Ritual BPM (English)
Story, Choreography, Performance: Sophie Yukiko
© Sound Production: Trace Polly; Camera & Edits: Cristina AmateRitual BPM confronts the challenges of the spaces of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the former congress hall, which as a »beacon of freedom« should be visible from afar, also in the East, and propagate the ideals of US-American power; it addresses the apparent transparency and openness and attempts to counter the physical dominance of the prevailing material concrete with a movement: How can ritual intervene in the problematic modernist legacy that demonstrates the erasure of a colonial legacy? How can the practice of this West African ritual respond to a Eurocentric architecture?
Ritual BPM is part of the performance series Tracing Influence: Intervening in Western Cold War Architecture. The series is dedicated to four Cold War architectures in Berlin that bear witness to the institutionalization of US power in the promotion of educational institutions and the dissemination of knowledge. Various artists engage performatively with these architectural spaces and their site-specific histories to develop new forms of gathering that question the power dispositif of their past.
In March 2024, the UNESCO Commission announced that Berlin techno would henceforth be part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Recognising the subcultural spaces and scenes that have been created through techno music is important in order to highlight the need for a collective, trance-like experience and thus ensure that the places and spaces in which this can be experienced are worthy of protection. However, this award not only perpetuates an erasure of Black culture, but also reinforces an understanding of techno as a German/white phenomenon, which only became a movement to be honoured and recognised through a supposed distance from its Black origins.
Tracing Influence was conceived by Kirsten Maar, Sophie Schultze-Allen, Hannah Strothmann and Luise Willer with the support of Mariama Diagne, Friederike Hartge, Martina Kutsch and Giulia Weis as part of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Intervening Arts at the FU Berlin, in cooperation with the Central State Library Berlin and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin.