Museum Angewandte Kunst und Historisches Museum, Frankfurt
Teil der Ausstellung „Yes, we care. Das Neue Frankfurt und die Frage nach dem Gemeinwohl“ vom 10.05.2025-11.Januar.2026 im Museum Angewandte Kunst
16.05.-15.09.2019 im Historischen Museum Frankfurt
A sound installation about exclusion mechanisms and xenophobia in the New Frankfurt
Eleonora Herder / andpartnersincrime
In Frankfurt, there is an acute shortage of affordable housing and a massive displacement of low-income populations from the urban agglomeration. At the moment, this mainly affects the outskirts of the city, where the settlements of the so-called "new" Frankfurt are located. Ernst May's utopia of using political instruments to create social housing has failed.
While the buildings are listed as historical monuments and upgraded with renovation measures, apparently nobody finds anything worth protecting in social and political practice. The increasing existential pressure to which the inhabitants of these former workers' disctricts are exposed manifests itself in racism and xenophobia and not least in increasing success in elections of right-wing parties.
There is a suspicion that we have never really been modern.
A production of Anpartnersincrime in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Historischen Museum Frankfurt und dem Museum Angewandte Kunst. Unterstützt durch die Theaterförderung des Kulturamts der Stadt Frankfurt.
Concept, research, interviews and realization: Eleonora Herder
10. Mai 2025 – 11. Januar 2026 als Teil der Ausstellung „Yes, we care Das Neue Frankfurt und die Frage nach dem Gemeinwohl“ im Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt
16. Mai – 13. Oktober 2019 als Teil der Ausstellung „Wie wohnen die Leute“ im Historischen Museum Frankfurt
Between 1989 and 2005, approximately 200,000 Jews immigrated to Germany from Ukraine, Russia, and other states of the former Soviet Union. Today, people with a post-Soviet background make up a large part of the Jewish community in Germany. Their stories are an important part of reunified Germany, but their stories are rarely or only marginally mentioned in museums and schoolbooks.
The installation in the foyer of the Jewish community allows these people and their diverse perspectives to speak. Based on interviews that journalist Erica Zingher conducted with twelve people from three generations, the videos were created that speak of departure and the arduous attempt to build a new life in a foreign country. They tell of hopes and disappointments, of remaining a stranger and then somehow finally arriving. They tell of a country that first welcomes people with grand gestures, only to then feel forgotten. And of people who enrich this country with their stories and their own unique perspectives.
For the walk-in installation "Arrived in Between," andpartnersincrime has set up an entire living room in the foyer of the Jewish community. Mementos from the old homeland mingle with pieces of furniture hastily purchased after arrival that have since become outdated. Personal belongings can be read as traces of an individual life or as ciphers for an exemplary existence. Jars of preserves are stacked on the shelves, a half-finished crossword puzzle lies on the table, and a richly fragrant soup has been simmering on the stove for an indeterminate amount of time. Visitors find themselves in a seemingly intimate space between here and there, whose inhabitant seems to have just left.
The videos shown here revolve around the questions: What might Jewish remembrance in Germany look like today, given the diversity of experiences and biographies? How is the Shoah remembered and narrated from a post-Soviet perspective? How can and must the culture of remembrance in Germany be expanded to include the voices of those who have long been part of this country?
Ignatz Bubis Community Center, Savignystraße 66, Frankfurt
Opening hours: Sunday to Thursday, 2 pm – 8 pm, Friday 10 am – 2 pm, Saturday closed; admission free; no registration required
Concept and artistic direction: Eleonora Herder
Interviews: Erica Zingher
Room: Sandra Li Maennel Saveedra
Collaboration Room: Michelle Koprow
Video work: Soran Ahmed
Camera and photos: Sahar Rezaei
Editing assistance: Venera Kushner
Composition and sound design: Désirée Flegel
Piano: Eleonora Volskaya
Subtitles and translation Oksana Nevynska
Production Manager: Sven Rausch
Interviewees: Klarina Akselrud, Marat Dickermann, Leo Friedmann, Irina Ginsburg, Galina Gostrer, Stefan Hantel “Shantel”, Klaus Kozminski, Anna Kushnir, Regina Potomkina, Eduard Sviatskiy, Eleonora Volskaya
A project of the Cultural Department of the Jewish Community of Frankfurt am Main with andpartnersincrime, funded by the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. With the kind support of the Frankfurt Historical Museum. https://historisches-museum-frankfurt.de
andpartnersincrime is supported by the multi-year funding of the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main.
Soft opening / opening on Monday, May 9, from 5 p.m.
Duration: 10-22 May 2022 Opening hours: Sun. to Thurs. 2 pm – 8 pm, Fri. 10 am – 2 pm, Sat. closed
Arrived in Between (Long Documentary)
Video 1: Leaving
Video 2: Arrival
Video 3: Attribution
Video 4: In Between
Video 5: Remembering
Video 6: Speeches
Audio trailer “ARRIVAL IN BETWEEN”
The installation "Arrived in the In-Between?" at the Jewish Community Center in Frankfurt takes visitors on a journey through time. Bitter memories are also awakened.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 11, 2022, Theresa Weiß
The interviews reveal many nuances and in-between worlds. The stories oscillate between hope and disappointment, homelessness and yet a sense of having arrived.
Jewish General, May 16, 2022, Laura Vollmers
If you want to hear the stories, you'll want to set aside plenty of time. It's worth it.
'It is part of my happiness not to be a homeowner', wrote Nietzsche in The Gay Science. One must add today: it is part of morality not to be at home with oneself."
Theodor W. Adorno
"We believe that the collective momentum in the lives of today's human beings, which is so strongly expressed in labour, sport and politics, must logically also be reflected in people's living cells."
Ernst May
Zwofadolei* is a two-family house with a two-wire line, which the Frankfurt Bauhaus architect and urban planner Ernst May designed and built in 1926 for illustrative purposes for the international architecture congress of 'Neues Bauen'. In this model house he saw the solution to the urgent European-wide questions of urban planning and the accommodation of people at the so-called Existenzminimum (subsistence level).
For May, the rationalization, standardization of living and simplification of work processes was a premise for social change and the foundation for a new era of community and humanity.
In 1963 he published his urban development plans for a "Neues Wiesbaden" (new Wiesbaden), according to which a large part of old buildings and art nouveau villas were to be demolished and replaced by modern apartment blocks and terraced houses. The project, which was prevented by citizens' initiatives, was then only implemented on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. Today, the buildings are managed by the Union for Hessian Housing and are used as social housing.
Eleonora Herder and her team visited the residents of Schelmengraben and talked with them about their everyday life and their living concepts - did May's plan work out? Does the 'new citizen of Wiesbaden' exist? Does he perhaps live quietly and unnoticed on the outskirts of this squiggly city?
The issue of this performance installation is to what extent people have been shaped by urban planning and architecture in the twentieth century.
To what extent are the discourses, history and politics of an era and a city reflected in its urban planning and what of it do people still contain within themselves today? Do the architectural settings of the past continue to have an effect on the inhabitants of today like a ghostly utopia?
A production of the Staatstheater Wiesbaden.
This production has received postgraduate funding from the Hessian Theater Academy.
"Augmented Reality" is a research approach in computer science that attempts to enable a description, over- and rewriting of "reality" through digital audiovisual media. In this process, an object, a building or a location is scanned with the camera and the filmed live image is superimposed with an animated image pre-produced for this location and this perspective, thus enabling an extension of one's own reality, but also an overlapping of times and places within one's own time period.
In a project with a theatrical focus, the augmented realities could become mini stages that hang like halos above the haptic reality. A narration could take place, which is created in a interaction of illusion and participation. Can the medium be used for visual and acoustic subversion of places and people? Or does it simply enable a greater experience of something or someone who has been there? Do we use such a medium to track down ghosts? Or do we give a view of possible futures, perhaps a utopia?
All the places and objects of everyday use which we come into contact with are tainted with a utopia. Someone has at some point devised a more or less concrete or ideological definition of use for them. So they not only tell us about their actual history of use, but also about how or what we as consumers should actually be. This future of the past hangs invisibly and auratically above everything that surrounds us.
In our search for utopias of everyday life, we quickly came across "The New Frankfurt". This settlement policy, which was developed for Frankfurt in the 1920s by the architect and urban planner Ernst May. He did not only aim at an architectural development of the city, but also at a socialization of the society as a whole. Through the buildings and the associated structuring of private life, a new kind of human was to emerge, seeking a new era of unity and collectivity.
We wanted to use augmented reality to make implicit "layers" of our environment visible: To what extent are the discourses, history and politics of an era and a city reflected in its urban planning and what of it do people still contain within themselves today? Do the architectural settings of the past have the effect of a ghostly utopia on the inhabitants of today? We wanted to approach this question empirically by visiting the current residents of Ernst May Houses in order to interview them about their living situation and to document the movements in their apartments on film.
If augmented reality has so far mainly served to enrich reality with utopian/fictional elements, then from now on we want to enrich utopia with reality. As if today's reality were a kind of anticipation, a vision of the future that hovered over the utopia of the past.
For us, an architectural model seemed to be the manifestation of immaculate utopia in a haptic reality.
(Eleonora Herder)
Concept and management: Eleonora Herder
Dramaturgy: Anna Schewelew
Stage design: Sabine Born
Stage design assistance: Lucia Bushart
Performance: Eleonora Herder, Maria Isabel Hagen & Sabine Born
Video design: Alla Poppersoni
Interface: Central Workshop / Fabian Offert
Sound design: Jan Mech
28.06.2015 from 12:00h as part of the "Hessische Theatertage" at the Staatstheater Wiesbaden.
13.10.2015 from 18:00h Naxos cinema. "Cinema at the theatre"
11.11.2016 - 18.11.2016 as permanent installation in the city hall of Wiesbaden. As part of "Wir in Wiesbaden."
19.11.2016 - 25.11.206 as permanent installation in the district centre Schelmengraben, in Wiesbaden.
Teaser video:
https://vimeo.com/131591800
Documentation performance:
Documentation permanent installation:
"Frankfurt artist Eleonora Herder, stage designer Sabine Born, programmer Alla Popperini, and a team of social workers from the Schelmengraben Bunt cultural initiative have adapted this exhibition, which has already been seen in other cities, to local conditions. The effect is astonishing, but you'll need time and concentration."
(Anja Baumgart Pietsch: “Everyday life in Ernst May’s high-rise,” Wiesbadener Kurier, November 16, 2016)
"Most Wiesbaden residents probably don't know what a Zwofadolei is either. The famous architect Ernst May designed the "two-family house with double ducts," or "Zwofadolei," in the 1920s. The fact that they exist not only in "New Frankfurt," but also in Wiesbaden, far from the historic center, on Schelmengraben in Dotzheim, inspired Eleonora Herder, Maria Isabel Hagen, and Sabine Born to create a performance in which they bring together residents of today's Schelmengraben, May's theories, and the audience in front of a beautiful model of a semi-detached house."
(Eva Maria Magel: “Plays on a silver platter. The Hessian Theatre Days show what local stages can do,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 20, 2015)
“For Doubt” is an interview film project with and about so-called Third Culture Kids.
The term "third culture kids" originates from sociology and refers to children who grow up and are socialized in cultures that do not correspond to their parents' culture of origin. From infancy, they act as a bridge between the culture of their parents and the culture of the country in which they live, ultimately developing their own amalgamated cultures: a third culture without space and, above all, without a people, lacking a national and political counterpart to represent it.
The videos in the installation revolve around the themes of origin, belonging, but also marginalization and exclusion, and not least the question of a possible political form of representation for this subjectivity of being in-between. How can cultural identity be conceived between or beyond clear attributions? How can a form for doubt be found?
In cooperation with the Association of Binational Families and Partnerships and the Open House of Cultures. Supported by the Frankfurt Cultural Office and the Hessian Cultural Foundation.
Hien Mai, Aristotelis Agridopoulos, Alex Stathopoulos, Roland Kerepesi, Luka Geike, Miryam Schellbach, Anonymous, Jan Lopič, Lina Siri and Jihan Akrawi.
A production by andpartnersincrime made possible by the multi-year funding of the Frankfurt Cultural Office and the project grant of the Hessian Cultural Foundation.
Developed in collaboration with the Open House of Cultures and the Association of Binational Families and Partnerships Frankfurt as well as the Social Work program at the Frankfurt University of Applied Studies.
The door opens and I enter the room. It is a small, somewhat untidy room with a rumpled bed, a very large mirror on the wall behind it, a closet to the right, a desk, sideboard, armchair - just to name the things that catch my eye first, before I discover the numerous details that are there, when I take a closer look at the room: A bite of honey bread, for example, a text in the printer on the desk, books in the sideboard, pictures on the wall, strange test tubes in the closet, video cassettes and CDs around the players and much more.
Of course I know: This is a set. Because I am in the theatre, in the Frankfurt LAB, to be more precise. And the supposed room is a Site of Fiction and an "machinery of illusion based on motifs by E.T.A. Hoffmann", as the title of the performance I'm visiting here tells me. That's why I don't really consider the room to be an untidy room, but rather the staging of one. And thus I behave quite differently than I would in a room I don't know. I also assume that completely different things can or will happen here. I ask myself, for example, whether someone will perhaps appear under the duvet, or how many interventions in the arrangement on my part are calculated by the staging or can be tolerated by it.
Anyhow, a videotape that I insert cannot be played. And what makes the whole thing even more special - or theatrical - is the large mirror, which is not by chance reminiscent of the one-way mirrors in interrogation rooms that we know from TV crime novels. In other words: unlike in a normal room, I feel observed and suspect spectators behind the mirror, spectators, however, whom I cannot - at least not yet - personally identify.
And the fact that I feel observed by others also leads to a self-observation of my actions, in which these suddenly seem like played actions to me. In a certain sense, I watch myself play a role in front of unknown spectators - which at the same time raises the question whether I am always doing this in a normal room, supposedly unobserved, too. With Jacques Lacan, one could speak here of an experience of that gaze of the 'big other', which makes us 'viewed beings' in the 'spectacle of the world'. And it is this view from which I am now playing the game - I attempt to look through the mirror by placing my hands on it, or I lean out of a window, which actually allows me to see one of the performers who, together with the others outside the room, produces what reaches me inside the room.
But these actions also remain part of the game in a certain way, and next to them, I always behave as Diderot would have wished, i.e. I pretend that there are no spectators behind the 'fourth wall', which actually materializes in the one-way mirror. But before I see the performer in the outside space, I can't really be sure whether there are actually spectators behind this 'fourth wall'. At some point, for example, I listen to the answering machine, read the texts on the desk - and finally get involved in a chat conversation on the computer, which ends with me being asked to get a red dress out of the closet, the back wall of which is then unexpectedly opened by a performer who invites me to take a seat on a grandstand in the dark outside space, where several people are already sitting, who probably were in the room before me.
From there I can now see the ensemble of performers acting in front of the one-way mirror. Behind this one-way mirror I see another visitor entering the room and beginning to orientate himself in the scenery. I could not say at what point in time this visitor, in turn, feels observed.
Written by Dr. André Eierman
Supported by:
The theatrical installation is by my definition a postmodern narrative strategy.
Unlike installative approaches that come from the visual arts, it is narrative. It narrates in any way and that is its theatrical component. Installation is postmodern narrative as space.
Site of fiction is the attempt to turn this thesis into practice.
Idea & Concept: Eleonora Herder By & with: Eleonora Herder, Maria Isabel Hagen, Michaela Stolte & Sabine Born Production: Lena Krause Technics: Stine Hertel and Camilla Vetters Musical advice and arrangement: Rebecca Berg
With special thanks to Bastian Kleppe for his loving and generous support.
Without the advice of Jost von Harlessem this project would'nt have been successful either.
“The project “Site of Fiction” disrupts the audience’s expectations through the ingenious form of its audience participation.”
(Lukáš Jiřička: “Eleonora Herder. Site of fiction”, A2 Magazine, Prague July 17, 2013)
"And the fact that I feel like I'm being observed by others also leads to a self-observation of my actions, in which they suddenly seem like staged actions. That is, in a certain sense, I'm watching myself play a role in front of unknown spectators—which simultaneously raises the question of whether I might not also somehow always do this in an ordinary room, supposedly unobserved."
LOTTEgoesLIQUID Scenic installation based on Zygmunt Bauman's "Liquid Life"
Concept: Eleonora Herder
Direction: Eleonora Herder, Falk Rößler, Arne Köhler
Texts: Lucia Carballal
Duration: 1:20 h
Lotte is only one of many who suspect her luck somewhere between crude promises and constant chances. She comes back to a past love. She would like to belong to something, but above all she wants to remain independent. And she is not alone in this. She ends up in a house full of people for whom the once desirable triad of work, house and family can no longer be the goal of all efforts. Instead, they wade through their lives, in which anything could happen all the time, but in the end hardly anything effective in the long run happens.
Everything can become a concrete possibility, an opportunity to hit the jackpot with a single stroke. That is why there is no longer any reason to exclude an option from the outset. Self-perceptions, people, life plans - they are valid until they have become obsolete and have to be replaced. Because there seem to be many more delightful alternatives...
The human being in the postmodern, globalized society lives in fragments, aborts and new beginnings. He must try to remain as flexible as possible and avoid any kind of commitment as best as he can.
This is how the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the current existence in the Western world. Contemporary life is "liquid life", in which previously solid structures are increasingly disintegrating and stable bonds are becoming a general problem because they could restrict possibilities. It is a matter of staying open for better opportunities.
The scenic installation LOTTEgoesLIQUID makes it its mission to take up Bauman's insights into life in globalized postmodernism in a theatrical work, both in terms of content and form.
Living a "liquid life" means first and foremost that everything happens faster, shorter and more simultaneous than past generations were used to. The "liquid life" is a life of short attention spans, in which the individual experience loses its significance because it is constantly in danger of being lost in an abundance of other events. It is important to conclude individual phases of life as quickly as possible and to be able to continue undisturbed - even if this is not always possible...
In LOTTEgoesLIQUID the audience is placed in the same situation as the seven characters of the play: They have to decide constantly whether they want to leave or stay and for how long they are willing to give someone their attention. There are no short actions being served bit by bit. Instead, one is always confronted with too much: too many actions, too much excitement, too many possibilities. Seven different lives stories develop simultaneously in front of the audience.
The spectators walk round an island of interconnected rooms. There is no angle from which you can follow the whole action. You’ll have to keep walking to find out what happens at the other end of the stage. If you want to follow a character over a longer period of time, you need to set off together with him. Meanwhile, other things are happening elsewhere, so that you unavoidably keep missing something... The individual scenes and storylines all run parallel and are interwoven. The "liquid life" never stops. You always got to be on your guard. Breaks are a waste of time.
But in LOTTEgoesLIQUID the many fragments come together to form a whole. All elements finally unite to a theatrical symphony. Perhaps in this way it becomes possible to make the pulse, the breaks and the constraints of contemporary life in the western world tangible. Whether this music of "liquid life" only exists in the theatre or also outside of it still has to be found out.
Concept & direction: Eleonora Herder Falk Roessler Arne Köhler
Texts: Lucia Carballal
Stage design: NAEVAS
Sound design: Arne Köhler Falk Roessler
Actors: Laura López (Lotte) Lluna Pindado (Inge) Anahí Setton (Josefine) Albert Alemany (Paul) Ramon Rojas (guitarist) Joan Casas Rius (Berndt) Arne Köhler (Fat Kid)
Video trailer for "LOTTEgoesLIQUID”
Snippets of „LOTTEgoesLIQUID“
https://youtu.be/WKaM_4SHKpg
Capitalism monologue of the figure Berndt in "LOTTEgoesLIQUID":
The Guitarist (LOTTEgoesLIQUID theme) by Lotte's Music This musical piece is a composition that was created during the work on "LOTTEgoesLIQUID". In it the musical leitmotif of the guitarist's figure and the whole composition was worked out. The melody appears again and again at various points in the scenic installation - sometimes played live with the electric guitar, sometimes through an audio cassette that some of the characters in "LOTTEgoesLIQUID" listen to.
Paul by Lotte's Music Lotte sings this song in a simple acoustic guitar version at one point in the performance. She calls at a radio show and tries to get back her ex-boyfriend Paul with this song.
"A scenic experience and a theatrical adventure. Because LOTTEgoesLIQUID
is not a conventional play from the outset. The audience is invited to enter a space with a highly distinctive stage construction. A series of fragile spaces directly confronts us with the actuality of the lives of these scarred people presented to us by the play."
"Everyone is an outsider in some way. Some just say it, others show it, or don't show it out of false modesty. Some no longer want to have to love just one person, others are looking for precisely that eternal love that is no longer bearable these days because even the person seeking it no longer truly believes in it. And in the midst of it all, the ticking of a clock, constantly reminding you that time is running out, that you're getting old, that perhaps you have to reproduce in order to BE."
Zwofadolei. It is a two-family house with a two-wire line. There are plenty of them in Niddatal. They were built for "people on the breadline" and people who were on their way into a new era. A new era of community and humanity. Into a new life full of light, air and sun, where variability still involves the danger of anarchy.
90 years after planning the "Neues Frankfurt", Eleonora Herder and Anna Schewelew set out in search of this new human being. They visit him in the single-family houses of Römerstadt and the council flats of Westhausen. They meet people who have been living in the buildings of Ernst May, some of them for generations, and investigate how much of Ernst May's biopolitics has found its way into these private lives.
This project is based on Augmented Reality. We provide devices for spectators who don't have a smartphone or who have one that doesn't work well.
Supported by:
The city of Frankfurt am Main and Studio Naxos.
This production has also received postgraduate funding from the Hessian Theatre Academy.
The houses that served as templates for our architectural model still remain in Frankfurt-Praunheim today. Those are the very first model houses that were built in 1926 especially for the architecture congress of 'Neues Bauen'.
The model we produced was to be used by the viewers interactively by scanning the windows with the camera of a tablet and, by means of the augmented reality program, placing small films in the windows of the live filmed front. These films then show the residents of Praunheim in their homes doing their daily activities. On the filmed live image it seems as if the miniature-people actually live in the model. At the moment the videos were played, everyday neighborhood noises came out of small speakers installed in the house, which made the model seem truly alive.
Spectators should also be able to pull out the individual rooms like drawers. These drawers controlled us as performers via a digital interface. We received the sound recordings of the interviews that we had made with the residents in the respective rooms and could then play them back.
Through this dramaturgy, the house model became the instrument with which the individual audio and video elements were set in motion. The result was a performative game, which not only allowed the audience to acquire as much information as they wanted, but also required the audience to organize themselves in order to compose the performance. Thus, each performance also became a social experiment; each group of spectators organized themselves differently and composed a different, usually completely new performance through their social behavior. The more collectively and democratically the audience organized itself, the more informative the performance became. Just as May wanted to use architecture to form a new human being, we wanted to use an architectural model to search for the new being. So the performance itself was never a finished product, but rather formulated itself anew each time as a social experimental arrangement.
