SAVE THE DATE
La Bâtie Festival de Genève, August 30/31, 2025
Altes Krematorium Sihlfeld, Zurich, September 27/28, 2025
Somewhere where future and past collide, there must be a space, a gap. Or secret portals to other worlds. Perhaps just a speck of the idea of a new beginning? Climb into the gap with us and embark on a search for the loophole in time.
The starting point for THE GAP is a short parable by Franz Kafka from 1920. In it, he describes the situation of mankind, caught between past and future, and forced to struggle against both. Hannah Arendt places this story at the forefront of her book Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought and counters Kafka’s hopeless image with the conviction:
“Every human being is a beginning, a beginner, a novelty, something that never existed before, something new and unprecedented.”
For her, therefore, a new beginning is – despite everything – possible at any time, because mankind is free. But how can mankind deal with this claim to freedom? Which stories should be passed on and carried into the future, and which should not? Is history a prerequisite for freedom, or does it stand in its way?
In the performance installation, the various aspects of time in music are made tangible: striving forward and pushing back, staying still, braking, circling.
THE GAP creates a sensory space between past and future, between transience and new beginnings, and questions the collection and transmission of history(s) as well as the possibility of other realities. The audience wanders through a spatial circuit. They encounter installations that are musically and performatively played by small ensembles. They can play their own sonic topographies of memory, browse through image and sound archives, or listen to the whispering of books in the writing room and add new texts to the endless web of texts. Along the way, they encounter quirky time travelers who, with their time machine, are stranded in the present and, like everyone else, are searching for the energy for a fresh start, which is finally conjured up in the final act in a large tutti ensemble piece.
More information:
www.the-gap.space