Oberammergau: Exhibition in the Museum of Materials from the Passion – Bavaria

Where the house normally stands, which many Oberammergau residents consider to be the most beautiful in the area, there has been a blue block for some time. The rough-looking surface structure alternates between light and dark shades of blue. A closer look reveals that these are fabrics, no, they are garments.

This material covering of the Oberammergau Museum is not the most conspicuous exhibit in the exhibition “(Im)Material – Material, Body, Passion”, which can be seen from April 23 to October 16. And now that we’re in Oberammergau, it’s also clear what kind of robes they are: Passion robes, of course, which the people wore at the 2000 and 2010 games.

It is said that some in the village find the scaffolding around the museum impossible. The most beautiful house is covered, hidden, completely without reason, nothing is being renovated here. Andrea Sorg, curatorial assistant to the curator Constanze Werner, calls it “making visible through covering”. She doesn’t think it’s a bad thing that people are criticizing it, it means that people are seeing their museum again. And that’s what the whole exhibition is actually about: feeling things, perceiving things that might otherwise seem natural.

The most bizarre exhibit: a red thread made of real hair from passion players

It’s normal to have discussions in Oberammergau anyway, the place where the very last preparations for the world-famous Passion Play are being made, which have been taking place in the village for 400 years and had to be postponed in 2020 due to the pandemic. The exhibition accompanies the Passion Play without having to have seen the play in order to understand it. As the title suggests, it deals on the one hand with materials that were left over from the production of the Passion Play and on the other hand with immaterial values ​​that accompany human life from birth to death. A bit of a hassle that, if you look closely, you don’t even need to get involved with the exhibition.

This then includes the entire cultural-historical museum, in which wood sculpture is normally the focus, and runs through the rooms. The artists alienate objects and spaces, change them and draw attention to what is supposedly familiar. More room installation than exhibition, small and large irritations. The blue fabric wall around the house continues inside, runs through all three floors of the museum, separates rooms, and you switch back and forth between inside and outside. Each room is designed by a different artist, by Stefan Reitsam, Michaela Johanne Gräper, Heike Schäfer and Tobias Haseidl.

And again and again it’s about making things visible by hiding them: in the entrance area, for example, where Oberammergau’s historic church nativity scene from the 18th century stands, everything is arranged as usual, the beginning of life, you understand. Only in the crib itself is there no child. On the first floor, the first room is completely lined with lining fabrics from the Passion robes, only a small chronos with hour clock and scythe, an 18th century stone pine sculpture, is exposed to view. The intangible value of time represented by a figure. The wooden carvings on display in the adjoining room are completely wrapped up and are strangely strange, an armada in gray wrapped in leftovers from folk costumes (fun fact: for conservation reasons, the original figures were carved out of hard foam and then wrapped up). This interplay creates an awareness of the materials used in the Passion Play on the one hand, and of the exhibits hidden beneath them on the other.

Stage and costume designer Stefan Hageneier designed the costumes for the Passion. When he no longer needs them, they go to their rightful owner, the municipality of Oberammergau, for further use.

Open detailed view

In the next room, in front of a “Christ resting” (framed in spruce and varnished, early 19th century, Hermann Bigelmayr), thick drops of blood made of linden wood float, a reminder of the suffering that, like birth and transience, is part of human life heard. The final stop is on the top floor: the room is again dressed in robes on which projections of idyllic images from the village and the surrounding area are played. In the middle of the room: a pillar made of cords, over which an angel seems to be scurrying. And which, when you climb into it, begins to shimmer and glitter. In the end there is the immaterial, it seems to say, salvation, so to speak.

By far the most bizarre exhibit, however, is the red thread that leads visitors from the entrance through the entire building, because it is twisted out of real hair. Anyone who deals with the passion knows that hair plays a not unimportant role in it. A year and a half before the games begin, the players start growing their hair and the men stop shaving. Because presumably Jesus and his companions also wore long hair and beards. When the last game is over, the big cutting starts, then Klaus Vogt is there. All of the hair twirled in the exhibition fell during the Post-Passion haircut and is now finding a new artistic purpose. This is as weird as it is sustainable and a bit disturbing. Not the worst mix.

“(Im)Material – Material, Body, Passion”, a building and room installation for Passion 2022, Oberammergau Museum, from April 23rd to October 16th