From Demonstration to Simulation and Back: »Demonstration with Money« (English)

At the center of the simulation are the banknotes distributed among the participants (each participant receives a 100-euro note withdrawn from the private account of the artists) and a gesture, which is repeated by Falczyk and Herschel throughout the simulation. From a megaphone, which Falczyk moves throughout the space, a voice sounds, guiding the participants through a fictive protest, culminating in shared choreography.

In the following audience discussion, moderated by Boyce and Pieper, Falczyk and Herschel gave insights into the working process of the performance »Demonstration with Money«. They originally stumbled upon the idea for »Demonstration with Money« when attending a protest advocating for the redistribution of wealth in 2022. While at the demonstration, it occurred to them to take out the 100 Euro bill from their pockets and to raise it into the air, where it would be visible to the other protesters and onlookers. What would it mean to make the capital visible? How could this act transform the demonstration? Could it make the demonstration more effective? This central gesture draws upon the choreography of the raised right fist, a symbolic and ubiquitous gesture, movement and image, that has appeared in political movements since the early twentieth century.

Together with other performers, Falczyk and Herschel repeated the action at a First of May demonstration the following year. The original performance and its iteration  »Demonstration with Money (Intervention)« cemented the practice as one with performative and political power. Soon, this intervention on the street moved to the theater. Deepfake Situations conceptualized and prepared a simulation for participants, first shown at Ballhaus Ost in Berlin. The transformation from intervention to simulation unfolded new layers in the action. No longer was the gesture merely about making capital visible, but about finding new potentials and purposes for the money. Deepfake Situations found that misappropriation, a long-practiced tactic in the repertoire of live theater and performance, had a political promise as well: through the techniques of theater, money might undergo a transformation, from an object holding capital power to an assembly-forming force.

 The collective's name thematizes contemporary phenomena of deepfakes, videos and images created by generative AIs that conceal their fraudulency. Deepfake Situations is not, however, interested in producing opaque imitations, but in using such methods of misappropriation (of objects, situations, sounds and gestural languages), physical training, guided simulation, intervention and pre-enactment to reveal certain present conditions to audiences and prefigure alternative futures with their audiences. ›Real‹ and ›fake‹ encounter each other in surprising ways in Deepfake Situations' work: a simulation of a demonstration uses fungible money, which could have real economic repercussions for the collective if lost or, more unlikely, stolen. Through the diversity of performance approaches at various distances to the ›real‹, Deepfake Situations studies and tests the capacity of theater to construct new futures collectively.