: Sarma
Co-production: Workspace Brussels and Beursschouwburg Brussels
Supported by: MotionBank/The Forsythe Company (Frankfurt am Main)

Sabine Ercklentz

A field recording in Sabine’s living room. Berlin, 28/01/2013.

Andrea Neumann

Tea, memories and real time music: a kitchen monologue. Berlin, 28/01/2013.

Arantxa Martinez

An Audio-Portrait. Berlin, 20/02/2013 and 22/02/2013.

Isabell Spengler

The Natural Life of Mermaids Photo: Jennifer Sindon

On the Holidays Movies Initiative. Berlin, 18/03/2013.

Marc Siegel

Kitchen Gossip. Berlin, 13/03/2013.

Lindy Annis

Smoking the Pipe and Gestures. Berlin, 14/03/2013.

INTRODUCTION

Focussing on a nexus of artists surrounding Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch, More Than One Tie looks through the key hole of affinities into the artistic practices of Ida Wilde, Sabine Ercklentz, Isabell Spengler, Arantxa Martinez, Marc Siegel, Andrea Neumann and Lindy Annis. The publication contains several online essays; a myriad of video, text, sound and images with these artists and how they care to organize (social) relations, make them productive, reflect upon them, criticize them.

More Than One Tie is an attempt to portray a web of affiliations in which artistic creation takes place by focusing on the social relations and the affinities it entails. It speaks about the border between work and life, about professional life and friendship, about alliances and complicity, about art and its context. If one talks about ties, one can try to imagine what these ties consist of, what they produce and how one can turn them into fictions. As Donna Harraway writes: ‘[…] relationships are the smallest possible patterns for analysis; the partners and actors are their still-ongoing products. It is […] exactly how worlds come into being.’ Some of the ties are selected on the base of long-term collaboration, some on friendship, some on shared interest, but all are thought through the framework of Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch. They functioned as the starting point to map out a complex network. What all of the selected people share, is an interest in the organization of (social) relations. In their work they explicitly or implicitly deal with what it means to enter into relations with other individuals, with larger bodies of people, with objects or even with a multiple people located in one biological body.

Concretely the following topoi are addressed: Andrea Neumann and Sabine Ercklentz talk about the development of the Real Time music scene (Echtzeitmusik) in Berlin since the early 90s and how self-organizational and improvisational tactics were applied to establish a platform for musicians to play, come together and share their works with one another. Arantxa Martinez talks in an audio portrait about the development of her radio project Emisiones Cacatua with Nilo Gallego – organized in a public garden in Madrid where artists would mingle with locals. Talking about leisure time, Isabell Spengler created a video contribution consisting out of five different holiday movies, made by the Holiday Movies Initiative. Blurring the borders between work and leisure time, this collective goes on holidays to shoot a movie, encompassing the events and encounters experienced during that holiday. Marc Siegel gives an account of gossip and its community forming potential. Keren Ida Nathan speaks about the Wilde Family: the fictional marriage of Ida Wilde and her husband Henry Wilde (to some known as Antonia Baehr).

This publication does not attempt to provide an overall image of this open nexus nor does it seek to offer a family portrait of Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch. It rather sketches a constellation of people in an ever transforming cloud without aspiring a fixed body of knowledge. For sure, the relations between the people are not fixed either; some lines are stable and some will change. It is impossible to speak about an ‘artistic family’: the roles and positions people take are not marked by hierarchy or arborescent patterns. Inspired by François Noudelmann’s work, affinity (and therefore also disaffinity) might offer a productive way to rethink questions of relatedness beyond blood connections. It offers us the possibility to render the fictions and practices that are created to live or embody those ties.

Any person in this map could have been the starting point of this endeavor: one would end up with different, but also overlapping fields of relations. In this case it was my very own affinity with the work of Antonia Baehr that brought me to portray these crisscrossing lines of (human) interactions. There is always more than one tie – we are nested in our connections, sometimes changing our costume, sometimes going in drag.

Ida Wilde

The Wilde’s Collect. Berlin, 12/12/2013.