Since 2010, the Mobile Academy Berlin has been researching the precarious zones between life and death and the Milieu of the Dead. The series deals with the gaps and absences in archives, collections and exhibitions. While exhibitions often present world history through objects and artifacts, the performances of the Mobile Academy Berlin stage the stories of things and beings that cannot or should not be shown, whose representation must fail. What you cannot see, you can talk about. What one cannot know, one should definitely talk about. In all appropriate ambiguity, narrating, fabulating and hallucinating. In this way one maintains relationships with things and beings that are not present.
The mechanical snail
- Kampnagel, Hamburg ,
- St. Elisabeth Church, Berlin
- Science theatre
For the Milieu of the Dead, the Mobile Academy set up a round theatre at various locations in Berlin. It is a mechanical arena, also known as a mechanical snail, designed especially for the series of events, with a curtain winding around the audience and protagonists in a spiral movement, opening up the view of the stage.
Design: Hannah Hurtzig
Architecture: Florian Stirnemann
Tribune and stage: Bartmann Berlin
Supporting structure in steel: Ertl & Zull
Track system and curtain: Gerriets
The mechanical snail was manufactured on behalf of the Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace. Supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.