A project by
Vernissage and guided tour on 31 January 2025
h 18:00, Protagon Performing Arts site
with artists and performative surprise
With the gallery – our visual exhibition space we want to expand the ways to express and perceive the themes of the festival. It is our vision to connect and grow networks between performing and visual arts and set them in a dialog. We believe that art reflects its times in dialogue with culture and society, it changes with and within them. It is political. And it is not objective, because it is a human production, with all its contradictions. For these reasons, the gallery aims to bring together artists from different disciplines to collaborate, exchange and share ideas and creative input as well as to create an enriched and safe space where dialogue and reflection can happen. For our exhibition we use unconventional spaces to bring art in the center of our daily live. We use the lounge of our theater-hall, old containments, a Mongolian yurte and the space in front of the sanitary rooms. We want art and theatre to be accessible to everyone and go outside the walls of museum and institutional theatre; we aim to put them in relation with the space we leave in, to our neighborhoods, streets and gardens.
THIS YEAR, we want to invite and share stories about HOME. Stories of grief, of anger, of resistance and survival, of research and curiosity. Again, we want to establish a sense of community, to come together around these themes and explore them with the most powerful means we have: Theater, Performance, Music and Dance, Arts and Storytelling. This is home is a declaration of resistance, against a system that keeps promising paradise and progress but brings loneliness and separation for the few and poverty and sorrow for the many. We refuse to become used to a reality in which some lives are worth less than others, some homes are legal and others are not. Finally, This Is Home is a call for peace. For de-centering our perspective and putting ourselves in the shoes of the other. In the home of the other, if you will. To view life from the other side of the fence, through the eyes of „the enemy“, the ones called terrorists or fascists or immigrants or hippies or the establishment. And also to view life through the perspective of the non-human creatures we share this world with; the tree in your garden, the wasp on your cake, the river running through your town, the forest that was once there. Home is a place of responsibility, a place that asks you to contribute and to fulfill tasks. To keep a home in order, in balance, is work, and it is a conversation: it is about listening to what that place needs, and what it has to give. And perhaps most of all, home is a place of caring; of taking care for the place that gives you life and those you share it with. It is to remember that home is the place where your family, your kind is; and to understand that this family is much bigger than we, in the dominant culture of the west, assumed in the last centuries.If we can remember that, the idea of home becomes a revolution.
Vernissage 31.01.2025 7 pm Protagon Kulturgelände
with artists and performative surprise
The Winterwerft Gallery presents artistic and documentary positions on the festival theme: Home. This year’s focus is on the medium of photography. In her series ‘Sometimes I paint a house for us’, created in the Moria and Kara Tempe refugee camps on the EU’s external border, Alea Horst shows very concretely what it can mean to lose one’s home and go in search of refuge. The photo documentation of the theatre education project ‘SANE – Stories about a new Europe’ by antagon TheaterAKTion & protagon shows how theatre can be used as a medium of exchange about one’s own roots and paths. People with and without migration experience came together for training sessions and performances. In their photo and interview project ‘Belonging’, Guiseppina and Carlo Tragni portray young people who have left their geographical homeland behind. In addition to other photographic works, illustrations, installations, poems, drawings and video works can be seen, all of which deal with the themes of origin, the question of future prospects in our own bodies and our home – the earth.
All of the works attempt the impossible: To depict the abstract idea and at the same time the very personal feeling that is inherent in every human being: home.
Alea Horst – Sometimes I paint a house for us
Collective work antagon TheaterAKTion & protagon – Stories of New Europe
Effi Bodensohn – Cycles
Giuseppina and Carlo Tragni – BELONGING
Ina Henglster – Permanence of the Moment
Jana Heilig – Fragments
Maria Abelias – Stretch Marks
Max Büttner – Fragments of home
more.impulse collective – h o m e
Patsch Katrin Hailer – A tree is resistance
Steef Kersbergen & Vicky Maier – WAITING WITH THE WATERS
A video being created by connecting drawings of young people with different stories. They are asked to draw what comes up into their minds when they hear ” home “. We collect drawing and make them move trough the help of a tablet for drawings and connect them with each other to share many perspectives on what we call home. Melodies, spoken words and thoughts build the athmosphere in the video. A participative project created by members of mehr impulse collektive.
ENG mehr.impulse
Since 2023, they have been playing concerts for life as a trio, addressing crises and collective pain, but also always playing with the possibility of creating lightness and encounters.
They not only like to invite people to join in creatively at concerts, but also use the opportunity to give workshops for all generations. It is often about creative forms of expression that are offered at a low threshold and can therefore be used by everyone in everyday life.
2.2.2025 pop up for children between 2.30-4PM
ENG An open drawing space with kids, youth and whoever wants to draw. How to discover what sourrounds you and placeing yourself within.Toes, arms and heads “surrounded” by lines .
Playing with spaces and possibilities drawing with our bodies and moving along and with ours and other drawings. Music will be part of this space too.
fragments of home are little bundles of words.
Some of them were picked up in between some unlikely mushrooms in a metropolitan park area. Others dropped by a pidgeon in the pedestrian zone. Some of them could be called poems, while others would get mad at the idea. They are patchworks of words and sentences; found oozing out of a dead fox’s body by the roadside or creeping through the cracks into your house; just like the ants that seem to resist the chemicals you spray on them.
They are words encountered wandering around the edges. Where the asphalt frays out gradually into a dirt road. At the old factory, eaten up by thorns and leaves and roots digging into the concrete. At the thrashbins, where the rats gather in the night (wash your hands after reading).
Many have walked past without seeing them. Now they were found, collected in a little basket, and written down on shreds of paper. To be found again by you.
The words are curious, desperate, in pain. Their pockets are full of questions. They are looking for their home.
Max Büttner
has reluctantly agreed to take care of the words during the
festival; and make sure they behave well and don’t create incomfortable situations. As an actor with antagon theaterAKTion he is not sure to possess the right qualifications for the job, but promised to try his best at keeping everything in order. The words agreed likewise, but he doesn’t like the look in their eyes when they look at him. While he assures not to have had any hand in their appearance, we notice the moss under his fingernails and suspect otherwise.
ENG The disappearing home, flooded by the rising sea levels. The tidal feeling of solastalgia, the homesickness when you are still at home, but you know it’s under threat and will one day be taken by the water.
The video’s performer, Steef Kersbergen, learned as a child that their hometown in the Netherlands would flood irredeemably and, with it, a third of the country. The precise timeline of this event remains uncertain, with scientists offering varying estimates and with the Dutch people being divided in dealing with this eventuality.
About the artists:
Steef Kersbergen (they/them) and Vicky Maier (they/them) have been collaborating in the fields of performance art and video since they met during their studies at the Home of Performance Practices in the Netherlands.
As a nonbinary performance artist, working between (community) theatre and visual arts, Steef is questioning conventions on gender in most of their work. Currently, Steef is focussing on employing a non-binary way of thinking in their practice, creating juxtapositions to explore all forms of in-betweens.
Vicky researches the interplay of audience participation and scenography as well as ethical ways of storytelling (live and in film). Their artistic practice is situated between storytelling and theatre, installations and image making.
Before Jana could even walk, she was throwing words around like other children her age throw sand. This love of words was followed by painting. In recent years, she has devoted herself to her home: planet Earth. Yellow fields of flowers, steep cliffs or just a sunset – Jana captures all of this in a magical way to give the viewer a message: We can be grateful for this planet and its beauty. And we must protect it.
Sunday 9 feb, 14:30-16:00, open kids-workshop
By Jana Heilig
“What makes a home? Is it a cosy home, a special place in nature or perhaps a country full of adventure? This workshop invites everyone to artistically explore the theme of home and to paint, cut, glue and craft their own dream home. Maybe it’s a magical island, a colourful city or a forest full of talking animals – anything is possible. Stories about home are also available to inspire your own creativity.
Collective work antagon theaterAKTion & protagon
installation composed by Edith van den Elzen, Camilla Piredda, Emma Tian
Photos, texts, (audio), puppetry or installation
Turkish mosaics with star of David motifs. A wall into which all worlds could enter through astronomy. The shapes of the mosaics or memorials are dense and were inspired by the complex primordial star Gemafic. A lot of colours in different shades from light blue to dark blue. They looked like sky and sea at the same time. And I was an observer but also a prisoner. Trapped in the beautiful world.
What travel do we make, following the smells, tastes and colors of a group of people all over the world, sharing commonly that they want to dive into a process of physical theater. Led by antagon theaterAKTion, a creation process appears on the Sommerwerft festival in 2024 with an end result of a walking performance over the terrain that follows along the Main. Intimate stories from people that chose to move to Germany, or that fled their country since their home is not safe enough anymore, come together into a warm nest.
We are the daughter and grandson of the second and third generation of guest workers from Italy. We have always been concerned in different ways with the country of Italy and with belonging to the country of origin of our parents and grandparents. In our “belonging” project, we explored the question of the extent to which the country of origin is relevant for young people. Does nationality still play a role today? In 2023, after 30 years of the EU being founded, is it still important to define oneself within Europe by nationality? Is there such a thing as a European identity in Generation Z and Y?
We investigated these questions as a team of two, consisting of Giuseppina Tragni, a freelance artist in the performing arts, and Carlo Tragni, a young artist in the field of photography. We interviewed and portrayed eleven young people aged between 18 and 32 with a southern European background from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Kosovo, Romania, Greece and Switzerland. The result is an exhibition of photos and texts.
The body is the elixier and the limit at once. It’s a home I can never return to after I left. How many people might feel that way about their home? Often their body is all they have left. By means of it‘s appearance others decide if they do belong and who they are. Whether a person is able to make their own choices in life is far too often linked to the color of their skin and their gender. How far can humanity go before it bursts?
Maria Abelia,
who works as an art educator and teacher, is 30 years old and lives in Frankfurt am Main. In 2017, she exhibited a work for the first time, ‘The Side’, in which she explores the topic of physical self-determination in relation to planned abortions.
planned abortions photographically. Since then, she has continued to pursue her own projects alongside her training, such as the photo series ‘hommage aux femme’ and the children’s theatre play ‘Die kleine Prinzin’.
Instagram: ma.belia
A tree is resistance
A tree stays firmly rooted, no matter what comes
Holding the ground, breathing the sky
A forest an anarchist society
Connected, growing together, resiting collectively
Until there comes the next drought, the next flood, acid rains, invasive desease, chainsaws, diggers – the next pour of concrete sealing the last seed six feet under
Hadn’t this been home?
In black and white drawings, Patsch explores trees as a symbol of resistance and as victims of human destructiveness, as childhood friends and as a reminder of how fragile and powerful a community is.
Patsch Hailer
The trees where she spent a large part of her childhood were another home; a part of the family that welcomed her calmly and reliably. A forest still harbours this feeling of home “a place of eternity, much older than me and here long after me”. The growing feeling that we are bringing this eternity to a tragic end is the starting point of the drawings.
When Patsch is not sitting and drawing trees from her head on paper, she is usually on the move, for example as a performer with antagon theatreAKTion.
Effi has been working with organic forms for some time now, placing circles around each other to watch the colours vibrate. The paintings increasingly reminded viewers of abstract representations of the vulva, which was the artist’s intention. The gateway to the world through which we (almost) all enter life. Through personal events and suffering, the interest in the organ behind it and the inner processes deepened. To the hidden place from which we all originate. The uterus, which sets the rhythm of life with its rhythm. Like many of nature’s cycles, this one is out of sync on a large scale, tabooed, degraded, discriminated against and/or regularly anaesthetised and switched off. Through her colourful illustrations, Effi Bodensohn wants to give visibility to the work of the uterus and draw attention to the process, which can give strength not only to those who are able to experience it in their own bodies.
Effi Bodensohn
is a dancer, actress, visual artist, curator and cultural worker in Frankfurt am Main. She has been practising dance and painting since childhood. She worked and trained in various social and artistic institutions in Europe with a focus on museum education and the development of perception and creativity through visual art and completed training as a state-recognised educator. Her collaboration with antagon TheaterAKTion and protagon e.V. began in 2021. In addition to her artistic work as an actress and visual artist, she conceives and designs costumes, make-up and merchandise for antagon TheaterAKTion and the spaces of the cultural venue Protagon – International Performing Arts. Since 2022, she has curated the self-initiated ‘Gallery’ to give other visual artists space and visibility and to create exchange, inspiration and collaboration between visual and performing arts.
“Sometimes you go somewhere and see something unjust. Even if you don’t understand how and why it happened, you suddenly have a very strong feeling. The feeling says: this is not right, it shouldn’t be like this. I always have this feeling when I’m travelling in refugee camps around the world. This feeling was particularly strong for me in the camps in Moria and Kara Tepe on the island of Lesbos in Greece, where the children in these pictures lived and in some cases still live.
All the people who travelled from Turkey to the island of Lesbos in rubber dinghies first had to go to the Moria refugee camp. They all had to flee their homes. People from many different countries such as Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Congo, Pakistan, Nigeria and Lebanon. The reasons why people leave their homes vary. Sometimes people flee from war, sometimes from poverty and others from violence, but nobody leaves their country simply because they feel like it.
Everyone is afraid of being deported back to their home countries or to Turkey. People would rather live in safety and not go back. The wait can last many years. The old Moria refugee camp existed for five years: a converted military station that had space for around 2,500 people, but was completely overcrowded with over 18,000 people (almost half of them children) over the years. The camp burned down in autumn 2020. All the people lost their huts and tents and slept on the street. The camp was then set up in Kara Tepe, with many tents and a few containers. The children in the pictures were living there in February 2021. One of these children is Arash. Arash says: ‘If all the children in the world are friendly to each other, work as a team; if everyone endeavours to lead a good life, then maybe one day we won’t have any more wars or camps.’ That is also my greatest wish.”
Alea Horst December 2021
The photo exhibition can be borrowed free of charge from Unesco Refugee Aid and is suitable for schools, classrooms, libraries, church communities and other public spaces.
https://www.uno-fluechtlingshilfe.de/spenden-helfen/aktiv-helfen/ausstellung-zeigen/manchmal-male-ich-ein-haus
Alea Horst
is a successful German photographer, author and activist who has made a name for herself through her work in crisis areas.
Born on 8 May 1982 in Bad Schwalbach, she developed a passion for photography in 2009 and for humanitarian work a few years later. She initially began her career in wedding and family photography, but quickly discovered her interest in social documentary photography and humanitarian projects.
Horst has participated in numerous international projects that have taken her to countries such as Greece, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Ethiopia and Bangladesh. She became particularly well known for her work with refugees and her impressive photographs of refugee camps. Her photographs show the human side of crises and impressively convey the stories of the people affected. In addition to her work as a photographer, Alea Horst is also actively involved in various aid organisations as an aid worker.
Her work and images have helped to raise awareness of humanitarian crises and put a face to the people behind the headlines. At the end of 2023, Federal President Steinmeier awarded her the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon for her extraordinary commitment to human rights.
She remains an important voice in documentary photography and works tirelessly to make the suffering of people in crisis regions visible and to give them a voice.
People have always collected things. In the past, it was vital circumstances that motivated us to collect. Animals also collect. They collect in their own bodies or in their burrows. Plants collect their seeds and kernels in their fruits. In order to find out about myself, I sort, organise and research. Through the process of collecting, I assimilate the world and re-sort it in the form of photographs. What is my story? What do I want to tell and show?
Objects that you have engaged with for a moment while taking a photograph can be recalled, reassociated, by looking at the photographic image later. The object is revitalised. It serves, as it were, as visualisation material of a current present in which the past and future are also inscribed. The completeness of this present is not anchored in the image, but in the viewer. It is about immediate visualisation, discovery and recognition, about appreciation and confrontation. With me, with you, and with the (surrounding) world. It is about enduring tensions, reflecting on one’s own identity and recognising the influence on others.
Ina Hengstler
(36) lives in Frankfurt am Main. She is a freelance artist, art mediator and communication designer and is also active in all three areas: exhibitions, workshops and projects.
She has been working as a freelance artist, communication designer and art and design educator for many years. Her projects are created in very different places and at various institutions. She has turned her passions into a profession. In her work, she is very interested in viewing, conceptualising and evaluating all creative processes from different and highly complementary perspectives.