Catalogue > At random

Detroit, once America?s center for auto-industry and theater, was shrinking to a third of its population. What used to be the space for theatrical presentation, nowadays presents the urban crisis. What once was private space became public open space for societal negotiation. The city became a theater itself. In front of the backdrop of former Michigan theater, today a parking garage for the adjacent office building, the film stages the performative discourse of six locations, six neighborhoods, and six Detroiters: ?...we?re sort of talking about Detroit in a way that it itself is a theater, that it itself is the object to behold.? state-theatre is a series of six experimental documentaries that explore urban conditions for performance based on six case studies in Lagos, Tehran, Berlin, Detroit, Beirut and Mönchengladbach. state-theatre departs from places that have shed their apparent societal functions: deserted areas, construction sites, unused or reinterpreted buildings ? empty spaces in the urban fabric, places that were originally meant as allegoric gathering places: theaters.

Daniel Kötter, born 1975, is a director and video artist whose work oscillates deliberately between different media and institutional contexts, combining techniques of structuralist film with documentary elements and experimental music theater. It was shown in numerous galleries, video festivals, concert halls and theatres all over Europe, in New York, Mexico, Tehran and Lagos. Between 2008 and 2011, he developed the video- and opera-performance trilogy Arbeit und Freizeit. His music theatre performances in collaboration with composer Hannes Seidl are shown at international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Musica d?hoy Madrid and others. Kötter`s new series of installations, films, and discursive work on urban and socio-political conditions of performativity has been under development since mid-2010 under the title state-theatre: Lagos/Teheran/Berlin/Detroit/Beirut/Mönchengladbach (with Constanze Fischbeck). For galleries and dance performances, he developed multi-channel live video delay installations. His award-winning short-Film Film für übers Sofa (with Hannes Seidl) was shown at festivals worldwide. Between 2002 and 2008 Daniel Kötter, as artistic director of the labor für musik:theater, developed and produced numerous feature-length performative projects and multi-channel movies on the borderline between concert and musical theater. Daniel Kötter has been living and working in Berlin since 1996.