ZWOFADOLEI* (Two-family house with a two-wire line)

"Make it short!"

Ernst May

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.

Concept and management: Eleonora Herder

Dramaturgy: Anna Schwelew

Stage design: Sabine Born

Performance: Eleonora Herder & Maria Isabel Hagen

interface: zentralwerkstatt  / Fabian Offert

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.