The 100 Home
by Rochus Aust

What does it look like, the flat of a Bauhaus person?

Are they already living in it or still living in it?

Does it even still exist or do they even exist already?

Has it already evolved or did they not have to at all?

How are they doing? And what does it look like today?

Flat One Hundred

One hundred current inhabitants of Bauhaus buildings all over the world become part of an interactive and performative media sculpture inside and around the Weimar Bauhaus University. One hundred people from Detroit, New York, Buffalo, Toronto, Cologne, Berlin, Casablanca, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jena, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Lisbon, Sofia, Plovdiv, Iserlohn and Leigh-on-Sea are turned into inhabitants of, performers in, communicators with or projections onto the university buildings as part of the opening weekend of the Weimar Kunstfest 2019. For 25 hours, the campus is turned into a stage, sculpture, theatre, display window, cinema and soundtrack of the year 100 after and in the Bauhaus.

Afterwards, Rochus Aust and the 1st GERMAN ELECTROPHONIC ORCHESTRA, with (real and medialised) inhabitants forming part of their luggage, go on a tour featuring simultaneous performances at the Jena Bauhaus, a presentation of five layers of the video material at LTK4 Cologne, and a periscope walk through Berlin as part of the Bauhaus week.

The current, artistic exploration of the Bauhaus idea is also at the same time an exploration of how Bauhaus is commemorated: it is meant to compare today’s (living) human with the glossy musealisation, and the codification and control of the interpretational sovereignty with an interlinked and fluid reality.

International House Concert

A concrete, documentary event encompassing music, film and architecture – past to present – including and with the people who today live and work in the different forms of Bauhaus, enveloped by the installative and symphonic music of the 1st GERMAN ELECTROPHONIC ORCHESTRA.

An interactive game crossing the boundaries between audience and performers, simultaneously accessible on all medial channels, made to be seen and heard, to be joined and touched. A theatre of the worlds showcasing Bauhaus synchronicity in 2019.

Following the conclusion of the large-scale performances, Rochus Aust takes all of the images and sounds back to where they originated from and there he meets the inhabitants once again. In intimate house concerts and installation-based, performative interventions in the semi-public space he tells us about the journey and the people of the Bauhaus, beyond jubilee and conservation.

This is a publication of half-truths and superficial knowledge. Both on the part of the author and on that of the protagonists. And of course entirely so on this page (4). The knowledge that has been incorporated can be found when referring to anything from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia; at no point was it the object of desire here. More so the lack of knowledge, false knowledge, projected knowledge, the knowledge we wished we had, as it left room for all kinds of speculation and stubbornly contradicts official propaganda (or maybe the propaganda knowledge) and refuses to be taken in by it. (Guardians of the grail, beware!)

This is a publication of iconic negation. 100 years of Bauhaus are not a hundred years of Bauhaus, Bauhaus does not equal Bauhaus and it certainly is not a style. An idea, so it is said, in order to further mythologise the myth and extend the spheres in a godlike fashion (or maybe just to put a spoke into the nimble wheels of the Dutch?). In light of the baseness of gods, the perfection of the imperfect or the salvation of the opportunists the scientists might furrow their brows, the press officers might get secret panic attacks and the amateurs cold feet. And in the end it transpires that even black-and-white will not suffice. For the officials were certainly not prepared to express their opinions outside the (imposed?) interpretations. And therefore it does not seem too ludicrous that some private individuals living in a Bauhaus give their love for all things iconic as their primary motivation and, even more ludicrous: that they even feel this way. Basking in the public interest, they almost perish in the sweltering heat (not just in Detroit) every day. Is the Bauhaus (retrospectively) so successful in Germany because it had never set its sights on starting a revolution?

This is a publication of incompleteness. The selection of locations in the ranking of architectural globalisation was entirely based on intuitive, organisational criteria and, at times, strongly influenced by the most banal events like flight schedules or airlines declaring bankruptcy as well as budgetary conditions. Nonetheless we managed to talk to the one hundred people who really wanted to say something. Statistically it is of course fatal that those who did not want a voice were not heard. But this should not be detrimental to the end result (if there even is one). To the contrary as there is no end result other than maybe the fact that the architecture of life is significantly stronger than one hundred years of ‘iconic architecture’. People love these buildings (which ones?) and at the same time rebel against them, physically as much as mentally. In order to get one hundred to talk, considerably more had to be visited. And in the end, there were a few more than that, which are published here (and the some in addition, who had something to say but did not want their picture taken etc.). In this respect we are looking at finished product that is doubly incomplete, as much in its statistical relevance as its technical number, which leaves us, all smug, with the iconic number: 100 (q.e.d.)

This is a publication of blurriness. You will not find any names of architects here (other than the unavoidable ones). The blurriness of the Bauhaus (we do not even celebrate such simple progressions like international style), the blurring of singular and plural, the blurring of gender (it house, she flat, he work) and the fuzziness of picking words that take sides – all together this creates a crystal clear image of 100 people in 78 locations in 17 cities in the year 2019 who, for their part, are linked to, linked by and at times delinked from the vagueness of celebration: one hundred years of blurriness between creation and inheritance.

THANKS

DIE WOHNUNG EINHUNDERT / APARTMENT ONE HUNDRED / THE 100 HOME
made possible with the support of Thüringer Staatskanzlei
Innovationsförderung Kunst und Kultur of the City of Jena
Kulturamt der Stadt Köln
suported by Sparkasse Jena-Saale-Holzland
in cooperation with the Bauhaus University Weimar

Kunstfest Weimar 2019, Rolf C. Hemke, Tobias Steiner, Kate Ledina und das Team Kunstfest Weimar, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Winfried Speitkamp, Maximilian Merkel, JenaKultur, Jonas Zipf, Katrin Richter, Robert Gärtner, SV Schott, Familie Schwarze, Familie Fischer/Happe, Ralf Schmidt-Röh, Jens Winkler, Thomas Schütze, Astrid Bartsch, Hans Mörtter, Sonja Grupe, Hermann Vogel, Helga Fitzner, Team Lutherkirche Köln, Nadine Müseler, Gerd Winkler, Michael P. Aust, Igor Fistric, Ivo Weber, Simone Gögelein, Andreas Lohre, Kulturprojekte Berlin Gmbh, Bauhauswoche Berlin, Lange Nacht der Museen Berlin, Christoph Tempel

Our special thanks goes to the 100 (and more) inhabitants and people in charge of the Bauhaus buildings visited.