DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

–Verena Stenke (VestAndPage), July 2020

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When the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns brought Europe to a halt in March 2020, I went to take refuge in my imagination because of the impossibility of producing live performance work. So came the vision of creating an imaginary place where we could encounter our artist-colleagues and continue co-creating art collectively, despite being obliged to physical distance.

I read the collection of surrealist short stories The Mirror in the Mirror by Michael Ende during the lockdown. It made me think of a film in which, as in the book, all episodes have their isolated protagonists related through a literary leitmotif. I shared my vision with the Anam Cara group; Andrea and I had already begun artistic collaboration in 2018. I invited them into this imaginary place, inviting their sharing of creative answers to the central question of what "home" means at this very moment. The question springs from our performance cycle HOME, interrogating notions of home since 2017 through collective performance operas.

I placed no intentional "deadline" (a word I dislike for its factuality and mere literal meaning or other limitations for producing the contributions, as lockdown had brought us all into emotional limbos. Some found themselves in artistic paralysis or confronted with the prosaic quest to secure a living. As we profess the potential of moments of crisis and the trust in change, we encouraged to inhabit the given situation artistically. Some had already started their projects in response to the lockdown. Others had never performed for a camera before. I invited them to use what they had at their disposal. In continuous feedback, I edited their material in line with the film's poetics. Others had created powerful diary writings that I encouraged them to record in their mother tongue to be used as voice-overs. Others created works ready to be placed in the timeline. Others bestowed sound pieces, writings, drawings, and impressions of a surrealistically emptied Venice, the city of our collective encounters in real life. It was, above all, a process of listening and letting the pieces fall into place, a place for everything and everything in its place, which we draw from our manifesto of performance-based filmmaking, "Poetics of Relations".

I needed a red thread to connect the seemingly disparate elements of the story-non-story into a non-linear narrative. Analogue and digital intersections were used to create our imaginary collective dwelling site, the "Castle of Mirroring Books". This castle is part of a larger universe springing from an old photograph album read by the White Bunny in a flowering garden in the film. The White Bunny is the tender raconteur: she opens the story through a poetic recall of the weeks of the lockdown. She bridges the artists' rooms with her cogitations on home and guides us back to reality from evanescence once the collective dream fades away.