BREAD AND RO-SES (BROT UND RO-SEN)
Sound Installation / Choir concert / Vinyl-Record (2020/2023)
Seven horn speakers, digital amplifier, USB, steel tripods, corsds, printed flag, flag holder
Sound Installation
odp Galerie / Leipzig
2020
The slogan "Bread and Roses" goes back to the demands of American textile unionists at the beginning of the 20th century
for fair wages (bread) and a decent working and living environment (roses). As a result, he found a place in the collective
memory of the workers' and women's struggle in a variety of ways, which is the starting point for the sound installation.
Growing up in the west of Germany in the 1980s, Anna Schimkat‘s childhood memories were shaped by the songs of female
music groups such as the Darmstadt "Hanns Eisler Chor", which campaigned for peace and women‘s rights in Germany.
The political song was a cen- tral part of social reality in the GDR, in which the relevant goals of the women's
movement seemed to have already been implemented. Unlike women in the West, women in the GDR generally did not feel
structurally disadvantaged; the political songs were less an element of political mobilization than part of a
collective conformism. From the late 1970s, a subcultural public in literature and fine arts received a critical
perspective on the question of actual gen- der equality and state reprisals against women in the GDR, for example
through the group of women artists around Gabriele Stötzer EOG (Erweiterter Orgasmus Gruppe) from Erfurt
In the work "Bread and Ro-ses" various perspectives on the women's movements in East and West are documented using
personal auditory memories of those involved at the time. The melody and text fragments determined in interviews
and discussions are reinterpreted by Leipzig singers and presented uncommented in space as a multi-channel
installation. For the first time it is possible for women who have been socialized in two political systems
to raise their voices together. At the same time, the topics and perspectives of that time are transported
into the present and the listeners are asked to position themselves spatially, temporally and in terms of content.
Concert
Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig
March 4, 2020
As part of the exhibition "Conscious Inability: The Gabriele Stötzer Archive #3", Paula Gehrmann und Gabriele Stötzer
Recording
Published in 2023 on LP by Fragment Factory
Interviews:
Hanns Eisler Chor, Darmstadt - Bettina Schimkat, Ingrid Schmidt-Viertel, Dr. Eva Gutheil, Renate Gieg
EOG (Erweiterte Orgasmus Gruppe), Erfurt - Gabriele Stötzer, Verena Kyselka
Musikpädagogin und Chorleiterin, Gotha - Dr. Susanne Polcuch
Singer installation:
Lea Oelkers, VeraSeyffert, Dorothee Schicht, Nina Stühring, Deborah Jeromin, Johanna Posenenske, Stefanie Spiegler
Singer recording:
Henriette Aichinger, Clara Ehrenwerth, Kristin Elsner, Marie Kraja Lea Oelkers, Johanna Posenenske, Josefine Poser, Juliane Schmidt, Vera Seyffert
Aufgenommen bei Nebo Klak, Leipzig 2022
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