Event

Our project "EINGESPERRT" ("locked up") is partly dedicated to the fate of a social outsider: The German artist Julius Klingebiel (1904–1965) was an "outsider," someone marginalized as mentally ill. He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore admitted to several psychiatric hospitals starting in 1939; later, he was a patient at the Göttingen State Hospital. Klingebiel was considered incurable, was forcibly sterilized under the Nazi Eugenics Law, but even survived the Nazi extermination campaigns. Starting in 1951, he painted all the walls of his cell at the Göttingen detention center. The "Klingebiel Cell" is today regarded as a unique work of Art Brut. Further information on Julius Klingebiel can be found here.

Two contemporary Asian compositions, whose points of departure could not be further apart – even geographically – come together in the program "EINGESPERRT" (not least thanks to their mutual contextualization with Clemens Gadenstätter’s Klingebiel piece) to form a musical-philosophical discourse on personal freedom that is as multifaceted as it is sensual.

Chang Yu-Hui’s Saving Faces explores the use of artificial facial recognition, a technology that is becoming increasingly commonplace worldwide – in autocratically ruled China as well as in democratic Taiwan. It has the potential to restrict everyone’s individual freedom.

In Shen Ye’s Babel, the story of the Tower of Babel – which established language barriers and scattered peoples across the world – is used to trace the origins of misunderstanding, separation, and distance.

A person in a cell – hidden behind a face mask and measured digitally – in a country – in an apartment under quarantine – these aspects of the theme of confinement are explored in the concert. It was conceived long before the coronavirus pandemic – and is now highly relevant.

This project is supported by the Karin Brass Foundation and the Förderverein der Sozialpsychiatrie Moringen e.V., among others.