It was the sensational success of the last Venice Art Biennale before the global Covid-19 outbreak. “Sun & Sea”, the observation of a day at the beach with bath towels, sun oil, swimming tires, children and dogs, which was repeatedly irritated by singing bathers in opera form, was a sensual experience that immediately flooded the social platforms millions of times. Although the Lithuanian contribution was shown for half a year in a hard-to-find part of the Arsenale in 2019, the queues in front of the Marina Militare never stopped. For the project by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, which won the Golden Lion for the best production at the Biennale, visitors had to wait up to three hours in a barren alley in front of the building. The desire for the piece has never diminished afterwards.
“We could have played ‘Sun & Sea’ for weeks,” said Pablo Wendel, describing the demand on the announcement that the piece would be shown this weekend at the Luckenwalde electrical power station. The tickets were sold out within 48 hours, even though the provincial town 50 kilometers south of Berlin is not exactly a cultural district. Every third house has fallen into disrepair, and every second shop has been cleared after the lockdown. And the world-famous landmark of the city, the hat factory built by Erich Mendelsohn in 1923, stands empty in an area full of crumbling buildings in a sloppily renovated condition. At these corners in Luckenwalde it looks as if the destruction of the world by humans, which the vocal passages of “Sun & Sea” is about, is already an acute present here.
The setting corresponds perfectly with the ruinous state of the world
In any case, atmospherically, there could be no better place for the performance of this “ecological” music theater than the old municipal swimming pool on the premises of the Luckenwalde electrical power station. After many international tour stops in noble baroque theaters, universities and sports halls, the bathroom designed by Siemens in-house architect Hans Hertlein in 1913 is the first after Venice with a perfect aura. In the swimming pool filled with sand, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė is not only standing in a large hall when setting up the play, which still shows all the elements of a public bath, but in a state of dystopian decay. The setting, which corresponds perfectly to the ruinous state of the world, which is sung about in the arias by Vaiva Grainytė (text) and Lina Lapelytė (music), is itself an inspiring place of hope for sustainable change.
The artist Pablo Wendel and the curator Helen Turner, who bought the decommissioned lignite power station in the Art Nouveau building a few years ago, not only organize exhibitions and performances for an audience traveling from Berlin on an area of 10,000 square meters. Wendel is again producing electricity in the system under the title “Kunststrom”. With a pronounced urge for handicrafts, repairs and recycling and many pensioners in dungarees who were still working on the old machines, the Stuttgart artist was able to convert the 35-meter-high tangle of boilers, pipes, cogwheels and conveyor belts into a combined heat and power plant without the character as Alter rusty sculpture of the industrial age.
The gasification of chopped wood now creates the artificial current that is now used not only by museums and galleries, but also by private customers. At the same time, they support art projects, because Wendel’s company uses all profits to promote culture. The waste heat from power generation is also used, for example to temper the cold, wet sand in the swimming pool for the staging. Indoor beach had caused quite a few colds in Venice.
In the finale, humans try to use the 3-D printer to restore everything that they previously destroyed
With his do-it-yourself power plant, Pablo Wendel now wants to exemplarily prove that ecological power supply would be possible everywhere with little means and without making any profits. If you exclude travel and hotels, then the production of “Sun & Sea” has also been implemented in a CO₂-neutral manner. And as an artist who works a lot with the medium of electricity, Wendel’s zeal for design engineers is far from exhausted. He is currently converting a fire engine that can reach a range of 600 kilometers with wood chips from the forest. Wood in the tank, a future technology?
The director is visibly enthusiastic about the atmosphere of this area with its mighty halls, self-constructed machines and a large geodesic dome for events in the garden, where everything is reused, even old screws. Because their project was also created during a joint artist residency in 2016 at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart out of the unease about the throwaway attitude of the capitalist individual. In the finale, the libretto envisions one last person who tries with the 3-D printer to restore everything that he previously destroyed as a livelihood through shopping, trips to the Great Barrier Reef and unrestrained shrimp consumption.
Whereby Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, despite the overwhelming success of her beach opera, feels a little bitter that “Sun & Sea” is almost exclusively associated with rising sea levels, poisoned rivers and oceans that have been fished out. “We tried very hard to create a subtle work of art that tells from many different perspectives,” says Barzdžiukaitė. “In the reception, however, the piece is reduced very much to the ecological aspect.” In fact, the consciously cast variety of people who populate the bath towels and loungers in “Sun & Sea” reacts to the lyrics. From the rich mother to the workaholic to the philosopher, various figures reflect on their consumer paradoxes.
But the lure of this performance, of course, is the shameless voyeurism it allows. To look from the galleries to the varied relaxation of different people creates a harmless pleasure. How threatened this area of tanning is by the harmful activities of those lolling there, dawns on the viewer in the dark rather through the messages that are received drop by drop. People’s vacation does not serve to relax the world.
Sun & Sea: E-Werk Luckenwalde, Saturday, July 17, 3 p.m. – 7 p.m., Sunday, July 18, 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.