Arrival/ Departure

About the Project

Arrival/Departure - a project that deals with fear in an unexpected way and thus produces bizarre extreme contrasts. These high-contrast extremes will consequently be compared more richly in an installation later on.
Happy-go-lucky passers-by wildly leaped up into the air at the airport in a circle, spoke of their fears of spiders or modeled the face of someone else (Aktionsperson) in order to express a fearful situation before their departure. In spite of what happened on September 11, 2001 and the airport environment, fear of flying was not a problem with any of the passengers who participated in the action. Trifles were the greatest fears. Do we actually know our real fears? Can we really comprehend the fears of others, if we haven't already experienced them ourselves?

The performance was part of the 2002 project 7days/week.

The action was openly carried out in the parking lots of Berlin's Tegel/TXL airport as well as in the halls of the airport. The performance ran till dawn.

Art Performance

Passer-bys (airline passengers or companions) were motivated to multi-part actions:

1. Verbal transmission (preferred under one's breath) about their own fears.

2. Spontaneous acting out of their own fears. The mimicry of a fearful situation on one's own body. To show fear itself, as if one of the dreaded situations happened right now.

3. Representation of their fear at the command of the Aktionsperson [Aktion=action/person=person] through:
forming the Aktionsperson's arms/legs through body contact
alteration of the facial expressions based on instructions
defining of the actions of the Aktionsperson (screaming, jumping, crawling, etc.)

Completion

In the end, the airport was run through as quickly as possible - n.b.: ignore everything - and most importantly: the security.

The Aktionsperson/acteur runs ahead. Followed by a camera, the second camera films the whole thing from behind ... reactions of passer-bys and airport workers captured.
Although, however, the security teams should have actually tried to follow us and try to stop up, they never appeared despite all expectations. After many minutes being hot on the trail without anyone following us, we had to break it up due to these conditions. Even though security measures in German airports, according to the media and public information, were supposed to be tightened down after the incidents on September 11, 2001 ...

Prominent Passer-Bys

In these actions Howard Donald (from Take That) and the actress Doris Schretzmeyer (seen in the "Was tun wenns brennt", 2001) were spontaneously integrated as well.