Performance by Johannes Paul Raether, in English
Meeting point and audio guides in the foyer of Akademie der Künste
Start of the performance at 4, 5, and 6 pm
Schwarmwesen or Swarm-Being is an anti-essential creature, a “combing pet” and inhabitant of “toxic swales,” which is what it calls the tourist traps where it appears and carries out its research: the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the Trocadero in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and now, in version 6.1.5 of itself, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Within “identitecture”—a cross-linked system of being and sites—Schwarmwesen explores the catastrophic timing of a global circulation of bodies, which it describes as “chronostrophy.” It traces the epicenter of this phenomenon in a series of psycho-realistic research missions in the reconstructed, Prussian-molded symbolic center of Berlin. Maneuvering across Pariser Platz, with its Fanmeile and beer-bikes, the Schwarmwesen counters the geopathological spectacle of this tourist hell-hole with its own unfinished and inadequate identity, its stumbling and linguistically estranged fabulation, and absorbs into its “potentiality” those people who, together with the being, want to forget to piece together a self for themselves.