Rimini Protokoll–Nachlass
The Rimini Protokoll, by Stefan Kaegi and set designer Dominic Huber, was part of a selection of immersive art installations on show at Berliner Festspiele’s ‘Limits of Knowing’ exhibit. It was an example of interactive theater, as most viewers were encouraged to interact with the sets that had been prepared. However, these sets had no actors in them, and were instead pièces sans personnes. This absence of people resonated with the exhibit’s theme, that of nachlass. This German word literally translates to ‘after’ (nach) and ‘to leave’ (lass). The Rimini Protokoll, then, examines what it is people leave behind, and how eight individuals from completely different walks of life have have faced death in order to begin this process of ‘leaving’.
These exhibits aim to question the way that contemporary society claims to ‘know’ certain things, and delves into the field of agnoseology–a field that draws the attention to the practical and theoretical limits of human beings’ capabilities to know our world. The Rimini Protokoll exhibit aimed to do just that by exposing the audience to realities particular to a group of people that were reflecting on death or had already left the world. These reflections are otherwise not available to a group of people being told how many people are dying in this world right now.
Upon entering the exhibition space, I was led into a waiting room with eight different doors, each with a digital clock on top of the frame, counting down towards zero. The ceiling of the waiting room was fitted with a screen showing a map of the world, with little dots flashing at different points on the globe. Upon further inspection, I realized that each little flashing dot represented a person passing away in a specific part of the world. As soon as I saw a dot flash in Belgium, I immediately saw that another person had died in Australia. In this way, I was immediately exposed to the theme of death and its global implications. I soon realized that this theme was central to the Rimini Protokoll.
Soon enough, one of the digital clocks reached zero, and the door slid open. I walked in and entered a room with a Turkish carpet lining the floor, with a plate of Turkish Delight sweets in the center of the room. A voice started talking to the haphazard group of museum-goers reunited in this room. We were told to remove our shoes, and to sit down on the carpet. Through the speakers in the room, Celal Tayip told us that he would switch the fan on in the room to help us feel more welcome. I directed my attention towards the TV screen in front of me, and as the blades of the fan began to spin, Celal–a Turkish man living in Zurich–began to tell us his story. The video immediately took us into his daily life as a 78-year-old man living in Zurich. He said that even though he has been working in Zurich for 54 years, the German language was never something that came naturally to him. After he urged us to taste the Lokum (Turkish Delight) sitting in the middle of the room, he cited an old Turkish saying to us: “No matter how golden the cage, the bird will always want to go back home”. It was clear that Celal longed for his homeland, Turkey. However, he knew that the only way he would ever be brought back would be to die first. He then went on to show us all the preparations that he is already going through to be brought back to Turkey as a body in a coffin. His warm comfort towards the aspect of his own death was so far from the fear that most of us feel when we think about death.
This experience of not only being in, but interacting with such an intimate space belonging to someone that I didn’t even know, made me feel like I was brought much closer to Celal’s lived experience: his little pleasures, his painful sorrows, and his aspirations. It was hard to not relate to the rootlessness he must have experiences as being someone who did not line up with the majority society of Switzerland.
It is in this way, then that the situation rooms, or pieces sans personnes, bring us into a different reality by augmenting our own perception of the wide variety of different people in this world who all face the same aspect of leaving this world one day. Although the person is missing from the situation room, one can still feel their presence. As soon as I picked up a piece of Lokum and ate it, I didn’t feel like an onlooker anymore, but more like a guest, having been invited to witness, what had been left behind. It’s interesting to me that the German word for ‘witness’ is beiwohnen, which literally translates to to live with. This is exactly what I felt in these situation rooms, like I was living with the person who was not in the room. This felt like the boundaries between ‘me’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’ became steadily blurrier by the second. I started to experience this exhibit as a collective experience not only with the person whose life I was learning about, but also with the other museum-goers who I was experiencing this with. In this way, Celal’s life lived on here in this small room in Berlin.
Rimini Protokoll to me was a fascinating discourse on how we interact with technology in the everyday. We swim through a web of data almost every day, and more often than not, this data, represented in numbers, is something that feels very foreign to our human sensibilities. We experience this data by ourselves, interacting through our own singular technological device. This exhibit instead encouraged the museum-goers to reach out to each other. The data of deaths around the world was not simply fed to each one of us individually, but was instead shared through stimulating community and stimulating common emotion or feeling within each of us. This speaks to the way that technical data can be represented in ways that can increase our experience of living in this world in a way that is heavily interdependent on others, and in a way which can increase our empathy for one another and what we experience in our lives.
Link to the exhibit’s promotional video: https://vimeo.com/181959966