Performance

The video work questions the so-called „performance principle" (or „achievement principle“) according to which many societies today, especially Western ones, are socially and economically organised.

A positive development compared to the rigid hierarchy of estates in the Middle Ages, still the principle of achievement remains a myth. For in reality, social and cultural origins and wealth are still decisive for what we can achieve in life in most Western societies.

But what is „performance" at all? It doesn't exist in nature. It was physics that shaped the idea that we have applied to the machinized human since industrialization: Performance is work by time. According to this logic everything in the world can be measured and thus made comparable: by school grades, intelligence quotients, salaries, record times, gross domestic products, CO2 emissions and much more. In the current coalition agreement of the German government, the word „performance" appears 109 times on 179 pages. „Achievement needs to be worthwhile again.“ An old as well as a new saying. It sounds like an incantation - a magic spell or counting-out rhyme that counts - and counts out somebody, again and again. Folklorists actually associate counting-out rhymes with ancient druidic rituals of sortilege in which the victim on whom the lot fell was chosen for death.

The video work performs a shamanistic invocation of the performance ideal in order to also imagine the possibility of alternatives with the help of a trance-like state.