The publication Black Studium documents the installation Black Lives Audio Triptych by Ina Wudtke. It uncovers traces of the history of Black people in Germany and is a multidirectional reminder of past and present anti-racist struggles.  

The work activates archive material, in particular songs, texts and photos relating to Fasia Jansen (1929 – 1997), Hilarius Gilges (1909 – 1933) and Joseph Ekwe Bilé (1892 – 1959) – all three were active in the context of the workers’ movement. 

The audio work consists of three staged audio self-portraits. The staging goes back to the techniques of the agit-prop play groups of the Weimar Republic. Local dialects were often used to reach workers; the actors were not supposed to merge with the roles as in bourgeois theater.  

The speakers, through their current social commitment, can be seen as continuing the protagonists’ political work: Jasmin Eding (speaker Fasia), for example, belongs to a group of Black women who organized with others ADEFRA (Black Women in Germany) in the 1980s for the rights and visibility of Black people in Germany. The Krump dancer Kofie Boachie (speaker Hilarius Gilges) was instrumental in organizing the Black Lives Matter demos in Düsseldorf. Jaenne-Ange Wagne (speaker Joseph Ekwe Bilé) deals with the colonial entanglements of cultural institutions. 

„We only started to deal with our Black history in the mid-1980s and now 37 years have passed and a lot has happened.“ – Jasmin Eding

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This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

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In her email correspondence with the New Zealand artist Matthew Cowan, which took place during the Corona pandemic, the artist provides insights into her photographic working methods. She outlines a practice that combines photography as a communicative and documentary medium with the process of archiving and its artistic translation.

She documents, among other things, legal exhibits in the evidence rooms of cities in Germany, re-enacts the police search of her parents’ house 13 years after the actual event in 1990 and artistically examines a playground with its special history as a background. For her, the use of glass as a working material is both functionally and conceptually an important filter for historical aesthetics, temporary architectures and the absent as information. Within these strategies, Müller’s photographic practice is an inventory of real and fictional events that address claims of the legal and artistic truth of objects.

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Such a philosophical approach offers an effective theoretical tool for opening up original and pointed perspectives to redefine the crisis of anthropocentrism by putting the place and capacities of what is human in relation to what is non-human, be it living or technical. Helmuth Plessner’s work is really brought into play here and serves as the basis for experimental performances and the formulation of new concepts.

The publication gathers two films by Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer, which are accessible in full length together with the book, as well as the text by David Zerbib:

– Der Freie Mensch – mit KI, Germany/Switzerland, video 4k, 7:43 min, 2019
– ƒ zwischen den Stufen des Organischen, Germany/Switzerland, video 4k, 20:40 min, 2021
– David Zerbib, Der Mensch, der Hund, der Roboter und die Seerose. Philosophische Anthropologie und Ästhetik des Falls ƒ, 2021

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