No one was at home

The Façade

The first thought that came to mind when curator Chen Shuyu told me about the Chinese theatre group Paper Tiger's project 'Revolution. The Foe of an Arrow Wound'

was the 1971 song 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' by Gil Scott-Heron. It is sometimes said to be the world's first rap song. It ends: 'The revolution will be live.' Got the message.

The revolution staged at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin in April 2023 was live to say the least, but of course it was also a simulation—that’s the nature of art. The newly built Humboldt Forum Museum is itself a kind of simulation. The façade is partly a full-scale copy of the Prussian 18th-century castle in the centre of Berlin and was bombed during the Second World War, and then demolished and replaced by the brutalist East German Palast der Republik, which also has been demolished, as being full of asbestos. But only half of the façade is new-old, the rest, and the museum's body, is a modern-concrete and glass building and contains a collection of African, Asian and other non-European art. It is a constructed and strange meeting place where stories are whispered after closure in the museum halls by all these artefacts, long away from home.

Humboldt Forum, fake 18th century façade

The invitation to Paper Tiger from Humboldt Forum might have had something to do with the fact that the polished façade cannot cover the various wounds this place and these various buildings tell: Nazism and the defeat of Germany, the Berlin Wall that divided the German people in the middle, and the stories behind all the artefacts brought from far away countries and turned into museum pieces.

During the conversations, both Shuyu and I thought of Tracey Chapman's Talkin' About A Revolution: 'Don't you know/They're talking about a revolution?/It sounds like a whisper.' Three months later, at the end of the performance, the exhausted dancers are writhing in agony on the circular stage, we see them, and we listen to them, to a few lines from Chapman's song: 'It sounds like a whisper ... run, run, run ... run, run, run.'

'The Chinese Collection'

When I arrived in Berlin in early February 2023 to discuss the project on site, we visited one of its starting points, 'The China and Europe, Chinese Court Art Collection' ('The Chinese Collection') at the Humboldt Forum. There is a scroll that depicts two men on horsebacks, a Chinese warrior chasing at full gallop an enemy he has hit in the back with arrows. The Manchu emperor’s warrior is chasing away the invader from the far west of the empire. It is these arrows that gave Revolution the subtitle 'Arrow Wound'. There are wounds.

But things are more complicated than that. The scroll was not painted by a Chinese artist but by the Italian missionary and artist Guiseppe Castiglione. He learned Chinese painting at the imperial court in Beijing, and in his painting style East and West merge. In particular the faces, the human façade, have a more three-dimensional character than in traditional Chinese painting. The Qianglong emperor appreciated this.

Portrait by Guiseppe Castiglione

In the same exhibition room, you find one of the emperor's travelling thrones in the West. the only one in the West that stands with its accompanying screen. It is a good example of how Chinese artefacts have 'travelled' from East to West over the centuries. Nowadays it is stationary. Later, the Israeli actor Ariel stood in the hall on the ground floor of the Humboldt Forum, in the centre of the foil-covered circular stage wearing only his underpants, like a child on a giant silver cake platter, pointing to the ceiling and shouting: 'Here, in this house, up there, there is the throne!' Then he told us a story about guilt and wounds. The emperor had suffered from insomnia and often woke up at night, in a cold sweat and filled with anxiety. He became increasingly tired and listless, so he called a wise man for advice. The wise man told the emperor to embroider the word Forgive on his back. By back, the wise man meant the drapery that hung over the throne, but the emperor did not understand that and had him killed. Then he called to him the most skilled embroiderer in the kingdom and asked him to embroider the word Forgive directly on his back, on his skin. It hurt terribly and when the work was finished, he had the embroiderer killed because no one in the kingdom would get to see or know about this strange embroidery.

Chinese artefacts transported to the West were also the theme of a grand video installation that was shown part way through the performance. All the performers in the show were filmed separately, wearing black jumpers so that their faces seemed to float in a row up the wall. They read out the lists of 117 crates full of precious objects brought home from Beijing in 1901 by a F.W.K. Muller, assistant to the director of the German Ethnological Museum. The German Reich government had provided him with 10,000 marks for expanding the inventory of the museum after the fall of Beijing in August 1900 during the so-called Boxer Rebellion, Yìhétuán Qǐyì, 1898-1901. It was directed against the increasing European influence over China and failed.

Revolution:The Foe of an Arrow Wound, The Blackmarket, 2023

The performers read, one after the other, in their mother tongue: Japanese, Chinese, German, French, English and Ukrainian. It sounded like hard blows. When, during the reading, the Chinese drummer Shengnan Hu lined up everyday objects along the edge of the stage and then ran in a circle, hitting them hard and precisely, the violence became even more obvious.

There are also artefacts in 'The Chinese Collection' whose westward journeys have been sanctioned at the highest levels, but they also constitute wounds. They are gifts related to revolutions. Some are related to the defeat of the Boxer Rebellion. In 1901, the Empress Dowager CiXi sent Prince Chun II to Berlin with gifts as a special part of the hard peace treaty, as the German ambassador to China, Clemens von Ketteler, had been murdered during the uprising. The porcelain artefacts are preserved in the Humboldt Forum's 'Chinese Collection'.

Other gifts recall other revolutions. A more recent example is the antique artefacts presented to the GDR by Mao Tse-tung during a state visit in 1959 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the two nations, China and East Germany. It consisted of porcelain artefacts from the Neolithic period until the fall of the empire. When it was time for the Soviet Union empire and GDR to fall, the Chinese collections from East and West Germany were merged.

Chen Shuyu had an idea to produce an artist book, a not only friendly takeover of the information on the museum labels in 'The Chinese Collection'. Writers were invited to contribute with short and sometimes speculative text fragments. My first encounter in situ with Revolution took place in 'The Chinese Collection', that's where I started. The visit was disturbed, or perhaps accompanied, by angry alarm calls. I wrote: 'Electrified: The obscure museum halls invite silence or quiet conversations. But the calm is abruptly interrupted at irregular intervals when a visitor walks too close to an object. Then an invisible laser beam is broken and a monotonous shrill alarm sounds, cancelling the solemnity of the museum and outcompeting all other experiences. Instead, visitors could be provided with wristbands that become electrified if they go too close to the artefacts. Then the alarm signal would be replaced by unpredictable cries in different pitches and different strengths and thus enrich the other visitors' experiences.'

The Circular Stage

We then left 'The Chinese Collection' and went down to look at the place where the performance was going to be performed later in April. On the way I noticed something which made me think about how we regard the purpose of museums and published the experience in the red artist book:

'It was Sunday, and a little girl was visiting the museum with her grandfather. In one of the exhibition halls they passed by two curators wearing white lab coats. The girl thought they looked like doctors and asked her grandfather: are we in a hospital? No, my little friend, he answered. Everyone here is healthy and happy.'

I was back at the Humboldt Forum in late February and rehearsals were in full swing. The director Tian Gebing was instructing the dancers with the help of an interpreter. The dancers (Raul Aranha, Simon Chatelain, Oksana Chupryniuk, Gong Zhonghui, Wang Yanan) came from France, Ukraine, China and India. In the background, a Japanese DJ, Mieko Suzuki, quietly honed her instrument. Israeli actor Ariel Nil Levy agonised over the mass of texts and Hans-Jürgen Schreiber worried about his role in the event. He was the only one of us from Berlin, but from a Berlin that no longer existed, East Berlin. Before the fall of the Wall, he was the restaurant manager at the Palast der Republik. Since childhood he had a longing for China, and had been allowed to accompany a state visit to China during the GDR era.

In a chair sat the dramaturge, Christoph Lepschy. He told me that the script needed editing. It was too long, and partly in German, partly in English, and had been translated back and forth between Chinese, English and German and suffered from a kind of material fatigue. I read a bit and understood what he meant. We immediately set about editing it together, paragraph by paragraph. When dinner time came, we went to my hotel, sat in the lobby and ate a sandwich, drank a couple of beers and continued the urgent work, late at night. Early next morning we were at it again. Intensely.

The Writer & The Throne, photo by Chen Shayu

It was impossible to imagine how the different pieces of the show: video art, dance, theatre, text, live music and an interview with Hans-Jürgen could be merged into a whole. The technicians stood at their electronic tables, separately. The dancers had lunch in their own little group. Ariel struggled by himself as the only theatre actor, and Christoph and I laboured over the text. Director Tian Gebing walked in-between us all.

The Last Run

Then came the first run-through. It faltered, as it should. But at the premiere, everything came together in a marvellous way, Revolution had become an adventure, a big collage full of surprises. Strangely enough, Chinese Paper Tiger and the performers, who like all the museum's artefacts came from different parts of the world, had united for a couple of hours, in an exemplary Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) with roots in German Romanticism and Greek antiquity. For a glimmering moment, it looked like a healing process by exposing the wounds.

photo by Ulrika Schalin

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about the author

Andreas Gedin is an artist and writer who works and lives in Stockholm, Sweden. His works combines an interest for ideas, communication, logistics, text and power relations.