STRÄNGE

For the festival garden we created connections: mapped out paths, spun networks, found junctions, established relations, and set nodal points. The festival’s living room became a landscape of routes and strands—a mesh that links the sites while opening a poetic structure.

We tapped the sculptural potential of infrastructural elements—high-voltage pylons, transport networks, substations, rail lines—to develop a scenography in the idiom of an overgrown industrial ruin that runs through the entire site. From a formal study of utility lines, an aesthetic vocabulary emerged: materials, colors, and surfaces entered into relation, prompted order, and enabled new orientations. Lines became a wayfinding system that guides movement and gaze.

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On the main square we installed a faithful replica of a transformer substation as the centerpiece of the scenography. With its monumental ordinariness, it gathered all the lines—they seemed to begin or end here. Anyone who opened the fire door found inside a gigantic spindle that, in endless repetition, interwove all the garden’s strands—a collectively shared hallucination created by the precise synchronization of a strobe light with the spindle’s rapid rotation.

The project continues last year’s work: we reinterpreted the material, rewired it, and added only a few elements. A shift in color marked the break and introduced the next layer. Between recognition and transformation, the mesh holds its balance, making the garden feel both familiar and new.

Planning, process design, budgeting, and realization of our stage and spatial concept “Stränge” took place as part of the International Summer Festival 2025 at Kampnagel in Hamburg (August 6–24, 2025). Invited artists included: Marlene Monteiro Freitas; akua naru & Tyshawn Sorey & Anta Helena Recke; Florentina Holzinger; Carolina Bianchi; Oona Doherty; Nesterval; Christoph Marthaler; Noname.

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