engl /dt
In her collective works, Marei Loellmann explores artistic practice that can function beyond a specific target group as a practice of social inclusion and mutual contact. By including physical experiences and individual perspectives, knowledge intertwines in multi-layered, dialogical forms in order to offer possibilities of developing new perspectives, creating points of contact for being with each other and sensing impulses for participation and individual proactivity.
photos Francisco L. Conde, Umbruch Archiv, Hannah Fee Kreuzer, Michael Depasquale
Wem gehört Lauratibor / 2020 - 2022
The opera project Lauratibor regards itself as a form of activism: It emerged from a collaboration between long-standing organised residents, businesses and initiatives in the Reichenberger neighbourhood in Berlin. It tells the stories of displacement and resistance, processing them into a vocal protest against gentrification and the sell-out of the city of Berlin. Emerging from the long-running protest movements of the Lause Bleibt and Ratibor14 initiatives, an ensemble of three choirs, 20 soloists, a protest orchestra and many other participants came together to musically translate their struggle for their city as a real-life fairy tale in the form of a loud demonstration. The street opera was performed in in Berlin on Reichenberger Straße (2021/2022), Mariannenplatz (2021), Habersaathstraße (2022), and in August 2021 in Odense and at the Copenhagen Opera Festival in Denmark.
By and with: Kiezopernchor, Protest-Orchester, Kneipenkollektiv Meuterei, Esels Alptraum, Die GloReichen, Ratibor14, LauseBleibt, Danae Nagel (artistic assistance), Jan Brokof (stage), Bergit Faßl, Marei Löllmann, Marie Perglerova (costume), Norbert Ochmann (musical direction), Kiki Manders, Yagner Anderson, Alexandra Kloblouk (Verdichtikator/Senators), Martina, Mizza, Leh (Druids), Öz Kaveller (Divine of Hope), Ingo Tomi (storyteller), Konstanze Kromer (Tibor), Johannes C. Held (Maximilius Profitikus), Marieke Wikesjo (idea/Laura), Tina Müller (idea/text), Anders Ehlin (music), Konstanze Schmitt (director) and more, complete on lauratibor.de
More infos: link
Umrisse in den Rissen / 2019-2020
In Hohenlockstedt, a small community in Schleswig-Holstein, neighbours came together at the Arthur Boskamp Foundation in 2020 for a series of storytelling cafés. The central question was: How do we want to live together? In collaboration with Ulrike Bernard, as artist duo Polyphrenic Creatures, they accompanied these conversations for one year.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, almost all events had to take place digitally. Due to these conditions, Polyphrenic Creatures began a letter mail correspondence with residents and activists from the region. The project, originally conceived as a performance, was reworked into two sound collages that outline a social space of human relations and interactions. The statements, moods, ideas from the conversations and correspondence are interwoven in multiple linguistic layers that dynamically unite the physical experience and collective exploration of local and alternative knowledge production. The sound collages do not serve to capture a result, but rather to offer the possibility of developing new perspectives, creating points of contact for being with each other and sensing impulses for participation.
More infos to the project Holo Miteinander ( a project for a solidarity community in Hohenlockstedt) can be found here.
An audio excerpt can be found here.
The recording of the opening evening at Haus der Kulturen der Welt can be found in the media library of HKW.
Pop Intratausch / 2018
"All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, changes you. The only lasting truth is Change." (Octavia E. Butler)
Pop Intratausch is a site-specific project by Ulrike Bernard and Mare Löllmann as artist duo Polyphrenic Creatures that was realized in 2018 as part of the VORBRENNER programme (BRUX/Freies Theater Innsbruck) and the Premierentage in Innsbruck. A closed down kiosk in the centre of the city was temporarily repurposed and transformed from a former place of consumption into a narrative space for experimental exchange. Conceived as an immersive situation, Pop Intratausch unfolded over two days, reflecting different dialogical and interactive forms of coexistence and possible spaces of dissent.
In this work, Polyphrenic Creatures propose listening as an active form of agency that is understood as a radical act of immediate power shifting. In the collectively practiced acts of sensing, perceiving, speaking, sharing and tasting, possibilities for the transformation of internalized knowledge emerge. The former kiosk thus becomes the starting point for intra-acting conversations in the space, which are reflected in different sound collages.
more information and audio excerpts can be found here.
Soft shells / 2015-2018
Cultures, traditions, fashion and politics are interwoven in clothing; clothing connects and separates. Like a language, it forms a social fabric that can express affiliations, one’s view on others and oneself. By making clothes our own, actively designing, changing, adapting or expanding them, they become the material for personal narratives and can be experienced as a space of possibility.
Between 2015 and 2018, Marei Löllmann initiated a mobile sewing workshop for young women and girls in different contexts. With different focal points, they were able to design their own clothes. The sewing workshop can be described as a mobile medium that, like a textile, is constantly deforming, changing, adapting and functions as a place of learning and experience of artistic expression, empowerment and a place of cross-cultural listening.
In 2015-2016, the mobile sewing workshop Klamottenfactory (in cooperation with Susanne Göldner) was set up for young women in an emergency shelter in Straßburgerstraße and afterwards in a community centre on Teutoburger Platz in Berlin. Additional workshops took place during the holidays with the aim of expanding the sewing workshop into a cross-cultural meeting place for girls from the neighbourhood. In 2016-2017, Marei Löllmann set up the sewing workshop with socially disadvantaged schoolgirls in the Alfred Nobel School in Berlin Neukölln and in 2018 in a youth accommodation housing unaccompanied refugee girls in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Afterwards, the sewing workshop was permanently installed in the home so that the residents could use it beyond the duration of the project.