Land’s End

During a frigid winter month, six burnt-out and charred luxury cars line a vacant lot, which is advertised to become the future neighborhood of ‹La Dolce Vita›. Melodic sounds and voices emanate from inside the old and scorched auto wrecks penetrating the cold air. The cars enact an urban drama of competing forces, which entails no less than a battle for social and cultural supremacy. Land’s End is a Metropol-Revue, in which music and image, reality and poetry dramatize a Tragedy of Place. On the open-air stage of Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, the forsaken cars play their roles with schizophrenic bravery. Multiple soprano and baritone voices fill the gutted vehicles, bickering in both tender and brutal verses. The sweet sound of a waltz dances in the air, but is abruptly pierced with the emotional conniption of a soprano. Adapted as a new libretto, popular melodies elicit and intertwine subjectivity with the objectivity of a word painting. The adjacent construction site and pseudo-Italian model house flank the scene as antagonizing extras. Skulpturenpark itself becomes the backdrop of a stage with multi-layered images and symbols appropriated from the chain of devaluation and revaluation. But from the peanut gallery, on the neighbors’ balconies, one sees not only frozen ideas. Upon the winter’s glade, humans gather round a fire, picking from a roasted wild pig and sipping hot wine.

Composition: Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Bizet, Di Capua, Donizetti. Libretto: KUNSTrePUBLIK. Soprano: 1 City Planner / 2 Investor / 3 Estate Agent – Sabine Hill. Bariton: 1 Citizen / 2 Activist / 3 Vandale – Thorbjörn Björnsson