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Events

11 Nov 2010

Performance

Discoteca Flaming Star
Void of White


Discoteca Flaming Star at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, 2009
photo: Irene Gomez Barrio


The creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel lives on: it does not end up killing itself but rather, 200 years later, it is still wandering about in self-indulgent loneliness at the northernmost extremity of the earth. Hatred, feelings of guilt and never-ending sadness left its internal and external world as if paralysed. Its life is characterised by a total absence of love. It is surrounded by dazzling sunlight, icy-cold weather and the brightest white snow, as well as a biting wind. It babbles deliriously away to itself, muttering fragments of words, sentences and text.

By chance, the creature stumbles across three books, which, together with Frankenstein’s diary (the history of its own creation), will have great significance for its life. Besides Plutarch’s “Lives” and Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe will leave the strongest impression on it. Fragments of what it has read, of what it has desperately remembered, as well as verbal reflexes of what it has seen, form the basis of the creature’s endless babble.

Discoteca Flaming Star takes Void of White (debut in 2002 in Madrid) as the starting point for a further dialogue with the creature at Villa Romana. Discoteca Flaming Star is – in their own words – “the place where the oracle speaks through the non-chosen. Discoteca Flaming Star is a love letter written in the present continuous, a love letter to thousands of artists”"


Cristina Gomez Barrio (born in 1973) and Wolfgang Mayer (born in 1967) live as artists in Berlin. Since 1998, they have been working together under the name Discoteca Flaming Star, an interdisciplinary performance project which has performed at the Whitney Museum, New York, at the MUMOK museum of modern art in Vienna, at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo in Madrid, at the MACBA in Barcelona and at the Tate Modern in London, amongst other places.

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