Last week I spent a lovely long weekend in Berlin. It was great to back in the city that I got to call home a decade ago. I met up with friends, visited the small but fabulous Puppentheater-Museum and the Museum der Dinge, ate some delicious food (Yafo and Geist im Glass being just two of the highlights), had a few drinks (I am biased but I’d like to recommend the Black Lodge in the Sanderstraße and wine bar Brut) and last but not least went to my favourite trödelmarkt (flea market) on Arkonaplatz.
I managed to mix pleasure with business by meeting up with Cat Gerrard, a British performer/director/teacher who is now based in Berlin. I worked with Cat a few years back in London, when I created a series of posters for her storyteller collective Tailspin. She recently got in touch to see if I would be interested in working together again, and of course I was!
One of the things we talked about was Cat’s current project Somewhere, Maybe Here – a project about making connections with strangers, with fellow artists and with a city. Cat developed this character of a fallen angel after she moved to Berlin two and a half years ago. Being new to the city she struggled to connect with where she was and felt a need to go out of her studio and onto the streets of Berlin to interact with the public. It was what she calls “a beautiful, exhilarating and provoking encounter”. She has now gathered a team to document the angel’s new encounters in a re-working of Somewhere, Maybe Here. With photographer Alix Lucas, camera operator Hugo Reis and costume maker Angharad Matthews on board the piece will become a silent film, to be screened with live accompaniment on the piano by Nerea Ariznabaretta and with an accompanying analogue photographic exhibition. They are also collaborating with artists, both local and international (one of those being me!). All will be documented in a book, that will provide an insight to the universe behind the work: the documentation of the work/creative process, along with essays, poems, stories and visual contributions to the project.
They have launched a crowdfunding campaign, where you can get postcards, prints (including a beautiful screenprint of the central image of the project, created by Devorah Livadna), the book, workshops, guided tours of Berlin and even a spot in the film in exchange for your much needed Euros. Visit the crowdfunding website by clicking here, and learn more about the project here or watch this short video:
