Genetik Woyzeck - A Necromancy / Revival, #2 - 2025

28 years is indeed a long time - in terms of a human life, but also in terms of cultural shifts. When we look at the old black and white recordings of Genetik Woyzeck today, they appear like ghost images: talking heads, frozen in time. Some of the people involved at the time - Irm Hermann, Otto Sander, Ulrich Wildgruber, Christoph Schlingensief, Chaim Levano and Alan Vega - are no longer with us. Only Lars Rudolph returns to enter this Woyzeck hamster wheel again 28 years later.

1997 was a transitional period. Digitalisation was still in its infancy, the fragmentation of reality, identity and representation and its disruptive potential was already palpable. Big Brother (2000) and Matrix (1999) were in the air - the idea of life as a simulation and the concept of the trivial that stages itself as a premonition of media self-utilisation.

The still virtually unknown authors Michel Houellebecq and Bret Easton Ellis had created new anti-heroes with "Expansion of the Combat Zone" (1994) and "American Psycho" (1991). Films like Man Bites Dog (1992) or Funny Games (1997) irritated with moral reversals - they made the viewer an accomplice to a superordinate concept that became more important than the plot.

It was precisely in this climate that our work emerged - in the slowly dawning twilight of a "long summer of theory", fuelled by Merve volumes, by Baudrillard, Flusser, Virilio, Foucault etc. in the interweaving of art, pop and theory, poking around in the fog of reality.

Genetik Woyzeck was not a stage play in the classical sense, but a deconstructive video project - filmed with minimal equipment, in living rooms, kitchens, hotel rooms. The scenes were recorded individually in just one take, the actors chose their own outfits and were given a bottle of wine as a thank you. We dissolved the role structure of the original: Three doctors, four main men, only Marie (Eva Mattes) and Andres (Martin Wuttke) were cast throughout. In this way, we separated individual and functional relationships in the play.

This open form reflected our attitude towards the theatre business of the time. Places like the Festspielhaus Hellerau or the Berlin festival reich & berühmt offered an aesthetic and institutional alternative to the established municipal theatre. We experimented there: between pop, theory, trash and performance, between seriousness and posturing. We staged ourselves as a pair of artists - as a label, as an aesthetic project and eventually called ourselves norton.commander.productions. in reference to software icons of the 80s.

For Genetik Woyzeck we initially travelled to California, tried in vain to win Robert De Niro for a role, met Udo Kier and various Hollywood agents, filmed Mexican waiters reciting Büchner lines. The boundaries between art and everyday life, reality and fiction, theory and trash were to be deliberately blurred. Back in Germany, we reduced our many ideas and gave the project a stricter form.

We realised during the montage that the concept of the "prominent face" - which stages itself in a singular moment - would have a peculiar effect. The shots make something visible that has become commonplace: the mechanics of representation, function and media self-design. In the meantime, we have all become "ghosts of capital" ourselves - whose helpless fidgeting is mercilessly exploited by ourselves and by others.

So 28 years later, "ghosts" conjure up "ghosts" and celebrate a re-encounter.

Genetik Woyzeck - Eine Videokonferenz mit tödlichem Ausgang (A video conference with a fatal outcome) is a collection of traces from a time when art, theory and way of life were still almost analogue and inextricably linked.

- Harriet Maria and Peter Meining 2025