hannsjana
Performative Audio Walk, 2024
The closed film studio and the extinct dinosaurs served as canvases for our imaginations of times past. Today, neither the film studio, the GDR, nor dinosaurs exist, but they have one thing in common: their former existence is still clearly palpable and continues to raise questions to this day. How we remember life in times past is shaped by the stories we tell about it and the images we conjure up. The film studio in Wolfen was once the largest women-run enterprise in the GDR. In retrospect, it is often romanticized as a model feminist enterprise. When it comes to dinosaurs, on the other hand, we think of supposedly masculine traits: size, strength, and brutality. With their performance, the collective hannsjana invited the audience to search the grounds of the former film studio for buried, obscured, and overlaid narratives. They found traces that told of women’s labor, of power, and of political movements. In the process, they discovered a special dinosaur in need of a feminist reconstruction. Tyrannosaurus Rex is dead. Long live Tyrannosaurus Regina!
From the development of the concept through the grant application to the final performance, I accompanied hannsjana and Tyrannosaurus Regina. The work was created for the OSTEN festival – “Welt Weit Wolfen“ in 2024 and addressed the central themes of that edition of the festival.