The
Art
of
Emergency

Dorothea Koch

Dorothea Koch lives and works as a freelance art and cultural worker in Hamburg.
Her focus lies in the areas of everyday culture, thing research, perception and fiction.
She uses performance, words, textiles, installation and action as artistic formats.

rhzrhz.de

Projekt

„steht noch dahin” ("still stands to")

Dorothea Koch - steht noch dahin ("still stands to")

a personal trauma

a production for emergency situations

text snippets, poems, quotes, stories

subjective, cryptic, incomplete

read out and narrated

"The Red King in 'Alice in the Land of Mirrors' gives the bailiff this rule: 'Start with the beginning, keep going through the middle, and when you get to the end, stop.' That's how stories work. But the world doesn't work that way, so we keep asking: How did it start? Ah, creation stories! And how will it end? That's where we have the apocalypses." (Alberto Manguel)

Dorothea Koch loves books, sometimes writes texts herself, lays out nets and catches them again, performs and stages (also in public spaces), deals with everyday culture and does research on things, helps build collective structures and moves in them, has worked with textiles, curated exhibitions, co-founded the artists' collective RHZ – Radical Handicraft Circle – , with a research group asked 100 questions to V.F, visited the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Zoo with Knut (the ice saint) (two tickets please, one adult and one polar bear), questioned the healing effect of cut flowers "Durch die Bluse" (“by/through the blouse"), explored properties of the rainbow, played with possibilities of masquerade and subculture, published a collection of texts about losses with A. Mayer, explored things of an Austrian attic with N. Noack, studied birds' nests and declared her mother's house a 24 hour museum. Dorothea Koch lives and works in relative safety mostly in Hamburg.

Saturday, 11th March- 19H
Staged reading
„steht noch dahin” ("still stands to")

The Intermission D of THE ART OF EMERGANCY in the Arbeitszimmer thealit St.-Jürgen-Str. 157/159 is given as a staged reading: Dorothea Koch comes to Bremen with "steht noch dahin" ("still stands to").

What is it about?
"A personal trauma", "a staging for emergency situations". This goes back to a special management of emergency, one with full risk: There was a fire. Dorothea Koch jumped from the third floor. "And what would happen if all my photos and books were burned?" she asked herself then and put together her favorite books. However, in a new emergency they would be much too heavy and too many. So nothing was more obvious than to compile quotations from these books, as a precaution, "which I could tuck under my arm or pack in my backpack in case of emergency. The results of such securing, at the same time fragmenting and reassembling measures can now be heard at thealit.

"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?",
the White Rabbit asked the king.
"Begin at the beginning, [...]and go on till you come to the end:
then stop."

So says Alice in Wonderland. Actually a good advice, but hardly possible to follow it. Why else the stories that are started and finished over and over again? The stories of beginning: the myriad of creation stories, the stories of ending: the never-ending apocalypses ...
All this read and narrated by Dorothea Koch with texts by Marie-Luise Kaschnitz, Teju Cole, Dubravka Ugrešić, Alberto Manguel, Roger Willemsen, Chantal Akermann, Etel Adnan, Einar Schleef and others.

Other works by Dorothea Koch

Selection →