Every two years, the Biennale for Light Art and Urban Design takes place in the urban areas of Frankfurt and Offenbach. Even before this year's event opened, it was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Since this week, the organizers have been inviting visitors to a virtual tour. Now, the digital space serves as a stage for installations that are partly impressive, partly shockingly oblivious to history. "Digital Romantic" is the theme of this year's Luminale. The organizers see a parallel between the age of digitalization, the quantification of the world in numbers, and the beginning industrialization in the late 18th century, a time marked by the achievements of the Enlightenment and whose consequence was a feeling of pressure to rationalize and standardize. While the 18th century, with Max Weber's "disenchantment of the world," paved the way for Romanticism as a counter-movement, the Luminale asks about the place of the romantic in the digital. Do we have in the digital a boundless rationalization machine, or does it offer space for the sublime?
BELONGING
The work of the collective for audiovisual art Xenorama, titled "Belonging," answers the latter question with a clear yes. The facade of the Alte Oper serves as their projection surface, a building that was only completed in 1880 itself, but whose architecture is based on the Palladianism of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden from 1743, thus aesthetically referring to the 18th century. With light plays, the artists break down the building into fragments, reconstructing it from the smallest pixels and vector surfaces. The performance is accompanied by a soundtrack that combines electronic music and classical instruments such as double bass and piano. In this way, Xenorama creates a sensual experience of what they imagine digital romanticism to be today.
GRIM WHITE
Video artist Vanessa Hafenbrädl and musician Anna McCarthy demonstrate a different approach to the Romantic era. The two take on the Brothers Grimm, themselves contemporaries of Romanticism, and the fairy tale Snow White from their collection. At the Snow White monument in Taunusanlage, the artists present their hypnotic mix of hauntingly hammering rhythm and light and video projections, which, with the help of light broken in glass, break up and reassemble the female figures of the fairy tale. Image and text fragments dismantle the story of the fairy tale and snatch it from the striving for a male savior figure. The impressive projections were created entirely without computer-aided animations.
FACING EXTINCTION
The Luminale commits itself to addressing "urban visions in the field of tension between light, architecture, technology, ecology, social coexistence in the city, or its history and culture." This year, the organizers show that dealing with the history and culture of the city is indeed an either-or, with a work that overshadows a memorial to the crimes of the Nazi regime with images of endangered species facing extinction.
"Facing Extinction" is the title of the video installation by the Berlin office for spatial and media installation M Box. The IG Farben building, the former headquarters of the chemical company that supplied Zyklon B to the extermination camps of National Socialism, serves as the projection surface. An example of the use of forced laborers by IG Farben is the Monowitz concentration camp near Auschwitz, which was built for the employment of prisoners for work in the adjacent Buna Werke of IG Farben. Arbitrary executions and death by exhaustion were commonplace during the expansion of the camp and factory work. Until 1945, IG Farben was not only significantly involved in the murder of 6 million Jews, but also in the death of 2.5 million forced laborers.
The description of the work now speaks of an "installation that relentlessly scratches at the edges, tears open the view into the abyss and mercilessly points out [sic] that the time of denial is over, the limit within which we can escape this self-inflicted disaster unharmed has long been crossed!" The background is not the crimes of the Nazi regime, but the report of the World Biodiversity Council, according to which about 1 million of an estimated 8 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. This alone is reason for an intensive debate, but it must not be carried out at the expense or instead of the debate on the crimes of the National Socialists. Even less may it promote the relativization of those crimes. That this danger is real was proven last November by the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam.
Hallam referred to the Holocaust in "Die Zeit" in the best Gauland-esque manner as "just another shit in human history" and announced in a Spiegel interview: "Climate change is just the pipe through which gas flows into the gas chamber." Whereupon the German branch of the movement resolutely distanced itself from Hallam and the Ullstein publishing house withdrew a book by him. All this was less than half a year ago. It would have been expected of the organizers to show more sensitivity for a "high-quality program" and a "sustainable contribution." Instead, the history of the IG Farben building is not mentioned in either the project description or the press releases of the Luminale, let alone an explanation for the choice of the building.
As long as the fight against climate change and against species extinction serves as a gateway for antisemitism, its successes will remain in unreachable distance.
