Togetherness

For the International Summer Festival 2021 at Kampnagel — the second pandemic influenced edition — we created a festival outdoor scenography focussing on modes of togetherness. Collaborating with the performance collective JAJAJA, we visually and atmospherically put an emphasis on what the pandemic nearly made impossible: coming to gather, together.

We therefore used aesthetics, affects and effects of funfairs as contemporary reference point. At this ambivalent space rough materials and plain adverts somehow meet captivating joyful, childish and foolish spirits of coming and being together. That’s why we turned the Kampnagel garden as the festival’s outdoor area into a fairytale-like fair-scape offering temporary spaces of joy: stages, bars, encounter spaces. And of course: The area was filled up with a scent of roasted almonds — that nobody actually sold. Thanks to flavored haze machines! 

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Funfairs are resting kitsch spaces. For creating this kind of landscape, we quoted sets and sceneries of classic fun and thrill rides, such as bumper car and the break dancer rides. And equipped them with bold and colorful display banners. As rough and quite cold effect production is a main part of funfairs, our scenery also revealed the disappointing technical production funfair dreams are made of. Being together in this funfair-fairytale-dreamscape became fragile — as fragile as being together in a pandemic showed us too.

When conceiving the scenography for the summer festival, we concentrated on barrier-free accessibility. We encorporated visual funfair narratives into accessible areas, e. g. for wheelchairs. Aside to this, we integrated visually prominent banners as well as tactile and acoustic orientation systems, all addressing multiple aesthetics of audience leading strategies.

As a spatial concept, we realized „Togetherness“ in the frame of Kampnagel’s International Summer Festival 2021 in Hamburg, Germany, happening from 04.08. to 22.08.2021. Invited artists and collectives were: JAJAJA, Josh Dolgin, Sophia Kennedy, Formation Now, Cointreau on Ice, Susanne Kennedy und Markus Selg, Feist, Ligna, Rufus Wainwright und Miet Warlop and many more.

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