Christina Werner

A new, site-specific edition of the multi-phase work “The Street: In Step with the Labour Force”, which Werner realised in 2020, was created for Dessau in 2023.

In it, Werner connects research into workers’ movements in Dessau and the Anhalt region with an interest in contemporary protest movements (Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter). At the forefront of the artistic intention in both cases are collective ways of bringing political issues into the public sphere.

Werner also refers to the so-called workers’ choirs, in which dancing or semi-professional amateurs acted in the urban space in the sense of a chorally organized mass in order to give visibility to their concerns. Bodies and gestures were used as visible political signs of togetherness and resistance. Together with various actors, historical and current poses and gestures are developed into a new collective photo-performance series. Using photographs, performance, video and set pieces of political agitation, Werner recalls the social spirit of optimism in the 1920s and brings it back into the collective memory through physical reenactment. In this way, urban space, performers and the history of an emancipatory movement interlock with today.