WE HAVE NO CHOICE | 2011

THE QUEST
"… how can we fail together ?"
With these words the collective Lou Grevenstorff addressed the collective C&H in 2007 and proposed a collaboration that would have the intention to find answers to the question in the form of a media-clash of film and performance.

Lou Grevenstorff is a Hamburg based collective, engaging in (anti-) political, visual, performative interventions choosing adequate identities, for what she is doing : Lou is filmmaker, poster-artist, directs alphabetisation courses, works as sexual pedagogue and is proud of wearing (freshly washed) white tennis socks.

C&H is the collective of Heike Langsdorf, Christophe Meierhans and Christoph Ragg. The three artists make work from 'what comes up to them', based on a no-disciplinary practice, developed during the last 10 years. 

Despite proceeding with, at first sight incomparable working methods, Lou's as well as C&H's work is usually mentioned as being 'actionistic'. Unlike the approach of their performance producing colleagues of C&H, (known for their theatre specific and composition-based techniques for hacking, undermining and transforming social mechanisms), Lou's approach finds it inspiration rather in history, philosophy as well as psychology.

Researching the failing of art, and asking the question how to learn from it, Lou and C&H agreed on the following deal : C&H would provide the scenery to be filmed, whereas Lou would provide the realm to be researched : the History of Revolution, ... of shattered attempts to end the unbearable.


THE IMAGE
The 'task', given by Lou to C&H,  was an 'image' to be brought into action : Walter Benjamin's Angel of History : an angel flying backwards in high speed, facing the wracks of the past, unable to neither make whole what has been smashed nor to turn around.

This image was accompanying the entire 3 year process and in a first round brought into investigation the principle of 'urgency' : a type of urgency emerging from the unbearable and the imposed, sensations to different degrees (not) detectable in our daily life : 'having to get up' - 'having to have sex' - 'having to go to work’- 'having to have something' - 'having to be someone' - 'having to end this' - 'fleeing real danger'.

Urgency remained the hard-core to be worked with and WE HAVE NO CHOICE wants us to consider urgency as a shared wound to live and act with.

Conspiracy
A principle often used by C&H in order to toy with theatre conventions, is conspiracy : going to the theatre implicates always the 'not negotiated' contract between very specifically informed people, something we find to similar degrees in all kinds of intrigues, espionage and trafficking.

Drawing further on the principle of selective informing, which made them declaring first a lecture/performance (KONSPIRATION 2004) and later postcards (Postcards From The Future 2007 - 2011) the respective medium for signing the theatrical contract, WE HAVE NO CHOICE is an attempt to use film as a vehicle for letting the public transit from the secure place of an agreement to the insecure place of its consequences.

Pushed into the corner
During the process the main difficulty was coming forth from the different ways of translating the shared abstract questions into concrete images. What became the title of the collaboration is not only referring to the sensation of urgency but in the same time to the decision making process of Lou and C&H : combining their contradicting working personalities, one giving preference to a history, manifested and documented, the other promoting the viewing of in-situ appearance : the only escape was an escape to the front : towards a new possibility, neither to find in the cinema, nor in history, but just in front of our doors.

Let's leave the theatre together and get lost ...


Lars Kwakkenbos over WE HAVE NO CHOICE >>>


a movie by :
C&H & Lou Grevenstorff
production :
Kunst/Werk
co-production :
Vooruit