( IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE CONCRET YET) 

At the Osten Festival in Bitterfeld, we created a very intimate environment where we as invited artists, part of the curatorial team, and vulnerable local community shared our personal stories. The stories in which we address certain important political issues that affect our personal lives. During the talk, we brought personal narratives that have become available to us only after listening to the recorded material of the interviews with Bitterfeld’s witnesses who awarded us the trust so we could listen to them. It was written with the intention to bring forth the tension between immediate experiences and the context that mediates and co-constitutes those experiences. One of our stories was divided into three chapters: Steel, sugar cane, and oil as the three materials that give shape to the area geographically and impact the lives of the inhabitants and therefore form the immediate experiences too. The other story was complicating the perception of linear time that fixates on one location and it shows how this perspective breaks apart when we start to register translocally and begin to consider the planetary coexistence.

Storytelling and events:

As today, We create an event to tell stories. To practise the ability to exchange experience as Walter Benjamin emphases in such an event as a crucial action. Because memory creates the chain of tradition which passes on from generation to generation. The formal, fermented and written version of such an event is now a concrete and non changeable history which for creation of such a form only few had access to. But storytelling is part of our (people) daily practices and it is accessible. The Fermentation form of what is called the past didn’t stay in the past. It is very present, maybe not the event but its consequences. For example If we walk a few metres away from the kulturpalast you see a water dump which was not there before but it’s there now. Or better to say it is not looking the way it looks before. We don’t go far. We just need to take the step to the cellar and we will see the bar which you see part of it here around us was not here. And these are not anymore in the cellar because of certain changes. Back to storytelling, This skill, ritual, habit is a significant skill which we practice everyday. With the help of this skill now we are advanced to entangle the time more and challenge the events. Past-future-present are sometimes lost somewhere at the very present moment or in the very far future. Writing the stories, or making events for the storyteller is what matters and is a profound ground step beyond or inside the time complexity. For the first time, when we saw the kulturpalas. We saw a big form of the past which is very present. I think this is a good place to exchange experiences. The stories which have been told and will be told and some are told today.