The Werkleitz festival, at the opening evening. © Falk Wenze
Until November 1st, the MoveOn-Werkleitz festival, Germany, was celebrating 20 years of Emare artist residency program in medialabs. And disrupts entrenched habits by inviting migrants.
Halle, special correspondent
When Germany had just been re-united in the early 90s, a community of students start in Werkleitz, a small village on the Salle river, in the ex German Democratic Republic (GDR), a festival dedicated to experimental cinema and to new forms of multimedia art. The Werkleitz festival, driven by success and creation, only 20 years ago, of the European network of cultural cooperation European Media Art Network and its exchange artist residency program Emare (European Media Artists in Residence Exchange), was set up a couple of years later in Halle, in Saxe-Anhalt (231 000 habitants).
European Media Art Network
To celebrate 20 years of this network long-standing support from the European Union Culture program, the festival gathered this year artists and European medialabs (Bandits-Mages for France, Impakt for the Netherlands, FACT for Great-Britain and as an associated partner the Berlin Transmediale), Canadian (PRIM and Oboro from Montréal, Images Festival from Toronto) and Australian (Experimenta from Melbourne, Creativity and Cognition Studios from Sydney, the Cube and the Block from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane). Without forgetting a good selection of installations and performances produced the two last years by the network.
Opening to the refugees
The 9th of October, the opening night of the festival reminded the breath of freedom of squats and clubs after the fall of the wall, thanks to the presence of around ten Turkish, Kurd and Syrian refugees installed since not long ago in the city’s hotels. Peter Zorn, the director of the festival and the artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud decided to invite them, who in favour of an Emare residency realised a documentary project on migrants reaching the Australian coasts.
The techno party was litterally envaded by these happy “aliens” who turned the dancefloor inside out with their acrobatic dance battle on hip hop, techno, electrochaâbi, the soundtrack of the Egyptian Revolution, played in an appropriate way by DJ PopHop.
In the afternoon of the 10th of September, 48 men, women and children reached the Isle of Lesbos on a pneumatic boat measuring 10 meters long and 2 meters wide. This embarcation, the Swiss Christopher Wachter and Mathias Jud brought it to Halle, a host town for a lot of refugees, but also inviting them to show evidence of their journey at Werkleitz. The image that will stay in memories is the image of merry 20 year old youngsters jumping on the pneumatic boat like a trampoline and competing against each other in dance battles. An evening of release to forget a very rough condition.
“Capital of the World” is the title that the artists gave to express the dream of a city looking towards offering a haven of world peace to the refugees victims of military conflicts and other climate imbalance.
Mobilisation in front of Transatlantic Partnership
Other highlights of the opening week-end, in a country living truly in 2015: the massive mobilisation against the Transatlantic Partnership of Trade and Investment with the United States (TTIP) on the 10th of October in Berlin.
Kristoffer Gansing, director of the Transmediale festival, called the partners of the network, representatives of concerned countries, to protest their disapprobation on the content of the negociations in progress and to join an alliance of actors of digital culture against the TTIP. The members of the network agreed to pursue these discussions.
The fruits of the medialabs
By occuping a building in ruins, Werkleitz lets art come out of the White Box to confront past and future in a sort of time machine that explores time. Sounding the Future by Gail Priest, invites to navigate in the futures of science-fiction in a sound capsule; with the help of serie B SF mash-ups, Astro Black: Jungle Are Forever by the duo Soda Jerk revisits afrofuturism of the 70s, Hip-hop culture of the 80s and jungle culture from the 90s; Lauren Moffatt documents en Oculus Rift the historical place of labourer mobilisation against the politics of Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, the Unemployed and Trade Union Services Centre of Liverpool. Propositions that work perfectly with the 2015 thematic of the festival MoveOn, that invites to change oneself to change things.
