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Cutout. 1Km Patriarchy
2024 – Digital HD – 15 min (Public Performance) / Goethe-Institut – Resonance –
Performance & Production – Jakob Wirth
Cinematography & Editing – Vincent Jondeau
Support – Claire Géhin, Arnaud Lemonnier, Indra Küster
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CONTEXT: In the frame of the french-german Resonance Program organized by the Goethe Institut France, Jakob Wirth started with Claire Géhin a collaboration entitled „Pas ton genre“ (Not your business). They exchanged ideas in a question-and-answer format, whereby a performance ( „Cutout. 1Km Patriarchy“) will be followed by a text by Claire („Sauver sa peau“) and then a performance by Jakob („My Gender Stretch“).
TEXT: The performance „Cutout. 1km patriarchy“ explores the position of cis-male-read people in heteronormative society. Throughout the performance the artist pulled 200 kg stones over 1 km through the street of Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. The artist started naked, took on cloth and the gender role as soon as he started to pull the weight. After 1 km and being totally exhausted, the artist left the cloth and the stones behind, by turning in a street and disappeared.
The burden is part of a never-ending line of heteronormative history. What burden is created by patriarchal society, with its role models, expectations and acts of violence? They are privileged and oppressed at the same time – a burden that oppresses them individually and at the same time supports them structurally and carries them through life. Who (re)produces and who is produced? Who bears the (collective) guilt? Where does it stick? The performance shows an excerpt of this paradoxical experience of the burden that will occupy the artist* for 1 km. A struggle, a process, a distance.
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My Gender Stretch
2024 – Digital HD – 8 min (Public Performance) / Goethe-Institut – Resonance –
Performance & Production – Jakob Wirth
Cinematography & Editing – Vincent Jondeau
Support – Claire Géhin
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CONTEXT: In the frame of the french-german Resonance Program organized by the Goethe Institut France, Jakob Wirth started with Claire Géhin a collaboration entitled „Pas ton genre“ (Not your business). They exchanged ideas in a question-and-answer format, whereby a performance ( „Cutout. 1Km Patriarchy“) will be followed by a text by Claire („Sauver sa peau“) and then a performance by Jakob („My Gender Stretch“).
TEXT: A stretching that creates tension and tightness; transparent layers that only become visible in their multitude of overlapping gender characteristics and their gender corset. Where does a cisgender socialised person who feels uncomfortable with this or does not want to embody this corset move to?
The performance ‘My Gender Stretch’ attempts to stretch the gender sediments that surround us in heteronormative society. Both visibly and invisibly, we are wrapped up in role expectations, ideas of behaviour and physical forms of expression that are based on society’s interpretation of our gender and leave us with hardly any way out without either dropping out completely or suffering great damage ourselves.
The artist* – who grew up as a cis man and has been experimenting with gender, its expression and definition since his childhood – deals in the performance with a gender stretch and the question of how these transparent gender levels can be dealt with.
The Cis narrowness is for them translated into a tension, to entangle, wind up, develop in a never-ending interweaving of privileges, violence, oppression and adaptation, which is directed above all at non-cis men*, but also at themselves as soon as they become aware of themselves and their effects.
For the artist, the stretching is an attempt to deal with gender in a playful way – to tangle it, to make it tear or to unwind it completely. The question of the performance remains as to how this experiment and playful approach is perceived and accepted in public space – who tears, who plays, who destroys or who liberates?
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— 2024 | Exhibition « Förderpreis Junge Kunst » – Rathaus-Galerie Reinickendorf (Berlin/DE)
