FFF1 | Situation Rooms

Theater / Installations, Germany

Greek audiences are already familiar with Rimini Protokoll, the leading European avant-garde theatre company which established the Reality Trend (Theater der Zeit) at the end of the Nineties along with the so-called ‘theater of experts’, and has made the theatre-documentary concept their own.. Now the group returns to Athens to set up the Situation Rooms in the city center.

“Situation Rooms" gathers together 20 people from various continents, whose biographies have been shaped by weapons in a film set that recreates the globalized world of pistols and rocket-propelled grenades, of assault rifles and drones, of rulers and refugees, becoming a parcours of unexpected neighborhoods and intersections. With the personal narratives of the ‘inhabitants’, the images start to move and the audience follows the individual trails of the cameras they have been given. They start to inhabit the building, while following what they see and hear on their equipment. The audience does not sit opposite the piece to watch and judge it from the outside; instead, the spectators ensnare themselves in a network of incidents, slipping into the perspectives of the protagonists, whose traces are followed by other spectators.

One spectator sits at the desk of a manager for defense systems. At the same time, another follows the film of a Pakistani lawyer representing victims of American drone attacks in a cramped room with surveillance monitors. On her way there, she sees a third spectator who follows his film into the shooting range of a Berlin gun club, listening Germany's parcours shooting champion. Around the corner stands another spectator in the role of a doctor carrying out amputations in Sierra Leone, while in the room next door a press photographer sorts pictures of German army missions in Afghanistan, only to stand in the shooting range himself a little later to do exactly what he was able to observe in passing just a while ago, thereby becoming a subject for observation himself.

The audience gradually becomes entangled in the film set’s spatial and material labyrinth; each individual becoming part of the re-enactment of a complicatedly elaborated multi-perspective “shooting”.
Situation Rooms is a multiple simultaneous cinema; augmented reality as three-dimensional as only theatre can be!”

A production of Rimini Apparat and Ruhrtriennale, in coproduction with Schauspielhaus (Zurich), SPIELART festival & Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich), Perth Internationl Arts Festival (Perth , Australia), Grande Halle et Parc de la Villette (Paris), HAU - Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt) , Onassis Stegi.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Regierende Bürgermeister of Berlin - Senate Chancellery - Cultural Affairs.

With the support of Goethe Institut.