Alice Creischer, Christian von Borries and Andreas Siekmann
City Point, Königplatz, Kassel, 2nd, 3rd, 4th of July, 17.00
A piece of science fiction is being staged in Kassel’s Königsplatz Mall: five musical scenes and a libretto dealing with experiments in rejecting today’s commodity world. Textual passages in documentary, dialogue and slogan form spoken, chanted and sung by ten performers explore and update past attempts at negation. The passages are embedded in a score that musically investigates the impact and efficacy of political music. Time is central to this feasibility study as a factor in production and sale in both their histories and in attempts at their appropriation. Auf einmal und gleichzeitig translates critique into action by taking commodities back to their origins, and the sounds of the present into a score by means of Soundalike software. By engaging in strategies of appropriation, elements of contemporary late capitalism are rearranged: the Mall becomes a musical instrument, stage, and showpiece. In the Mall the performers rehearse concrete negations of their environment. Everything turns on decoupling the elements of the labour-commoditymoney nexus. There is no pretence at starry-eyed freedom in this world in which one might “suddenly cease to want to buy anything”. Actions, parentheses, and initiatives remain in opposition to one another. A supermarket’s entire stock of Tilapia is bought up, nothing is left––“every commodity is a scandal”, and is symbolically returned to its origin (Lake Victoria) on capitalism’s low-wage periphery. Auf einmal und gleichzeitig experiments with playing off commodities against their reproduction, and the production of music against its copyright exploitability. For its aim is not to rescue isolated actionist elements of the present, but rather to put its entire cultural history at our disposal.
