Calla Henkel / Max Pitegoff, Mousse Magazine (2015)

“Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s website offers only practical informations on the current, performative, community-based project they run in Berlin, New Theater, without visual documentation, without bio, without a list of previous works. This offers a telling illustration of their concern over the importance of presence, temporariness and of their distrust in slippery representational means. Working mainly with performance, photographs and texts, the duo reflect often
on the conditions of artistic production and its constitutive emotional and interpersonal nature. In the following interview they talk about amateurism, hierarchy of audience, the performance of the self, the metonymy of digital images and their next exhibition at Isabella Bortolozzi in May.

Isabella Zamboni One of your last projects, New Theater (opened in August 2013, will close next June), is a collaboration between artists, writers and musicians – all apparently linked by personal relationships, and all of them not trained in drama – which perform plays within a storefront space in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Do you see the forms and intentions of this work (amateurish, intimate and temporary) as any particular reflection on the current artistic configuration of the city of Berlin – which many describe as losing its 1990s and 2000s experimental appeal and promises?

Calla Henkel / Max Pitegoff New Theater isn’t a flag for another time, but theater, particularly community theater, seems to have its own sentimentality built into it, and the impending close of the space allows for a doubled projection of doom which contributes to some of its freedoms. And part of the humor of the theater for us is the tangle of amateurism and art world professionalism.”

Read the full article here.