Political Art – “Le Ping Pong D’amour”: a faded binoculars

»An individual life is a serialized capitalist mini crisis, a disaster that bears your name. Invest nothing! ”That was on a banner that was hung in an ATM room of the Sparkasse at the Hackescher Markt in Berlin at night. It made a police patrol at a loss, which was hesitantly removed. This is an episode from the “inner city campaigns”, which took place in 1997 in Berlin and other cities against the privatization of common goods, against surveillance and displacement in public space. Because even then this development swept the neighborhood Blank and made it into the inner cities of the present time as assets.

The sentence cited at the beginning reappeared as the motto of the first season of the “Le Ping Pong d’amour” series, in which the “inner city campaigns” also occurred. “Ping Pong” was a collective project that saw himself as an alternative to professional film and TV production and also as an expression of distrust of academic and cultural careers. The first season begins in a loft in Munich in 1997. The second plays in the Rodin Museum in Paris five years later and releases-or rather she bumps-the members out into the world. The next episodes play separately, including in Damascus, Guadeloupe and Istanbul.

On June 5, the entire series in the Gropius Bau Berliner was shown again. I write about it because it explains possible reasons for our political silence in this present. In a historical review, it looks like an overturned binoculars. The series begins in the 90s, the first decade of the forcing of that neoliberal world society, whose financial gau in 2008 caused the loans of thousands of individual mini crisis and caused urban homelessness to previously unknown dimensions.

In the first part in particular, it seems to us that the actors of “Ping Pong” tried to practice an immunity against this form of economic forcing in their shared apartment, the part of which they are. They wear books from which they read out like protective shields. They also use these books as ammunition when they throw them on stubborn roommates. At the time, these books were the literature of the hour: French theory and gender -critical feminism. But of course the people appearing have to earn money. Wing around books is also a privilege, a distinguished form of estrangement at a time when the employment office was renamed the “Employment Agency” – one of many sloping euphemisms for the unconditional availability of worker.

Series shared apartments are like capsules that convey a non-binding security. They are not families and not municipalities, their members are ready for separation depending on the Fortune. The common framework of the Ping Pong WG consists on the one hand of the landlord and on the other hand in a small company, then called I I-AG: a French language school. The landlord is also the psychoanalyst of a headstrong WG member: a reversal of the transmission principle. The language school uses the rooms (and the people of the shared apartment) as a language laboratory. It is this reversibility of the livelihood that makes this season look as carefree – as non -binding as a loose ensemble from Monad.

According to a term of Louis Althusser, the second season is called “ideological state apparatus”. The French Marxist described the family, school, politics and the media, all of which ideologically affect people. As a title for the series, this acts like an allergic reaction to the then newly established Federal Cultural Foundation. In the series, a state curator now takes on the role of the landlord. It is exhausted by the constant hunt for creative resources that are supposed to enliven the museums. The Ping Pong Community moves to Paris, to the Rodin Museum. The art student Camille (what could she be called?) Destroy the sculptures there – far too easily plunge down the stairwell – to free the community. But that doesn’t use anything because it does not suffer from musalization, but suffers itself.

In a pronunciation, the characters fall apart and together again as if they had never played anything other than themselves. The openness of the project has become a burden. The actors are thrown back. Because they are themselves who laborize themselves on the attitudes of a negative freedom that does not tolerate any liabilities if their sentences never lead to discussions, their interactions.

In Istanbul, the state curator stimulates other residences with “mini crisis subjects”, two flat share members appear in Damascus. It is the time between the two Assad dictatorships, the transition of rule between father and son; A short spring when the upcoming society could be discussed in the salons. Photos of Claude Cahun, a well-known surrealistic artist of the twenties and thirties, are reproduced as if they are assembled into a backdrop. When they return to Paris, the cover of Edward Said’s book “Orientalism” is shown. Only the camera still stays there and films how someone learns to dance Palestinian on the roof between the laundry and between other people, not with them.

A salon is filmed in Guadeloupe, which is part of a dead guard, a nine -day Veillée to which everyone can come. The relevant women of the island will discuss the upcoming society. The body that is committed is another member of the WG, a European, but one from Yugoslavia that no longer exists as a state.

The narrative of bohemian groups that diverge when members outgrow them and become part of the “ideological state apparatus” has extended to the bourgeois development novel of the 19th century. But the ping pong flat share is not for education, but the recording of aversions: against the state and business apparatus and against its own constitution. Such subjects cannot design a new society because there are too much state that they reject. They remain their own faders. When Hegel describes in the “phenomenology”, the development novel of the terms, the law of the heart and the madness of the own man as a deviant poetry that faces the reason of bourgeois society, i.e. the unity of the individual and community, this reason was driven into the intelligence tongue of the chainsaws by its enrichment tendency.

And the law of the heart? The Ping Pong series was produced by the Minimal Club, an artist group (originally from Munich) and the B-Books (Berlin) bookstore. These were and are nested, constantly meandering collective relationships that still practice art, film, theory, literature and political activism as committed practice in the debate. This persistence is a protection at a time when freedom becomes tight. From now on, Ping Pong is a criticism of the lying triumph of the so -called free society of those years that their liberality was happy to promote culturally so that the forms of enrichment were not disturbed. Of course, this criticism was not intended.

“Le Ping Pong D’amour” (FRG, 1997–2005, approx. 400 min.) By and with Team Ping Pong (Elfe Brandenburger, Esther Buss, Katja Eydel, Stephan Geene, Monika and Stefan Rinck, Niko Siepen, Klaus Weber, Cornelia and Mano Wittmann UA)