Meeting of a Linden Tree / Ein Lindentreffen
Commissoned work for Sammlung Philara Exhibition: Cutting the Puppeteer's Strings Düsseldorf, Germany
20 October 2024 — 1 June 2025
Meeting of a Linden Tree is a work that was commissioned by Sammlung Philara on the occasion of the exhibition Cutting the Puppeteer's Strings, an exhibition focusing on marionettes and marionette theatre, shadow plays and puppetry, and associated aspects of staging, display and characters in contemporary art - where the traditional craft of puppet theater is currently receiving special attention.
This work uses four puppets from the storage of the historic Düsseldorf Marionette Theatre (the character Momo from Momo, two Mephoisto puppets from Faust, G'Mork, a werewolf from The Neverending Story, and Molly, a train from Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer). The four characters hang from their strings in a circular formation and are strung with small LED bulbs that light when each one of them "speak". Their conversation is a sound work recorded with speculative voices of the three characters.
The characters debate what it means to be exhibited as performance objects without being "alivened", or played. The script was developed through a series of conversations with artists, puppeteers, and researchers Pansee Atta, Aram Lee, Ada M. Patterson, and Nadia Ihjeij. The conversations focused on their personal relationships with exhibiting their own performance costumes, obejcts, or puppets, and also their research on the traditions of exhibition in Western museological practice.
An annotated script was exhibited in the same space. A digital version of this script can be read here in English and in German.
