Taking place on the 22nd floor of the Postscheckamt tower “E-Waste. Heavy Metals” closes 3hd’s “Fluid Wor(l)ds” program on a poignant note. Saying goodbye is rarely easy, which is why the festival’s final performance will be an intimate affair in the old postal bank, with its spectacular view of Berlin. As a symbol of obsolescence and changing modes of communication, the space plays host to this feeling of inevitability, where everything ends, nothing stays the same but residues still linger.
Performance is its own form of transmission, with its application shifting, expanding and spreading from theater and the art institution to the Internet and social media. The role of the body within this diversifying space of relationality is constantly adapting and being adapted to as technological advancement alienates us further from its limitations. Hence, “E-Waste”’s focus on ‘liveness’ and the transient encounter in this architectural relic of a disappearing communication network, high above the city.
Rotterdam, Amsterdam and New York-based artist and educator Geo Wyeth digs deep into this historical runoff of past events influencing the present in their “Misc Blues, at the Muck Studies Dept.”. Unraveling as a contemporary folktale, the audio-visual performance engages diasporic black/American music, stories of passing, and conditions of water passage in a reconstitution of cultural sediment and rot as a possible cosmos—an outer space in the soggy earth we have inherited. Berlin-based musician and producer Laurel Halo, meanwhile, applies her heavy, mutilated strains of electronic music with influence from the sounds of Detroit, UK and Germany in a shapeshifting and moody set flowing into, through and out of this closing 3hd event.