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Speak to me, Civil Rights

Architectural sculpture, 3.6 m x 1.8 m, with several chapters of five-minute readings, Presences Chemnitz, 2020 curated by Sarah Sigmund and Florian Matzner in collaboration with Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz

Readers: Fanny Schorr, Silvia Klemm, Jana Beinhorn, Noah Tröbs, Lina Sophia Letocha, Natalie Schulze

Constitutional rights are the most important rights that people in Germany have in relation to the state. At the center of these rights is the human being. Due to the rules and restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of COVID-19, basic constitutional rights have been limited. Most people in Germany today take these rights for granted, and it was not until they were restricted that many began to perceive them. Yet, there are also people who cannot take these rights for granted and must continually demand them. For the project Speak to Me, Civil Rights, Witt conducted conversations with around fifty people in Chemnitz about their own personal experiences with their rights. Basic rights were written into the German constitution in 1949. They arose in reaction to World War II and the unfathomable cruelties of the Nazi regime. Basic civil rights were also anchored in the East German constitution. What is our personal experience with civil rights? Who has had their rights denied them? Who has fought for their rights? Is it just about our own rights, or do we have a responsibility toward others?

Older people from Chemnitz in particular know what it is like, to live under different types of political systems. The experiences they had with their civil rights back then, and what their attitudes are to their rights today, are also included in this project, as are the experiences of people from very different socio-economic, political, and cultural backgrounds.

Installed Am Wall, a central location in the inner city, was an architectural sculpture that served as a meeting place for performances involving readings. During regular opening hours over the course of the ten-week-long exhibition, visitors had the opportunity to hear an actor or actress read passages from these conversational records personally to them. The transcriptions of the conversations between the artist and the participants have been made anonymous. They are excerpted from the chronological series and assembled into approximately five-minute-long textual collages on various themes. In a private meeting with the performer inside the architectural sculpture, located in the public space, visitors can have individual, spontaneously selected passages read out loud to them.

The architectural sculpture was a pavilion made of transparent acrylic glass plates, and it functioned both as a divider and a connector. In terms of form and function, it recalls the kind of counter situation often found in government offices, which is being used more often to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus in public places where people come into contact with each other. There were openings at various spots in the acrylic glass pavilion, so that the actors could be heard reading through the divider glass. Attached to these “speaking holes” were spit protectors made of magnifying glass lenses. Not only did they offer protection from saliva droplets, they also had enlarging properties, which upsets the sense of proximity, thus pointing out the changes in how we deal with each other in society, due to the challenges of battling the pandemic.