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Sophiensæle Forever Publikation – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

Program

Saison 26/27

Sophiensæle Forever Publikation

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Sophiensæle Forever Publikation

The three-part publication Sophiensæle Forever uses the triple anniversary of the venue, theater and Tanztage Berlin as a venture point to reflect on the (im)material conditions of artistic production. We know that art is work. And yet the myth persists to this day that love of art is drive enough. This is felt most acutely by those who work with limited resources and use their own bodies as material and medium, such as the emerging choreographers who have been given a platform by Tanztage for 30 years.

The second part of our anniversary publication, Sophiensæle Forever, coincides with this year’s International Performance Festival, titled Never Work. While contemporary labor demands more from us, it offers increasingly less of the social identity and stability it once promised. Yet a society where the link between wage labor and survival is finally severed still feels like a distant prospect.

Simone Dede Ayivi’s text Hanging Out links leisure and culture to labor rights, arguing that access to the arts is inseparable from fair pay, rest, and a functioning welfare state. Those who cut arts funding are the same people keeping workers precarious; leisure, she argues, is politically threatening to those in power.

In Good on Paper, Bad for People: Why We’re Losing Art and Care, Emma Holten traces the influence of the Enlightenment’s legacy on mainstream economics to show why the current system, built around market prices, fails to capture the value of art and care. She calls for new alliances between artists, care workers, and activists to challenge it.

Make Fire from the Ashes: Imagining the Arts Worth Living describes the experience of living inside a system, that structurally under values the arts, and is the closing text in this volume. Anka Herbut and Kasia Wolińska argue that the art world systematically produces exhaustion and disillusionment while promising “a good life.” What if, instead of working within the system’s rules, we simply refuse—and set it all on fire?

The second part of our anniversary publication is available online and in print at Sophiensæle.

The first part Sophiensæle Forever Tanztage is available here.

Publishers: Sophiensæle GmbH, Jens Hillje, Lena Kollender, Andrea Niederbuchner and Mateusz Szymanówka
Editing: Lena Kollender, Mateusz Szymanówka, Miriam Seise and Sebastian Sury
Copyediting: Miriam Seise, Sebastian Sury, Christoph Tempel, Louise Trueheart and Johanna Withelm
Translation: Alex Piasente-Szymański
Graphic Design: KaranKobel, karankobel.com

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