Music and performance collective Column One was founded in East Berlin in 1992. Core members Robert Schalinsky and Rene Lamp have already collaborated on short films during the last days of the GDR. Column One’s projects, recordings and performances are developed with changing casts and documented through a huge number of publications and releases (Cutup Productions, Moloko+, 90%Wasser a.o). Participants in recent projects have been a.o. Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV), Asmus Tietchens, Jerome Soudan (Mimetic Field / Von Magnet), Wojcek Czern (Zia Siodma Gora), Jürgen Eckloff (Marc Wannabe), Daniel Löwenbrück (Tochnit Aleph / Noise of Gaki), Tom Platt, Andrew Loadman, Leo Solter, R.U.Brain-Bridge. As collective and performance group, Column One feels obligated to the principles of performance art: their projects are conceptualized as singular, non-repeatable events und always get documented. Apart from music they operate with a variety of visual media including film, video, collage, drawing, costumes, stage sets and choreographies to create thematic performances.
In 2001 Column One founded its own label 90%Wasser to release its own output and selected work of likeminded artists. Column One is part of Methods To Survive Net and initiated the recently deceased art space Sibirische Zelle (Siberian Cell). Sibirische Zelle was a combination of a club and a secret lodge that was housed in a remote corner of northeast Berlin from January 2004 ‘til the end of 2005, camouflaged from the outside as perfectly as anything in Prohibition times. One passed through an empty store and a sliding door into a backroom in which screenings, readings, concerts, performances and actions took place regularly. Participating artists included Z'ev, Asmus Tietchens, Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, Peter Wawerzinek, Verbrecher Verlag, members of the Schimpfluch Gruppe, Frieder Butzmann, Thomas Kapielski and others.
While connected to many likeminded individuals globally, Column One are, and the Sibirische Zelle was, dedicated first and foremost to a profoundly local experience that puts social issues, personal commitment, and questions of identity before chichi-nomadic aspirations, and the artistic experience before publicity and success. Column One and the Sibirische Zelle answer impositions of a liquefying neo-liberal order that knows no outside with the Dadaistic smokescreen of the interior. It is only under the protection of provoked and provocative ambiguity that they feel able to work on their utopian quest, where the existential desire to be precedes any and all desire to have.
> www.column-one.de
> www.90%wasser.de
> www.sibirischezelle.de
Appearances:
> CTM.06
> 2005 > PRYJAZN/FREUNDSCHAFT – CTM @ Unsound Festival
> 2003 > CTM @ WEF Festival
> CTM.04
> CTM.00
> CTM.99
