Rhythmifying Existence

The word is incapable of breaking the pattern of identification. In the video opera Prekaria, when the figures begin speaking about their past under the GDR regime, a web of personal memories emerges, coupled with sensations of circumstances, modes of behavior and images of a reality that is fading away more and more all the time. If one were to consider the interview passages of the work its core, the rhythm of language with its contexts of meaning would move to the foreground. This becomes clear in the form of speaking exhibited. The two artists place their partners in conversation at the table: it has the feel of a questioning, even an interrogation. The questions are precise, exposing aspects of the socialist regime, and often target the views of the individual. Reflections refer to a reality whose legitimacy was born by a state structure that no longer exists. What remains, one would like to think, are personal fragments of memory that contradict a discourse of truth, as maintained by other state structures as well. The answers show that all forms of individual or collective memory are either too large or too small to do justice to the totality of the lived period. This totality is usually coupled to the totality of political regimes and their relationship to language as the dominant site of inscribing meaning. The questionings move in heterogeneous temporalities. On the one hand, there is the time of bodies present with their own memory. On the other hand, temporal layerings of lived inscription surface repeating with small differences forming a whole, albeit fragmentary. If these fragments of reality were tied solely to language, the identity of the subject (human and linguistic) could not be removed from the grip of the regime—of any regime. The proximity between the past of the socialist regime and today’s political regimes becomes clear in the language itself, the subject in language that grants identity and stability. The political regime here always becomes a linguistic regime and beyond that a discipline of the body. Prekaria has made it its task to counter language’s claim to truth in memory with a different version of the reality of experience. If the interview is understood as a territorial practice that subjects memories to a rhythm of language, the musical and color aspects of the three-hour video work form a starting point for the multiplication of rhythms or signs of deterritorialization. Prekaria counteracts the language of memory as a dominant rhythm of identification with visual effects and with singing. The interviewees are defamiliarized by way of video effects and become diagrammatic distorted images, charged with color intensities. These queered figures break with the seriousness of the situation, or the trained seriousness with which regimes are normally addressed. The goal is not to loosen the statements of their seriousness or to make fun of them.