Park III: how leisure always imitates labor
with Jan Kunkel, Vera Karlsson, and Alie O.
Saturday, September 9
3pm

The performance series Park in the adjacent Hofgarten concludes with its third iteration titled how leisure always imitates labor by Jan Kunkel with Vera Karlsson and Alie O. The new piece supposes the co-presence of leisure and labor within each other—both contain and mirror one another through plays of imitation/substitution.

When an “institution” and “infrastructure” couple, a bond for life is formed. The performance exemplarily uses the instituted properties of marriage to glance at its attempt to decorate labor as leisure in the name of (possessive) love and (naturalized) mirages of the “self.” As a public park, the Hofgarten conveys a popular scene for wedding photography. It is therefore often utilized as a stage to enact the holy union of wedlock, ensuring sentimental documentation and material perpetuation. Couples and their entourage overextend this scene until finally leaving it emptied.

Shells, fountains, and pleasure houses are symbols of the baroque architecture in the Hofgarten. Focusing on this historical continuation, the piece re-appropriates the garden as a scenery for the German tragic drama or Trauerspiel. It intently suspends modes of establishing and relinquishing the genre, remaining concerned with a shared un-realization of opulent violence as a form of (dis)possession. The figures of the Trauerspiel exhaust and overcome themselves in the final scene: from reenacting twosomes to self-abolition. how leisure always imitates labor thus examines performance as spectacle, disorganization, and collapse.