Wilden renate’s Tomorrow is an immersive art experience created by over 40 artists, from well-known collectives like Bad Bruises and TrashEra to newcomers. Installations, performances and exhibits take up most of Wilde Renate’s interior spaces and offer approximately 1 hour of exploration in dark and changing spaces.
The audience enters in pairs, with 5-minute intervals, which roughly matches the time allotted to each room, and weaves their way through the 17 intertwined “Positions”. The positions range from exhibitions of oil paintings to interactive installations to performances, and are loosely linked to each other by themes of isolation and the future. They often overlap, reflect on each other, and can be seen or heard in advance, adding to the dreamlike nature of the trip.
Boundaries and transitions between rooms are just as important as the rooms themselves: visitors often have to crawl through startling openings, press buttons, and are faced with dead ends and hidden doors. Like our post-Corona future, the works come without pre-assigned interpretations and must be seen confusedly from the obscurity.
Overmorrow collectivizes the experience of isolation, of being caught outside the normal flow of time. Much of the art deals with the task of accommodating what needs to be saved from the world of yesterday and taken in the day after tomorrow. The moments when traces of the original destination of Wilden Renate’s dance floors, smoking lounges and bathrooms shine serve as a reminder that the club itself is going through this hibernation process.
Without the basis of community and the routine of moving and going out, mental life and identity are left to ferment and play in isolation. Normative pressure and other external forces disappear, leaving only what is already internalized, which can be liberating or traumatic.
“Locked Up, Lights On”, an installation representing a quarantine room, draws attention to this process in a personal way. A room, which normally has a specific, very intimate purpose, stretches out to become a museum of life, arranged through symbolic objects and spatial relationships. Everyday objects become doors to hidden worlds of meaning. A person’s entire world is present, but only in abstraction, which brings them even closer to the visitor.
“We use a variety of mediums to explore what is behind many closed doors. For some, leaving their room was not an option, even long before Corona; it was daily torture. Some were already locked away by force and / or emotional manipulation. Some didn’t notice what bothered them until they were locked up, forced to dig deep to find Amor en los Tiempos de Corona. – explains Kim Kong, CEO of Red Leather Lab, the collective responsible for Locked in, the lights on.
In the last room, visitors prepare for their exit in a space reminiscent of a waiting room, while gazing at the silhouette of a naked dancer, inviting and distant, intimate and impersonal at the same time, before being released. in the courtyard of Wilden Renate. The courtyard itself has undergone a strange transformation: the furnishings and most of the people are the same, but the exclusive, sexually positive nightclub is now an Afternoon Biergarten. The entrance to the street is wide open and the bouncers are not there to dismiss anyone, only to remind visitors to cover their faces and wish them Viel Spaß.
The disruption of economic, social, cultural and almost every other type of activity creates a responsibility for reassessment: normally the desire for change must be weighed against the cost of change. But when everything stops and has to come to life, the price for change has already been paid. If there is something in the world that should be reassessed, there has never been a better time to do it.
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Text: Daniel Corsano, photos: Overmorrow
Daniel Corsano is a journalist, freelance writer and art critic living and working in Berlin.
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