Workshop I
Kinship and other Monstrosities
24/09 – 29/09/2007

By Kattrin Deufert (D) & Thomas Plischke (D)
With Jeroen Peeters (B), Katharina Pewny (A/D) & Marcus Steinweg (D)


How do we claim artistic interest in a time when "normal" life seems to be more and more aestheticised and art more and more contingent or every-day-like. Antigone as a myth, a failed hero, a theatrical figure and a cultural political concept will be the starting cloth of our workshop. Her "I say I did do it and I don't deny it" testifies a possible language of performance that formulates itself on the border of a withdrawal of action and of staying political by resistingly living the desire for death. The name „Antigone“ is constructed as anti-generation and she figures the limits of intelligibility exposed at the limits of kinship.

Together with the workshop participants material will be collected, cross-read and processed that tackles the myth of Antigone, the problematics of kinship, the politics of representing
###(or creating) monsters in our society, the functionalities of terror in a capitalistic world, the precarious relation between death, incest, family and suicide.

Together we will start our working method of Reformulation based on the already individually collected material. In a circular structure we initiate processes of formulation, rendering, reformulation, passing on and giving up. In the end we will come up with individual projects without a fixed authorship that can be worked out further. The idea of giving up and passing on is a central concept of our workshops. The participants experience through the giving up of authorship a possible difference of individual and shared reference within the frame of always also socially sharable and communicatable aesthetical processes.


Kattrin Deufert + Thomas Plischke founded frankfurter küche in 2001. As the artist-twin “deufert+plischke” they work on theatre projects, installations, and text and video publications. From 2001 to 2006, they created their plays “As you like it” (2002), “inexhaustible (RW)” (2003), “Sofia SP – science is fiction” (2004), “As if (it was beautiful)” (2004), and the “Directories” trilogy (2003-6). deufert+plischke regularly teach at international art academies and were visiting professors for Performance Studies at Hamburg University in summer 2006.

Jeroen Peeters (Brussels) was trained in art history and philosophy and is currently active as a writer, dramaturg and curator in the field of dance and performance. He is co-directing the platform for criticism www.sarma.be and is an artistic collaborator with Martin Nachbar and Meg Stuart. His recent publications include the book Shadow Bodies on the work of Philipp Gehmacher and Raimund Hoghe.
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Katharina Pewny (Graz/Hamburg), theatre, dance and performance theorist, currently working on her habilitation project “Performing the Precarious. Analyzing and theorizing the Performing Arts in the New Millennium”. Researcher and teacher at numerous European and American universities and art academies. Dissertation on gender constructions of German-speaking women authors.

Marcus Steinweg, philosopher, lives in Berlin. Currently teaching at HBK Braunschweig. His most recent books are “Bataille Maschine” (with Thomas Hirschhorn), “Subjektsingularitäten”, “Behauptungsphilosophie”, “Mutter” (with Rosemarie Trockel), “Duras” (with Rosemarie Trockel).


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