Disruptions, Interruptions, Misruptions, Soundruptions

A year-long program of artistic actions, interventions, and manifestations in public, semi-public, and private space in the frame of the “Year of German-American Friendship” initiative in 2018/19 in the US.

For 12 months, the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis Goethe in the Skyways occupies a space in the city’s futuristic skyway system. Minneapolis’ skyways, an 18-kilometer-long indoor artificial gangway and pedestrian bridge network constructed in the 1960s to connect downtown office buildings and avoid the bitter cold of winter, is still the longest of its kind in the world today.

Perceived and used as public space but completely in private hands, the skyways embody so-called public life in the US, both within politics and economics, as well as within sports and culture.

In the midst of this hybrid skyway situation, Goethe in the Skyways serves as a platform for a critical consideration of the current culturally and politically contentious situation in the United States, which will be examined and discussed in light of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a renewed rise of the New Right within Europe and the United States, as well as recent global migration movements.

I would like to see a blue shrub, or a pink tree, or a green sky … something out of order, a coconut tree, the Northern lights, sun in the middle of the night.

—Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand

Another focus of the program is on language and communication, in a time when truth has become hyper-subjective and, in fact, almost entirely irrelevant. As Rudy Guiliani, the former mayor of New York and now President Trump’s lawyer, simply puts it: “Truth isn’t truth” – anymore, one could add.

The invited artists will respond in different ways to this reality-ignoring, though very imaginative, socio-political drama that has dominated US politics and therefore public life since the last elections using spoken-words formats, such as reality TV shows, sound works, concerts, readings, performances, walks, workshops, and posters.

Sandra Teitge, director of the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis, invites artists to develop and present works specifically conceived for the Goethe in the Skyways space that challenge and question, (inter-)rupt and disturb the site, as well as context-specific conditions of the skyway system, of the city of Minneapolis, and the state of Minnesota, always in relation to national and international issues and debates.

Sarah Petersen, Artistic Producer
Daniel Shinbaum, Production Assistant
Valérie Chartrain, Managing editor/creative advisor

With works, interventions, and actions by: