The video installation and performance work by the artist duo Tomas Kleiner and Marco Biermann deals with a finely motorized way of being dependent on each other. Located in everyday situations, Kleiner and Biermann experiment with moments of physical helplessness, as long as the the condition continually changes. While a clearly contoured situation – making coffee – initially begins with a definable distribution of roles (who uses whose hands for what purpose), this is reversed again and again, giving rise to moments of indeterminacy that no longer allow a stable allocation. In this way, acting together creates spaces in between, which constantly oscillate between supporting, instrumentalizing, empowering oneself over the body of the other, joining and letting oneself be guided.

The video projections shown in loops, as well as the actions performed as a live performance, thematise a mutual feeling of movement, of the physicality of the other, but also of the body as a material, a tool with its own resistance. At the same time the work does not linger merely in the mode of representation. The haptic highly charged images and the tangible objects in the room, which can be incorporated in a direct sense via smell, create an increased materiality ratio, which produces a direct physical response. In this way, the installation itself becomes an experiential space that negotiates the materiality and corporeality of the other, without allowing this to dissolve into a tactile experience of its own.

This ambiguous experience is heightened in the live performances, which in turn take up everyday practical situations. Whether preparing a coffee, hanging out the laundry or potting plants – the actions as material acts are felt above all in their temporal extension. While making coffee as a practiced, independent action would take about four minutes, here it is extended to almost four times the time. In this way, the experience of the performance goes beyond a quasi-distant observation to emerge a sense of the process as action. Thus the materiality of the performances generates a form of physical involvement that makes the resistance of the body of the other person visible, and the loss of control about the slipping coffee bean perceptible. In this way, personal everyday life becomes an experimental field of constant change, a situation that shifts the privacy of practiced actions and turns it into a field of negotiation, which allows the interaction with one another to become a resistively ambiguous and at the same time uncontrollable, attentive and sensitive practice.

Text excerpt by Svetlana Chernyshova, 2019