In the fall of 2016, a two-year cooperation has begun between Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and the Offenbach based artist collective YRD.Works with its members David Bausch, Yacin Boudalfa and Ruben Fischer. In the context of the German Federal Cultural Foundation’s Doppelpass program, which promotes partnerships between independent art groups and established theaters, YRD.Works realizes four projects that alternate between the Mousonturm and parts of Offenbach’s port. The artist collective does not only work closely with the Mousonturm team; it also repeatedly cooperates with colleagues from the performing arts and music.
The two-year partnership allows YRD.Works and the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm to examine their own work methods and conquer previously unknown territories. The focus of their common interest is the “artist house” category that was so elementary at the Mousonturm’s founding at the end of the 1980s. Conceived as an open space with apartments, studios, recording studios, rehearsal spaces and theater stages in the spirit of a rigorous interdisciplinary approach, the Mousonturm has now developed into a highly efficient staff organization and infrastructure that is exclusively specialized on the realization of performing arts productions.
In their cooperation, YRD.Works and the Mousonturm experiment with surprising openings and re-appropriations. They develop new dispositives of a transdisciplinary artist house that disengage from the paradigms of given traditions in architecture, institutions and cultural politics.
As the first Doppelpass activity, YRD.Works transformed the Mousonturm’s restaurant into a knife factory („Messerschmiede“) during their residency in April 2017 and produced 100 knives. YRD.Works were especially interested in the company’s ambivalent status: What is cutlery and what are the knives? Are they banal objects of our daily life or rather limited art objects? Is the knife factory an artistic performance or a commercial pop-up shop? Is cutlery a craft of precision or serial production? Or put simply: tool or weapon?
In July 2017 YRD.Works and the Mousonturm-team initiated together with the Japanese performance collective contact Gonzo and the Frankfurt-based electronic-duo Les Trucs the 1. Offenbacher Seefestspiele (1. Lake Festival of Offenbach). They transformed the property in front of Kressmann-Halle, an exhibition hall that YRD.Works run since summer 2016 in the former harbour of Offenbach into a lake of 600 m2. The artificial lake was simultaneously a water basin, an accessible sculpture and a stage; each day during the “Seefestspiele”, a different performative action took place there. A construction error of a new adjacent street, leading to regular floodings of the property, had inspired the artists. They were especially interested in the ambivalence between the creative character of a city fountain and the destructive power of floods.
In January 2018 YRD.Works will will present a piece specially developed for the heart of Mousonturm: the theatre hall. „Insight Out“ will transform the black box into an unusual space in which conventions and potentials of different spatial devices overlap. Interior and exterior spaces, the smooth facade and the exposed structures, the individual contemplation of an object in an exhibition space, the collective experience of the theatre and the act of submerging oneself in the anonymous mass of the club.
Supported by the Doppelpass fund of the German Federal Cultural.