DO TANK is a group of international artists from various disciplines; they will form a collective for the duration of the SPIELART festival and develop projects. The current social and political challenges involved with local and global correlations are the starting points for their themes, and their artistic means are the tools they will use to produce only seemingly everyday situations and encounters in the coexistence of art and social reality. This intensive process allows the creation of new communicative platforms – and possibly the creation of altered perspectives.
DO TANK is a laboratory. The performers examine their concepts of a good life or of a better world, and they will present them for discussion and thus lay them out in the open. What do we hope for? What do we need? What is important to us? Which systems of values are the foundations for our coexistence in society? What survival strategies do we use to react to this? What can we do – for ourselves and for others?
The projects leave the base camp at Muffatwerk and will be installed in municipal spaces, private gardens, wastelands, and in social institutions; DO TANK will also make a stop at Müllerisches Volksbad. The base camp serves the collective of artists as a workspace and an interface between the artistic act and the general public. Everyone is invited to visit the base camp during its opening hours from Monday to Saturday, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m., gather information about the status and progress of DO TANK, and join in conversations and discussions.
The desire to change the world and make it a better world is as old as our astonishment when we realize we are mortal. The starting point for our base camp DO TANK was to rediscover the intimateness of an action and its social value in simple, straightforward interrelationships and to conduct research. We are in the death zone.
Hope to meet you.
Angelika Fink
To begin working on a proposal like DO TANK we need a certain degree of innocence and naivety, otherwise we might just be paralysed by the complexity of connections and contradictions that the world is made of. Making DO TANK has been a journey guided by the hunger to do something and by the foolishness to believe it matters. It is a practice to refuse cynicism and withdraw from irony. It is a try out and a cry out. It is an outreach for 15 potential days. We hope that DO TANK will, in Kafka´s words: »Affect us like a disaster... like an axe for the frozen sea inside us.« Warm welcome!
Satu Herrala
The DO TANK project is part of the FestivalLAB (www.theatrefit.org), and it was produced with the support of the European Commission and the Allianz Kulturstiftung.
Production and realization:
