Events/Openings

"Zucker I: PINOCCHIO" by bösediva is a counter-proposal to Walt Disney's dictatorship of sugar induced happiness. For this performative installation, the artist group opens up a gigantic underground mortuary, built by the City of Berlin in the Wedding neighbourhood. The mortuary: a place to process formerly living bodies, a place of putrefaction. Pinocchio: a story processing wood to human flesh. Sugar: the processing of drug into happiness.

The story of Pinocchio 133 years old. It is not sweet. The wooden doll that is to become a real boy is hungry, loses it's feet, is tortured and hung. The terror is unending. In his 1940 animated classic Walt Disney poured masses and masses of sugar onto these cruelties. Sugar makes children happy, malleable and fat. Sugar makes everything all right. Walt Disney has created perfect conditions for everlasting cuteness. And then there was peace and quiet! In Disney's Pinocchioland there is a final clarity, drug-induced.

This is different in the original Pinocchio story by Carlo Collodi. In Collodi, there are wild contradictions and ludicrous absurdities. One never finds solid ground. “Be good Pinocchio!", says the Blue Fairy. But when he looks around, he says to himself: Being good gets you in trouble! bösediva seeks out this kind of uncertainty, ambivalence and cognitive dissonance.

Over the course of five days, bösediva will create a constantly changing space at Altes Krematorium Wedding, their very own negation of Disneyland. Installation, performance, music and video are aimed at visitors, who are left to their own devices to make up their own story. Suddenly sugar can also taste yucky and things are allowed to have more than one meaning – a liberating experience, possibly. Each project of bösediva is about freedom, also the freedom of perspective for the spectators, who are being empowered to choose from a wide variety of images and information.

„Zucker I: PINOCCHIO“ is the first part in a three-part-project by bösediva circling around sugar, brain chemistry, heaven and hell. And the color white.

Concept Robin Detje, Elisa Duca Performer Elisa Duca, Jochen Stechmann, Robin Detje Compostition Neele Hülcker Nose Sonja Alhäuser Dramaturgy John McKiernan Production Manager Katja Kettner Technical Manager Benni Schröter Sound Adriano Angiolini Assistant Chris Möller Intern Julian E. Schnorr

bösediva has worked on the boundaries of performance, visual arts and theater since 2009. Their work has been presented in Berlin (at Sophiensaele, LEAP and Deutsches Theater) and internationally. bösediva insists on providing an aesthetic experience that can also be alienating. Beauty can be a part of it, but is not meant to overpower. bösediva utilizes performance art, video- and sound-installation in the tradition of romantic deconstructionism.

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. In co-production with PATHOS München.