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(c) Ant Hampton, (c) Britt Hatzius

Ant Hampton/Rita Pauls

(Heidelberg/Buenos Aires)

Mund-Stück (Mouth Piece)

Mousonturm Studio 1

Performance

“What do you feel needs to be said?” – As British performance artist Ant Hampton and Argentinian writer and actress Rita Pauls hitch-hiked randomly across Germany, they asked the people, who picked them up this questions. Neither Hampton or Pauls speak or understand German but they recorded the answers in order to later memorize them and in doing so learn and assimilate more of the country and the German language. Pauls has a German passport via her great-grandparents, Berliners fleeing Nazism in the 1930’s. Hampton is in the process of acquiring German citizenship, not least of all because of Brexit. In “Mouth Piece”, the two of them reproduce the answers that people gave them verbatim, synchronously, with all the pauses to catch one’s breath or sort out thoughts, the sound of the voices and the accents. The result is a reflection of a society’s voices and moods, often funny, sometimes a bit shocking.