annas kollektiv is a Swiss collective of dancers, architects, filmmakers, and sociologists. They confront architecture as a potential city-set raising questions about the social, urban, or cultural meanings generated by it. Their interventions dematerialise architectural objects by, for instance, optically disturbing gravitation, changing emergency-exit systems, or using lighting effects. Their site-specific performances often take place in settings like underground parking lots, high-rise buildings, or train stations.

In Warsaw, the artists created a performance meant for, and inspired, by the 10th-Anniversary Stadium. They worked at the site for two weeks in the spring, as tests were already beginning for the construction of the new stadium for Euro 2012, and became intimate with the place. Despite the cold May nights (though the temperature inside the stadium is always slightly higher than outside), they took breaks during their rehearsals to picnic in the parade stand. In collaboration with musical artist m.Bunio.s, a one-time night show on the construction site was created, where excavators and pile-driving machines danced together with people.

The artists addressed the site using very simple means (a bicycle lamp illuminated the track in the darkness; four persons cast shadows over stands seating many thousands; the stadium breathed regularly and loudly). Using light and sound installations and construction equipment, the artists subjected the stadium to artistic acupuncture, showing the disappearing portions of the monumental sports-place, like the historic fragments of the tribunes, tunnel entrances, or piling points.

Pile Driving was also an attempt to respond to the lack of debate in Poland on the architectural heritage of the Socialist-Realist period. Inspired by the architecture of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium as a multilayered space of history, the Swiss collective offered its own interpretation of the disappearing object.

Since 1999 annas kollektiv has worked in the closed spaces of factories, army barracks, and former military zones. It is interesting that this group, fascinated with architectural disintegration, with areas of decay and neglect, was established in a country known for its perfectly organised cities and generous spending on urban revitalisation. And also, importantly, in a country where space is consciously and responsibly shaped not only by institutions, but also by people. This is an important context for the collective’s practice, eaten away by an equivalent of the Polish yearnings for the PRL-era architecture. The Swiss group points to the constantly diminishing material heritage of the past, as it is covered by contemporary meanings, privatisation and ghettoisation. They alert us to places from which life has already evaporated and which have not yet been filled with new meanings. ‘No-man’s-sites,’ deserted and degraded places. Citing historical clichés, they wonder how those places might function today.

Pile Driving took place on a late June evening in the bowl of the stadium. An audience of some 800 seated themselves on the turf. In the thick darkness, only vague outlines of silhouettes, blinking cellular phone lights, and glowing cigarette ends were visible, and the only sound was that of the opening of beer cans. The picnic-like atmosphere was a counterpoint to what the Swiss group offered. First we watched a slow and contemplative run by one of the performers across the stands. Barely visible, he blurred in almost completely with the grey concrete background. The jog was on the verge of invisibility. The same, initially microscopic, figure then turned into an enormous shadow. But Pile-Driving was not just a play with scale; annas kollektiv also played on the public’s expectations, bringing out sentimental tones and historical tropes. Over the remains of the dugout was a large screen on which an excerpt from a historical newsreel was projected. ‘Finally the stadium has been useful for something’, the narrator’s voice said. The pile-driving machines were started up. Illuminated by spotlights, they looked like spaceships ready to take off. In the action’s final chord, funerary candles were used to illuminate the Stadium’s tunnel, down which Jadwiga Fołtasiówna walked so sadly in the movie Mąż swojej żony, and through which Peace Race cyclists used to ride into the venue.

As with the Berlin Wall or the Palast der Republik, the parliament building of the former German Democratic Republic, here the artists highlighted the entire ambivalence present in the 10th-Anniversary Stadium.

http://www.annaskollektiv.ch/

Chosen articles and reviews:

Sybille Korte, Katze odel Nudelmaschine, "Berliner Zeitung" 23.11.2007

Julia Slater, Spreading the Swiss Word in Eastern Europe,Turkish Weekly, 11.03.2009

Daniel Miller, Stadium X, Frieze, 15.05.09