The starting point of “Internment Area” is the therapeutic technique of the psychodrama, which was developed by Jacob L. Moreno in the 1930s. In its clinical application we try to discover the leading signs which have become one of the most important parameters of today‘s media production: The spread of intimacy in a spectacular dispositive.

The basis for the artistic work is the replica of Moreno‘s conceptual design of the scenic area. Through maximal visibility, free spaces, and the sparse usage of Helping objects, the stage is characterized by chairs and a mattress. The signs of an architecture which has extracted much from the 19th century and at the same time foreshadows the TV studios of the 70s shall be made visible. In this dispositive, a group of five protagonists portray a meeting according to the role playing technique constructed on the basis of real meeting protocol. The meeting was filmed with five actors and lasted 28 minutes. The video focuses on a boy who has fled a boarding school and has been caught. Now, a team of therapists is supposed to help him to work out his conflict situation. His mother accompanies him. At first only taking part in the meeting as an observer she nevertheless becomes involved in the play and enters the stage. In the corner of the stage is the director who functions as the preferred contact person of the protagonists. He asks questions, stimulates the play, and initiates the emotional outbursts. He is surrounded by two helping egos of the patient who take on the same attitude as he in order to express that, which he hardly dares to express.

In contrast to a conventional production in which the director the predetermined text and the parts clearly distributes, the actor directly becomes the author of his own fate, a situation which today is regularly exploited by TV entertainment. This is the technique of the confession. Because the architectural dispositive (scantiness, visibility by 360°) and the human dispositive (the players divide the two stabilizing modes of operation of authority among themselves, that is to say the mode of the director and that of the helping ego) are so conceived, that the patient has no other alternatives but to compromise himself, to tell and to show what he does, feels and projects in intimacy. The stage is available for his emancipation to feel and function better in his life. From then on the subjective story becomes material for the drama.

The large 1300 qm hall of the Wuerttemberg Art Society has led us to this project through its inherent utopia, its minimalism of the 60s, and its coercing materialism (square room of 36x36m without any opening besides the entrance door). The claustrophobic aspect which is explicitly reproduced in the film unexpectedly becomes apparent in this room. This is how the hall is reflected in its locked in state. The fragment of outdated theater architecture becomes the wonder of the modernistic ideal, which results in just such an exhibition hall. With this installation the dimension of the spectacular becomes logic with implicit regulations which we concentrate in this huge one eyed room in order to compress its occlusion. (Artists’ statement by Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger)