Olf Kreisel

Each of the three vitrines on Karl-Marx-Allee’s median will show a person building a coat rack out of wooden clothing pins. These are former technicians who, up until the end of the 1980s, worked on the preservation of several buildings on the street that are admired as some of the most noteworthy examples of GDR architecture in the world today.

The dissolution of the GDR resulted in a large gap in the resumes of these protagonists of the performance Nußknacker-Suite #4. Now each of them has a stage to themselves that is close to the height at which the bleachers for political officials once lined the street. They will sit working on the coat racks in the warmly lit vitrines lined in red velvet for three hours each on three separate days. Outside of these performance hours, the wooden pieces will be shown on their own as works in progress alongside the biographies of their absent creators

The whole performance will be documented by a photographer and preserved in a publication of roughly 30 pages. The objects created in the vitrines will be given to the Kulturamt Mitte after the project’s conclusion.