Mirror: Experience

What do the photojournalist need to go to war? The night vision, protective linen, body armor, courage, faith in God ... What is needed to go through the Situation Rooms (“Rooms of Operational Response”) of the Rimini Protokoll group? Headphones, tablet and clear orientation on the ground. Individuality is excluded. You - in a voice, index icons - instructs the tablet. Be sure to twenty people - according to the number of storytelling stories, installed in twenty rooms - diverge along their paths, becoming the characters of the “theater of war”. You wander along complex decoration, as in a movie, very whimsically mounted. Under the supervision of real people in the roles of directors, you check your body movements with the screen. You are an actor trying on many masks, roles (identifications). For example, the inventor of the gloves equipped with explosive detectors, or an administrator of the drug cartel, or a surgeon from the organization “Doctors without Borders”, deputy of the Bundestag, Hacker, Dron operator who received the CIA note to destroy terrorists in Pakistan, human rights activist and so on. Victims and criminals. Pacifists and ministers. Living and the dead. “There is not a single war in the world where we would not take part” - we read on the tablet the translation of the ordered voice in one of the rooms. We look at the “mirror” of the tablet and reincarnate in doubles - or rather, the understudy of real people, the inhabitants of these rooms.

The authors (Daniel Vetzel, Helgard Haug, Stefan Kagi, the scenographer Dominic Hubert and many other specialists) “ Sitowion Rooms” ask each participant in the session: “How is your war?” American journalists asked such a question in one of the rooms to the German doctor in Iraq.

Our war is limited by ten, it seems, by stories - selective for each participant in the session, but also crossed. While you knew one on one on one with a glove, someone entered and put on a bulletproof vest. Someone visited the dining room of a military factory in Kirov and poured himself borsch, and this bowl passed someone. Someone was pi-ragged in a hat, but someone did not have to. Intiral personal experience is mirrors with his own universality (today you, and tomorrow I) and becomes the nervous of the “situational” - chamber and total - directing “ S ITUATION ROOMS ” .

You, sitting down in the negotiation chair for the German defense ministers or Chile or to the chair of the director of the bank selling weapons, despite assurances and inspections; You, laying down on the couch in the operating tent in anticipation of the sticker signaling for help (it is sculpted by your hand that suddenly entered the decoration of a stranger); You, moving the joystick, to impress the hostile object - you do not pass all fence, stairs, elevators, installation corridors. But such a part instead of the whole in the nookswoman of the maze involves everyone in a tense and simple -minded game. So the Soldat boy (in one of the rooms) compared the massacre in which he participated, with a game in the war, although he saw how the commander ate natural human.

Experts, killers, lawyers, journalists, workers at military enterprises ... recruit you, a recruit, for the role of an activist of the theatrical process. Obedient for technological requirements, you play global reenactment. Other agents of contemporary art reconstruct, document more specific events, such as episodes of the French revolution or a strike of English miners.

Your safety is not that CRIFOM is with the presumption of your guilt. Now your security is generally possible only in the cinema, only in the game.

The ambitious project of the Rimini Proto K OLL forces to visit the zone of indifference of war and the world, injuring your ability to press the button in the drone cabin and at the same time think about the menu for dinner in the Italian restaurant, and on the way home do not forget to buy flowers to my wife. Or - to comply with the request of the Syrian refugee not to take his eyes off the defeat of his fellow citizens (on the screen), but also to “console” himself with the command not to protrude “around the corner” where the sniper can lurk. But, indeed, he himself.

Your safety is not that CRIFOM is with the presumption of your guilt. Now your security is generally possible only in the cinema, only in the game.

Here you are moving the tiny model of the tank (they are going to buy it in Saudi Arabia) in the German Pavilione - sorry, on a stage site built into the VDNH pavilion. And in another room with an alpine backdrop, you hear the story of the manager of the company's manufacturing systems for gifts for gifts to customers and take (according to his hint) in the hands of a toy bomber plane. At such moments, the boundaries of the visible and imaginary are erased - and the limitless space itself is deducted by simple, if not banal, and therefore shameless staged means.

The cliche of the Formula Theater of War here is literalized and at the same time undergoes deconstruction. On the territory of mutual shakes Pro and Contra (War), your participation in the arms race is redeemed and replaced by a more or less calm perception of theatrical objects. The technology supply of such a rhythm is in perfect installation inside the episodes and between them.

So, for example, the decoration of the Mexican “cemetery” with puppet corpses, artificial flowers and signs with the names of unsuccessful drug carriers are mounted with a soft voice of an administrator of the drug cartel, recalling how he made these people with the light. Or, say, you are ahead of the military atmosphere on the monitor in the Butt (having the opportunity to defeat the object with the help of a joystick), and relax in a different space where weapons/purchase transactions are taking place that there is definitely nothing to do with you. That is, the further a fragment of dangerous reality is, protected from you monitors, the more active intermediary between the theater and the world you find yourself. And when you go into the room where scenes geshefts take place, and you can even touch the bottles of water on the table, you feel just an observer.

Installation clutches of a programmed military campaign have neither the beginning nor the end. To say that the authors abandon the actors (and, of course, actors, although the word is very nasty), such a trip is either in heat, then in the cold, means minimizing the special effects of “ S ITUATION ROOMS ” .

The main thing in this campaign is the traps that should bypass. But it is they who provoke stress, anxiety (however, the exit is also provided - the assistants will be found in a vast landfill, as a military training ground): the authors of the “ S ITUATION ROOMS ” thematize the transformation of the “global village” into a global network, reduced (sophisticated) to the local theater model.

A visitor of the simultaneous game session is in two -dimensional space: the picture in the navigator (tablet) repeats the decoration of the room. Transgression of the virtual and material worlds forms a steep route leading to remote and tactile access to the venue sites. Having survived the formation of actors and characters, having lie down on a bed in the hospital, shooting, eating, driving the “terrorists” and having saved from the sniper, visitors to “ S ITUATION ROOMS ” are as if armed with experience - or protection from a trick of peaceful life. At this moment, in the title of the “Inspiration” festival, which sheltered Rimini Proto K Oll , one cannot help but hear sarcasm.

The Situation Rooms project at the inspiration festival can be seen until July 29.