January 13th 2024 Flashmob at Berlin Global in Humboldt Forum

Unannounced, quiet intervention in the interactive exhibition Berlin Global. For several hours, we repeatedly walked through the same doors of the exhibition rooms, triggering small sounds. The doors are labelled with seemingly mutually exclusive statements ‘I want to dare change’ versus ‘I want to protect what we have’. You always have to choose one of two options in the exhibition. DETOX cannot decide in this pointed, binary way. So we were always going back and forth, forwards and backwards, together and alone, without a solution. 98% despair, 2% humour.

MITSPIELEN (PLAY ALONG) – Performance Intervention in the public space infront of KaDeWE Berlin

Photo: Clio van Aerde

Unannounced intervention in public space. Christmas jazz, sometimes pop, trickles from the loudspeakers above the shop windows of KaDeWe in Berlin Schöneberg. DETOX played along quietly. Maja with the trumpet, Anton with a blackboard on which he writes everything that we as participants in Western consumer societies are involved in: ever more oil drilling in the Amazon region, violence at Europe’s external borders, thousands of deaths in Gaza, the rise of right-wing radicalism. We have no solution either. We play along. 98% desperation, 2% humour.

Performance at Festival Musik 21 “Kipppunkte” during the concert of Ensemble Mosaik, performing Antons piece “Camp Linden Nord”

DETOX at Musik 21 in Hanover. During the premiere of Anton’s composition ‘Camp Linden Nord’ at the ensemble mosaik concert, Maja cleaned Anton’s fee with a toothbrush. After about 120 minutes, she has made one side of a coin a little cleaner. 98% despair, 2% humour.

Concert/Performance @ 4bid gallery Amsterdam

Photo: Lisa Hofmann

Photo: Anton X

DETOX on tour as a duo. Improvised music and performance in a gallery in Amsterdam. For about an hour we played instruments wired together in a complex setup, and resonators made of everyday objects connected via transducers. The control over the sounds lied somewhere between us and the machines. The evening began with the sound of coin-scrubbing toothbrushes from a rubbish bin in the gallery courtyard, and ended after the entire electronic amplification failed towards the end of the performance, as a duo of bamboo flute from a market in Bangalore with an unamplified electric guitar. 98% despair, 2% humour.
Followed by an exciting and inspiring audience discussion.

Live Musik / Performance @ AckerStadtPalast Berlin

Guests:
QiQi Zheng – dance, contorsion & performance art (sunday)
Wieland Möller – drumset & performance (monday)

Funded by Musikfonds

Photo: Detox

On two consecutive evenings, DETOX was laundering their first public funding from the Musikfonds – on one evening supported by the performance artist, vogue dancer and contortionist QiQi Zheng, on the other by the drummer and performer Wieland Möller. On an off-stage in Berlin, we tried to wring poetry out of a pile of urban rubbish to constructively network ourselves and our instruments, to publicly search for new forms of co-operation and shared control over the whole. Scraps of a jazz band, singing rubbish bins, a body whose contortions simultaneously point to its entanglement in global dynamics, and express the longing to somehow wriggle out of them. 98% despair, 2% humour.

Music/performance/lecture online. Washing happening simultaneously from Berlin (Germany) and ísafjörður (Iceland).

DETOX non-stop. Money is laundered even at the height of summer. In a Zoom call, we read from our summer reading programme from different ends of Europe. It’s about friendship, debt, resonance and capital in the 21st century. In between, we tried to launder a cent by transferring it back and forth online and making the resulting internet traffic audible to the guests through sonification. 98% desperation, 2% humour.

Bibliography

Various authors of the South African online newspaper THE CONTINENT
David Graeber: Debt – the first 5000 years
Thomas Piketty: Capital in the 21st century
Hartmut Rosa: Resonance – a sociology of world relations
Hannah Arendt: Friendship in dark times

Music/performance in the in the power cellar of a Kreuzberg tenement house.
An intervention in public space that you can watch from the street.
Followed by a bonfire in the yard.

Photo Ivan Mrsic

Fourth DETOX – cellar wash cycle. We opened the normally rather hidden basement of our apartment building in Berlin Kreuzberg to the street and used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, we worked with a wide range of electronic and acoustic instruments, which are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. Individual moments of this washing process were by now routine, listening to our own four walls via microphone and feedback, working with text snippets from the South African newspaper, THE CONTINENT, and another recorder solo dedicated to whistleblowers, possibly only 1% funny and 99% desperate.

The third performance in the basement of our building.
An intervention into the public space, that can be followed from the street.
98% desperation, 2% wit.

Photo: Maja vK

Photo: Anton X

Third DETOX basement concert. For our wash cycle in June, we once again used the basement of our house in Berlin Kreuzberg. We opened up the normally hidden basement of the house to the street and used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, again working with a large selection of electronic and acoustic instruments, that are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. Individual moments of this wash included listening to our own four walls via microphone and feedback, working with snippets of text from the South African newspaper, THE CONTINENT, and a recorder solo dedicated to Julian Assange that was 98% desperate and 2% funny.

An online performance on zoom.

DETOX takes the educational mission of art seriously. In a Zoom call, hosted simultaneously from an art academy in the Netherlands and the Berlin home base, we read from one of DETOX’s basic theoretical texts – David Graeber’s ‘Debt, the first 5000 years’. We also discussed our previous washing methods and tested Anton’s new online transfer sonificator in public for the first time. Towards the end, Maja’s revolutionary etude on the Steinway, as well as the entire event, is were taken out of our hands by China. 98% desperation 2% humour.

Video: Anton X

Performance Still: Detox

Photo: Karolina Rupp

DETOX in the basement for the second time. For our washing cycle in April, we once again used the basement of our apartment block in Berlin Kreuzberg, which is open to the street. It’s a rarely entered, rather hidden place – it’s also where the electricity meters for the whole house are located. The room thus becomes a kind of control centre. We used it as a metaphor for invisible entanglement, complexity and opacity. Musically, this time we used a very lean setup of a few washing sounds that are electronically amplified via transducers with cleaning buckets positioned on the street. In this wash cycle, the focus was on listening to one’s own four walls via microphone and feedback. 98% despair, 2% humour.

Photo: Vinicius Giusti

Photo: Vinicius Giusti