Soccer Opera

Last night we attended a Soccer Opera at Ballhaus Mitte. It was the much anticipated event of the EM season hosted in an baroque ballroom in Berlin's Mitte district.

This evening's protagonist was Germany facing their arch rival Turkey. The stage was set as a beam of light was emitted from a projector and cast a luscious green expanse upon the wall, falling between smoky sheets of plate glass mirrors above our heads. Sitting at benches, among candle light, the cast's coreography ran a gamut of emotions beginning with the national anthem and culminating with last whistle's blow. It began with national comraderie and moved quickly to suspense as the team in red scored the first goal. Mixtures of embarassment and frustration built as passes were missed and the men on the field tumbled on the ground. The liters of beer fueled the anger each of us shared as the live television signal was lost and everyone in the room was left to confront each other in helplessness and desperation. The chorus began shortly after the signal returned, Fi-na-le!...Fi-na-le!...Fi-na-le!... The game was tied by a goal that could have passed through a keyhole. Hands waved ritually in the air, bodies jumped up and down in unison and the clock ticked away.

The last movement of the evening was nearly forgotten until the composition climaxed in the final 30 seconds of the night. The screen flashed 3-2, Germany! Rooms emptied and streets filled with honking horns, broken bottles, and black, red, and gold tears from the Schwarzwald to the Nord Sea.

Fußball (or soccer, for those of us who need to differentiate between football and American football)

I think that Turkey just won its playoff game in the Euro 2008 championship. I can tell because the streets are filled with people cheering, cars honking, and fireworks. Checking online just now I learned that was indeed the case...Turkey goes to the semi-finals and plays Germany next Wednesday in Basel, Switzerland. That will be one crazy day for Berlin. In this past week we have actually moved temporarily into Neukölln, a largely Turkish immigrant neighborhood, and so excitement (and potential tension next week?) was running high all through the evening...until it was unleashed when Turkey 'came back' from defeat against Croatia and won the game.



The Euro 2008 has been going for a couple of weeks. We first experienced the craze during our trip to southwestern Germany. As soon as we returned we got off the train and was surrounded by people covered in black, red and yellow (Germany's flag/national colors) clothing, face makeup and wigs, watching TVs throughout the station and temporary large screen viewing stadiums out front. There is no American sport experience that can quite compare to this. Every corner of every street, every little cafe and corner store, pulls out a TV (many times literally on the sidewalk) for the neighborhood to get together an watch the game.



It makes one realize how few international competitions we (the US) are really engage in. The only one I could think of that a large number of people actual care about is the Olympics (also set to start this summer in China). It makes sense, since European countries are competing with each other at about the rate our large cities of each state are...but with that in mind, can anyone really blame us for being so patriotic during the Olympics? When else do we have the opportunity to shout U-S-A? Even then, it is not the same status that soccer (i.e. football) has in...well, the rest of the world.

So...What else have we been up to in the last month? First, thanks for the encouragement from those of you who missed our posts. It is nice to be missed! But, we have been busy and traveling around so it was necessary to take a break. As R mentioned in the last posting we started May with a whole bunch of guests. M and N came from San Francisco for about 10 days, and then we headed to Denmark and Sweden for R's exhibition at Unten Drunter. We spend 5 days between Copenhagen and Malmö and got a real sense of both countries. Scandinavia is so much more like the US than the rest of Europe. I started referring to Scandinavia as the Canada of Europe, where Canada is more like mainland Europe than the US.

A couple of days after we returned from that trip our good friends J and W came in from San Francisco as well. They were on their way to a wedding in Amsterdam and decided to expand their trip to include a stay with us. They were here for about 6 days and tried to show them around Berlin as best we could...including a boat ride on the Spree and some traditional German food.

The day they arrived I actually got a job. I was offered a studio assistant position with the same artist I mentioned meeting way back in January, WN. I didn't start working though until the day after J + W left and then there was lots to do. A last minute project came up so over the next 9 days I worked about 70 hours transcribing some lectures and various other things.

Then we left for our 9 day trip down south. I will be expanding on that trip after this posting at length so I will leave it at that for now.

We returned from that trip about a week ago and since have moved out of our apartment in the Mitte, into R's studio for 2 nights, and into the Berlin Office space in Neukölln. We rent our apartment in the Mitte from the artist that R works for and he was coming for his yearly visit for a month so we were leaving temporarily. Originally we were going to be at R's studio for 2 weeks and then the Berlin Office for a month, but things have moved up on all fronts and we are already in the Berlin Office and will be back in the Mitte probably the 3rd week of July.

For those of you who did not get the email blast about our upcoming project, the Berlin Office is a 2 bedroom apartment project space that is run by a group of Danish artists we know. One room is for longer term tenants, and the smaller room is more of a project space used for shorter term projects and events. We arranged the have the larger space during our temporary move during a transitional period in the space, and since we were living here anyway we were offered the opportunity to do a project in the actual Berlin Office space. After some thought we decided on the upcoming Many Mini Residency program. As we say on the website,
"Many Mini Residency is a one-room residency that is open to applicants from all disciplines (art and non-art alike) and encourages participants to customize their residency experience. There is no minimum time-limit for your stay at the residency but the maximum stay allows you to use this space for half a day."



We are very excited for this upcoming project and have been spending quite a bit of time working toward it. We have had some great proposals and look forward to updating them online once they get underway.

So...that is where we are at this point. Working at the Berlin Office, preparing for a residency project, and listening to excitement on the street following another Euro 2008 soccer match.
more soon...