the monday walks

play! Leipzig Conference and Performance Festival
24 - 27 June 2010

Project blog

Inspired by the demonstrations that took place in Leipzig leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and beyond, the so-called Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday Demonstrations), we made The Monday Walks for the same urban space albeit 20 years later.

plan b asked how we can shift the attention of the listener/walker to reconsider urban spaces as sites of resistance? How do we experience/ remember/ reconsider pivotal historic acts 20 years later in a city that has naturally changed? How we can create collective performative experiences in urban spaces through the power of suggestion and minimal technical intervention?

We made the project in collaboration with students from the University of Leipzig and the Tanz Archiv in the context of the play! Leipzig Conference and Performance Festival

GPS journey reconstructions

The Monday Walks had two main outcomes. The first was a GPS animation of recreations of the journeys people took to the demonstrations in 1989 from leaving their home or workplace to joining the marching masses that occupied the whole of the city ring, itself widened for state events. The students interviewed people in Leipzig who took part in the demonstrations and reconstructed their journeys, recording the results on GPSs that are then visualised with plan b and the avr::ptr team of computer scientists. The result showed an animation of lines converging on Leipzig from the neighbouring suburbs, surrounding cities and different districts and then drawing/walking together to delineate the demonstration path following the city ring.

A guided walk through Leipzig with live intervention and audio

The second outcome of the Monday Walks was a walk re-tracing part of the Monday Demonstrations, finishing where many of the demonstrations ended, at the Stasi headquarters, the Runde Ecke. The walk was developed in collaboration with the students and featured some original sound material from the time as well as interviews with Leipzigers who took part in the demonstrations and some live interventions into the space and social fabric of the city.

Project Blog

During the project, we kept a blog in order to continue communicating with each other outside of the contact time and share the experiences of collecting the GPS and interview material as well as reflect about the workshops we ran in the lead up to the production period in June. You can take a look behind the scenes at http://mondaywalks.blogspot.com/

Conference

As well as showing the GPS tracks at the symposium venue, we gave a talk about our work, focussing on the Monday Walks during which we showed the GPS animation as our contribution to the conference that was organised around the performance festival. We presented during the morning session on Friday 25 June. Check the festival web site for details.

Thanks

We would like to thank the students of the University of Leipzig, Marcus Quent, Peter Vasil and friends, the staff of the Tanz Archiv Leipzig, Prof. Patrick Primavesi, Elaine New and Nathaniel Nelson

Monday Walks audio guide sound sample

The Monday Walks GPS Video

 

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