Pulling Strings | installation

Pulling Strings is a work that has been realised as a choreography for a space, a theatre performance, a site-specific installation and a video piece. The movement of the found objects in a specific place starts to produce a meticulous portrait of that space. It starts with an inventory and the invitation to the audience to observe the space and the objects, dimensions and functions it has in detail - close up, from afar, from above, below, underneath, on top. A choreography emerges in which large objects such as trees, tables, lamps, as well as small things like pens, glasses, tea bags are mobilised in both senses of the word. Not only tangible things are used, immaterial factors like sounds, smells or volatile substances such as smoke all play a role. The process of performative string pulling changes the perception of a place and its physicality by opening new perspectives on the familiar and known.

INSTALLATION

For the installation version of Pulling Strings, Eva Meyer-Keller, together with other artists, nests in a specific place for several days. This can be individual rooms, houses or entire street blocks. The architecture as well as the objects found on location become actors who are mobilized on strings to create a performative portrait of the respective place.

SUDAN / CHILE

In Chile and Sudan, local artists met with the three German artists and spent ten days together in an empty house, exploring each of its rooms. Found objects such as windows, doors, tiles, ceiling suspensions, shutters, a safe, water taps or prayer rugs were, according to the principle of PULLING STRINGS, set in motion by means of threads attached to them and their action potentials were explored. Choreographic miniatures were created that allowed the architecture of the house and its now dysfunctional, formerly everyday inventory to appear in a different perspective. The building, initially perceived as empty and abandoned, became a dwelling place again - this time for animated things - thus drawing attention to what would otherwise simply be accepted, overlooked. The individual scenes in the various rooms were directed by individual project participants.

https://vimeo.com/180407986

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h433GaKstZ8

DEUS EX MACHINA

A continuation of Pulling Strings is the scenic project Deus Ex Machina, which Eva Meyer-Keller developed with students as part of her guest professorship at the University of Hildesheim during the winter semester 2013/14. As in the stage version of the piece it is the theatre itself, with all its technical fixtures, that is the apparatus and starting point. Those objects that usually remain in the background as functional equipment are pulled into the centre of the action thanks to their attached yellow threads. Micro-dramas emerge originating from scenes from Greek mythology that cannot normally be represented on stage or dramatic literature and inspired by old theatre machinery. They turn from threadbare gods from the wings of the theatre, dancing strings and great myths, to the question of what holds the world together at its core.

How to produce the heavens over the stage - How to cloud over a part of the heavens by starting with a small cloud that becomes ever larger and changes its colour continuously - How one must arrange the threads from one point to another.
(Nicola Sabbatini, Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638)