Statements for the Future, Performance/Video, 15 min, 2019/2022
Material: declarations, manifestos, and lists of demands put forward by working groups and individuals, dissidents, artists and cultural workers, labour unions, women’s groups, as well as gay and lesbian organisations in the GDR in the autumn and winter of 1989/90. Performances recorded on 9 November, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, at Sala Omnia, a former assembly space of the Romanian Communist Party in Bucharest and on 30 April 2022 in the old water reservoir in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg.
To express thoughts or feelings to convey information in speech or writing; to convey information or ideas in text; to engage in conversation; to say with the voice, pronounce or utter; to express in words, to tell. Also, to speak out: To talk freely and fearlessly, as about a public issue. To speak up: to speak loud enough to be audible; to speak without fear or hesitation. From Middle English speken, from Old English sprecan, specan. In old Slavic, the word for speaking is vět-iti or věťati, which also means „to inform", to „say“, to „speak“. It is related to větъ (“agreement”), věťe (“assembly”), otъvěťati (“to answer”), oběťati (“to promise, to pledge”), as well as the Slavic věst ("news"), the English wise, the root in ad-vis-or, the Dutch weten or the German wissen (“to know”). Combined with the prefix so-, from old Slavic su- („together“) it also forms the root of the word “soviet.” Philosophers like Boris Groys and Maurice Blanchot have described the exercise of collective speech as the essence of the “unideological communism” of revolution.