"All of this was here…"

Gob Squad's collective work, their 20 year long process of creating, is characterised by the wish to hold onto time, stop it, baffle it and trick it. Wrestling with eternity and the wish for immortality confronts the experience of real time and the unrepeatability of the moment.
 

Countless moments like these are buried in the Gob Squad video archive, which is like a collective visual memory for the group. These images tell of the attempt to banish transience while also being the preserved expression of a particular phase in the collective process. A montage from the video material of past performances has been created for Be Part of Something Bigger and installed in different locations in HAU 1 and HAU 2 - stills and images edited as a series.


20.-22.11., HAU2

100 Kisses

– 100 kisses in 100 cities

(Video loop, 45 mins.)

"In our war on anonymity our choice of weapon is the video camera. The streets will be our film set, cigarette butts and litter our props and the passersby the stars of this film. We will do our best to complete our mission with a great moment of passion, emotion and liberation!"

(Super Night Shot, Manifesto 2003)
 

In the video performance Super Night Shot, a performer has to convince a stranger on the street to kiss them. Since the premiere at the Prater in Berlin in the winter of 2003, this kiss has been repeated in over 100 cities across the world. The video documents this unusual event of a person in a rabbit mask kissing someone unknown. The places change, the time passes but the kiss remains from Berlin to Budapest and from Krasnoyarsk to New York.
 

Video edit: Anna Zett and Gob Squad


Heroes’ Welcome

(Video loop, 15 mins.)

"We can be Heroes

Just for one day

We can be us

Just for one day."

(David Bowie)
 

Like ghosts from the past, groups of spectators from widely different cities in which the piece Super Night Shot has been shown greet the audience in Berlin: Heroes' Welcome shows their faces in closeup, in expectation of a beginning which at the same time is an end.
 

Video edit: Anna Zett and Gob Squad

Sound design: Jeff McGrory


Where Do You Want To Go To Die?

(Video loop, 52 mins.)

"Music was my first love

and it will be my last

music of the future

and music of the past"
 

First you hear the sound of chattering voices of people on a journey, beneath them hums the sound of a van and its radio. Sometimes excited, sometimes tired, the conversation meanders playfully from one topic to another, referring to buildings, directions, travel snacks and personal anecdotes. Then the image of a speeding road begins to form. The pace of the night time streets has an ominous quality, out of sync with the soundtrack, there‘s an overwhelming sense that something is about to happen. It's like waking up in someone else’s dream, in which you are a silent passenger.
 

Soon the van pulls up, the door slides open and the passengers appear in the glare of the headlights.  As the car radio continues to play, the figures douse themselves in champagne, childishly jumping with reckless abandon. Eventually the van pulls back, leaving the passenger in an eternal ecstatic image... once again in darkness you are joined by the voices as another journey begins. Each stop presents a new location and a new image.
 

As our night time journeys progressed our responses to our brief became more and more intense.  Using strawberries, champagne and party string, what seemed appropriate were images which somehow captured a kind of "letting go". Each image is a bizarre celebration of surrender, a personal wake and a parting gesture.
 

Our approach to the project was instinctive. Taking as starting points the city of Berlin and the question "where do you want to go to die?" we spent many evenings driving from one location to the next, trying things out in front of the camera. In piecing together a picture of the city, it seemed important to find a diversity of locations that ranged from the iconic Brandenburg Gate to an abandoned industrial wasteland, from the shiny terraces of Potsdamer Platz to a graffitied cul-de-sac in Mitte. 

Where Do You Want To Go To Die?  was originally developed for the Berlin week within EXPO 2000, Hannover. A night time journey around Berlin was reconstructed in a static vehicle, using surround sound and video images projected onto the windscreen. A version for gallery or similar art spaces has been developed to be presented on a video screen and has been shown at various venues since.
 

Concept and Realisation: Gob Squad

Video: Alex Large
 

Courtesy Gallery Arndt&Partner, Berlin. Coproduced by the Berliner Kulturveranstaltungs-GmbH.

21.-22.11., HAU1

"All of this was here..."

(Video loop, 5 mins.)

"Once upon a time, not so long ago... all of this was here."

(Gob Squad)

Saving The World  is an ambitious attempt to save the world and preserve it for posterity – a filmic portrait of the here and now, transforming one day in a city square into a microcosm of the whole world.

"All of this was here..." reveals the public places in which Saving The World  was filmed – banal, everyday spaces that become an archive testimonial to the state of the world on that one day and hold up a mirror to their time.
 

Video edit: Miles Chalcraft and Gob Squad


Now and Then

(Video loop, 12 mins.)

How long is this hour that we will spend together with our past selves?
 

There is hardly a Gob Squad piece where transience, mortality and the desire to hold back time are more apparent than in Before Your Very Eyes, where seven children run through their lives in "fast forward".
 

In Now and Then  the closeups of the children's faces taken at the first meeting confront videos of their alter egos five and a half years later – the gaze into the eye of the camera is simultaneously focused on the past and an uncertain future.
 

Video edit: Anna Zett and Gob Squad

 

Photo: Piotr Redinski