The small german City of Mönchengladbach, a former textile industry hub, redefines its commercial and cultural centre by removing the modernist theatre building, abandoned during the past decade, and replacing it with a shopping mall. This constant process of producing space comes to a temporary halt when a group of citizens enters the winterly void to claim and re-stage the public discourse on appropriation of urban space: „There ought not to be a vacuum which might attempt to lead us to the idea of the void as potentiality.“
state-theatre is a series of six experimental documentaries that explore urban conditions for performance based on six case studies in Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut and Mönchengladbach.
state-theatre departs from places that have shed their apparent societal functions: deserted areas, construction sites, unused or reinterpreted buildings – empty spaces in the urban fabric, places that were originally meant as allegoric gathering places: theaters.
You can watch other documentaries from the series here:
state-theatre #1-3
state-theatre #4 DETROIT
state-theatre #5 BEIRUT
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