With "The Great Report", choreographer and researcher Moritz Frischkorn, together with an interdisciplinary artistic team (including filmmaker Paula Hildebrandt, sound artist Nour Sokhon and photographer Robin Hinsch), has developed a multimedia, artistic research work that tells stories about our involvement in capitalist trade cycles. Based on the observation that logistics companies describe themselves as choreographers of global flows of goods, the artists searched for traces of logistical movements of goods. Their path leads to Nigeria, Greece and Lebanon, with each country receiving its own dossier and artistic medium: the research in Greece was accompanied by film, the research in Nigeria by photography, and in Lebanon Nour Sokhon created sound work. A picture of the otherwise mostly invisible global trade networks - primarily of water, waste and oil - emerges in the course of these journeys. The research reports, reminiscent of gonzo journalism, are condensed through the addition of film, photo, audio, and annotation material into a sensual, immersive journey on the tracks of logistical commodity chains. In the process, we encounter profiteers and oligarchy as well as activists and victims, but above all our very own Western involvement in this bizarre dance of commodities, which still reproduces traces of colonialism and militarism.
The SECOND NATURE LAB presents excerpts from Frischkorn's research reports as a serialized novel. Each month until the beginning of 2021 we will feature another dossier. With each week, new chapters, new photographs and impressions will be added and condensed into a disturbing image of the often invisible distribution chains of oil, water and garbage. As smooth as the choreography of logistics may seem at first glance, in reality it perpetuates neocolonial patterns of exploitation and environmental destruction.
Starting point for October is the first chapter of the Crete dossier.
At the same time, you can see Paula Hildebrandt's film about the logistics of paradise in Crete, Nour Sokhon's sound work on land reclamation from garbage in Lebanon, and Robin Hinsch's photographs of the oil industry in Nigeria currently on view at GREENHOUSE NAXOS. The installation there was developed on the basis of the stage design by the set designer Vladimir Miller.
The complete research reports and other archive material can be found in the web archive of the Great Report.
Project members of the Great Report:
Heike Bröckerhoff, Moritz Frischkorn, Paula Hildebrandt, Annalena Kirchler, Robin Hinsch, Vladimir Miller, Katharina Pelosi, Maria Scaroni und Nour Sokhon
The Great Report, (c) Moritz Frischkorn
THE GREAT REPORT was funded by:
Elbkulturfonds der Stadt Hamburg, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, and coproduced by Kampnagel Hamburg.
The guest performance during NODE20 was supported by the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and the Departments of Culture and Arts of the German federal states, as well as the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.