April 13, 2012
SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK
A Site-Located Interdisciplinary Performance Meditation
Yom HaShoah / Holocaust Remembrance Day
Pan Pacific Amphitheater at
The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
April 22, 2012
10:30am – 11:30am
by QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO
Choreographer: ALEXX SHILLING
Dancers: MIMI YIN and SARAH YOUNG
Poetry/Libretto, Photography/Film: QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO
Voice: ANNA LISA BLOTH and HEATHER HARSTAD
Composer: ISAAC SCHANKLER
Violin: ANDREW THOLL
Translation into German: DOROTHEA HERREINER
live performance still from SONDERBAUTEN premiere in NYC at Yeshiva University Museum at the Smithsonian-affiliated Center for Jewish History.
A suite of interdisciplinary works in multi-panel photographs, film installations, original text, and live performance collaboration in dance, music, film and text, SONDERBAUTEN: THE SPECIAL BLOCK explores the unmarked and unmemorialized ruins of the forced-sex rape brothel at Dachau Concentration camp. The work is a powerful, luminous inquiry and meditation surrounding the obscured and suppressed histories of gender-based war crimes and State-sponsored violence against women.
In 1941, several hundred female prisoners were transported from Ravensbruck to Dachau – some were forced into slave labor at the rape brothel, and the others were forced to manufacture cameras at the Agfa factory sub-camp of Dachau in Munich.
In 2009, multidisciplinary artist Quintan Ana Wikswo recovered several of the Nazi military film cameras manufactured by these women, and worked with these cameras to photograph the unmarked site at Dachau where the rape brothel had stood.
In 2011, SONDERBAUTEN premiered in an eight-month solo museum exhibition and live performance in New York City at Yeshiva University Museum at the Smithsonian-affiliated Center for Jewish History.
In 2012, SONDERBAUTEN will be adapted by Quintan Ana Wikswo and Alexx Shilling for site-located meditation in the amphitheatre at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. The artists and performers will present a work that moves within the naturalistic setting with spacialized voice, movement, and sound. Soprano Heather Harstad will perform Quintan Ana Wikswo’s original poetry and libretto in English, with spacialized recordings of Anna Lisa Bloth reading in German.
In 2013, the work will continue on to the Jewish Museum in Munich.
Special thanks to the Center for Cultural Innovation, Yaddo, the ARC/Durfee Grant, Puffin Foundation, Dragon’s Egg, Oberpfaltzer Kunstlerhaus, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and to Perla Karney, Joanne Jacobson, Zachary Levine, Ute Herreiner, Deborah Poe and Noah Saterstrom.
performance still / SONDERBAUTEN
WIKSWO / Sonderbauten / Diptych Panel 4 / 40″x60″ /