Stille Post #exhibition - open today 12-22 h

Stille Post
exhibition

Artists:
Louis Abel Dunbar (FR), Theodoros Fragkos (GR), Johannes Rantapuska (FI), Angelina Stavela (GR)
Curated by Anna Giannessi and the artists

Exhibition opening times today:12:00 -22:00

de.wikipedia: Stille Post is a children's game. In the game, the participants arrange themselves in a row or a circle. One player thinks up a message. This message is then whispered from mouth to ear by one participant to the respective neighbour. The fun of the game results from the subsequent resolution, where the last person in the row speaks out loudly what was whispered into their ear as the final message. The increasing distortion of the original message can be documented by each participant repeating the understood message loudly for all.

Don’t forget that

en.wikipedia: Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.

Our rules

- Every whisperer sent one mail to every other whisperer. Only postal mail was accepted.
- The content of the mail was decided by the sender. The content could be anything: A photo, collage, drawing, poem, riddle, music, video, scent, ready-made object, etc.
- The works have been documented before the sending.
- The receiver was meant to collaborate with the arrived work. They altered or added anything they pleased.
- Every whisperer kept Anna updated via email about the process: notification of arrived and sent work.
- Whisperers didn’t communicate with each other about each other’s work.
- The work was ready after all the whisperers have worked on it.
- The result is four different works, originated and altered by four whisperers.

The backbone of the exhibition, i.e. the approach to the production of the artworks, is based on the children's game known as the telephone game or broken telephone (American English), Stille Post in German. For this exhibition four players, artists, whisperers passed a message to each other as in the mail art movement, a message in any medium they found congenial. A group of people with common status as artists, yet different origins and living in different countries, reinterpreted each other’s work. By using different techniques and without knowing the original message, they performed something akin to a translation relay or indirect translation, where physical interaction gets substituted with international, polymorphous interpretation of each other messages. The production of the pieces and of the exhibition seeks to engage the unreliability of human recollection and the possibilities of intercultural communications.