Ina Wudtke, Dieter Lesage, Thomas Kilpper
The Paris Commune and Beyond #1 The Days of the Commune

Møre and Romsdal Artcenter is delighted to present an exhibition project with Berlin based artists Ina Wudtke, Thomas Kilpper and Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage.

#1The Days of the Commune

Welcome to the opening Friday March 18 at 7 pm.

In 1871, the Paris Commune entered the political stage for 72 days. The exhibition project The Paris Commune and Beyond refers to this historical landmark as a starting point for a project which commemorates a historical event, but also reflects on a series of contemporary social questions, issues and conflicts.

The exhibition The Days of the Commune curated by Ina Wudtke refers to the title of a play by German author Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau. The play is based on Steffin’s translation of the play Nederlaget by Norwegian author Nordahl Grieg. Grieg, who always championed for social justice, was a convinced communist and took part in the fight against fascism. In his play Nederlaget on the Paris Commune he reflected his experiences in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Brecht, Steffin, Berlau as well as Grieg followed the motto art as a weapon of the October Revolution by using their writings in the fight against fascism. Nordahl Grieg visited the two German authors while in exile in Denmark, after their escape from Nazi Germany. In Denmark, Brecht and Steffin started working with Ruth Berlau, who was a Danish writer and actress. Shortly after Grieg’s visit, Steffin translated Grieg’s play Nederlaget into German and Brecht published several parts of this translation in the German-Soviet exile journal Das Wort. After the war, Brecht and Berlau wrote their own version based on Grieg’s text (translated by Steffin), entitled Die Tage der Commune (The Days of the Commune). In 1966, both Grieg’s version, as well as Brecht’s, Steffin’s and Berlau’s version were produced for television in the GDR and Norway.

At Møre Og Romsdal Kunstsenter Berlin artist Ina Wudtke will set up an installation of textiles and stage elements based on the set design of one scene from the TV adaptations of both plays Die Tage der Commune (The Days of the Commune) and Nederlaget. The scene shows the discussions after the revolutionary seizure of power in the Paris City Hall. Banners – previously carried in the street – now adorn the walls of the City Hall with slogans like: freedom of the press, voting rights, right of assembly. The two TV adaptation videos are part of the presentation.

In the black box a video of the 2021 live performance Parliament and The Commune. A Philosophical Performance for Two Voices and a Turntable by Ina Wudtke and Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage at the Brecht-Haus in Berlin will be on show. For some philosophical voices, the Commune is the opposite of Parliament. No representation but direct democracy. However, it could be argued that the Paris Commune was the attempt to install a radical Parliament. For a parliament is to be radical if it is to represent. Rather than abolish parliament, we need to radicalise it. In this performance lecture, Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke argue for a radical idea of parliament, against the antiparliamentarianism of The Invisible Committee, Alain Badiou and others.

As a third work Ina Wudtke will show her installation Proposal for a Future Edition, which refers to the books written by Brecht in a collective manner. All these books are released under Brecht’s name only, although it is known that they have been written collectively and draw on substantial contributions by authors like Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau and Elisabeth Hauptmann. Wudtke’s work is a plea for the visibility of the female co-authors that are too often overlooked.

For artists Thomas Kilpper and Ina Wudtke, curatorial praxis is part of their artistic work. Since 2015 they are running after the butcher. exhibition space for contemporary art and social questions together (a space inaugurated by Thomas Kilpper in 2006), which publishes butchers blätter since 2020. Thomas Kilpper contributed a print of a woodcut portrait on textile of author Louise Michel, a feminist protagonist of the Paris Commune.

butcher’s blätter #3
Two online & print publications, release March 2022

butcher’s blätter #3 in English and German (2 publications)
The publication consists of the performance text Parliament and The Commune. A Philosophical Performance for Two Voices and a Turntable by Dieter Lesage and features work by Andreas Siekmann and Ina Wudtke. The publication will be released online on the after the butcher website in German and English and on the Møre Og Romsdal Kunstsenter website. Additionally, the publication will be presented as well as a print edition in German and English in the exhibition.

Ina Wudtke, Worker Writers / Arbeiterschriftsteller:innen
Book release and online discussion 5th of April.
The currently favored image of the Weimar Republic is constructed as a liberal one that emphasizes the individual freedom to shape one’s life. Meanwhile, the collectivist face of the workers’ movement and the artists inspired by it were and are mostly ignored. With Worker Writers / Arbeiterschriftsteller:innen, Ina Wudtke aims to give antifascist resistance workers in general, and the worker writer Margarete Steffin in particular, their rightful place in history. This bilingual publication (English & German) documents Ina Wudtke’s artistic work on worker writers, with contributions by Gerhard Wolf, Nora Sternfeld, Margarete Steffin, Ariane Müller and Dieter Lesage. The book’s graphic design is by image-shift (Berlin).

The project in Molde is possible thanks to generous support from Arts Council Norway
MRK is supported by Møre and Romsdal County municipality and Molde Municipality.
The publications produced by After The Butcher are made with support from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa /BERLIN

About the participants
Ina Wudtke is a conceptual artist and curator (*1968). Her research-based work questions hegemonic political discourses and strengthens counter-discourses on themes such as gender, work, housing and colonialism. With Dieter Lesage, she wrote the book Black Sound White Cube (Vienna, Loecker, 2010). In 2011, she released a concept album on gentrification entitled The Fine Art of Living, about the expulsion of low-income tenants from city centres. In 2018, she published a book of the same title on her artistic work about housing issues (Berlin, Archive Books). From 2018 to 2020, she was artistic researcher for documenta professor Dr. Nora Sternfeld at the Art Academy in Kassel. In February 2022 her book Worker Writers / Arbeiterschriftsteller:innen from / von MASCH to / bis Greif zur Feder (Motto Books, Berlin) was released. Ina Wudtke lives in Berlin since 1998.https://www.inawudtke.com

Dieter Lesage is a Belgian philosopher, writer and critic. He studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (1984-1988) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1988-1990). In 1993 he obtained his Ph.D. at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven. Dieter Lesage was a visiting lecturer at the Willem De Kooning-Academie in Rotterdam (2003-2005) and at the Institut für Kulturtheorie der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (2007). His texts have appeared in the magazines Springerin, Afterall, e-flux journal, De Witte Raaf, Kulturrisse, Open, Agalma, Domus, Cairon, Maska and Vector. Dieter Lesage has been professor for political theory, philosophy and artistic research at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound (RITCS) in Brussels since 2006. He has lived in Berlin since 2007.

Thomas Kilpper was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1956. Thomas Kilpper’s artistic and curatorial work engages with history and politics in a manner that recalls the 1960s in terms of his committed engagement. Kilpper’s strategy is to work with buildings condemned for demolition and to use only materials he finds on site to make art by inscribing himself with woodcut technics, rather than simply cutting it up. Research is a fundamental tool of his practice and the result is normally an artistic intervention into politics and history. Thus Kilpper combines a strong conceptual basis with considerable technical skill in making images that have dramatic impact and presence. He lives and works in Berlin. Together with Ina Wudtke he runs after the butcher. exhibition space for contemporary art and social questions.