moving out of stommeler strasse, a dark blue space in the left side of my torso and my grandfather in the cold storage

by jasmin hoffer

An object is not so possessed by its own name that one could not find another or better therefore.

Rene Magritte

This action or event can not be understood as a unity it can not be defined - only described

Kalvin Clayton

on sunday two days after the platform, i am in cologne bonn airport to get a plane to vienna, to be in time for my grandfather's funeral, who died two weeks ago. he has been lying in the cold storage since then, waiting for his children and grandchildren to gather from costa rica, germany, croatia and bulgaria. i sitting in front of a ball pit. i remember playing in them as a child. i see pictures, but i can't remember the sensation. i remember thinking of ikea ball pits at some point in ROSALIND's workshop, which dealt with somatic responses to imaginary bubbles and balls of different consistency, color and size, filling up the whole space.

i have an urge to go to the ball pit, even if there are only balls and no bubbles, yellow, blue and green, no pink ones, homogenous, not of different size and half a meter high, not filling the space up to the ceiling. i am overcoming my shyness and constraints and step into the ball pit.

maybe it is not the most serious movement research I ever did, but I have a comfortable time at the airport. lying, gliding and swimming on cold plastic balls, sensing the immediate affect of the other little guests movements. the balls also become means of social interactions, they are given towards and thrown at each other. short, friendly, playful and at the most slightly aggressive encounters among two to four year olds, who will be spread all across europe and beyond in a few hours. in some way similar to what i experienced in the past week.

the week started with me, SLAVA and ULLA jointly carrying an ikea bag with three packs of coffee, two liters of milk, three different kinds of biscuits, two cheap ones and one organic, sugar, honey in a tube and a watermelon.

the guests from berlin arrived and the guy, with short jeans, suspenders and a colorful t-shirt, who was hanging around in the schoolyard since the morning, turned out to be one of them. after a slightly rhetorically odd welcome we introduced ourselves and thestudents from cologne made their first attempt to define the term dance dissemination. LISA, KARO AND SUSA presented the booklet.

later in STEFFI's workshop i created a dark blue space in the left side of my torso. it contained skin, muscles, rib bones, part of the diaphragm and my small and big intestines. this dark blue space left my body through the eyes and was projected in different places of studio 1. as a third step it reentered my body through the eyes.

something internal transits through my eyes, becomes part of the room and after settles in my body again. this experience also affected how i was watching the other group doing steffie's scores later. the images could travel inside my body and the right side of my torso was still clearly activated.

i couldn’t stay for the second class, because i had sold the fridge of the apartment MAAYAN, JOVANA and me had to move out that weekend twice. once on ebay and once on nettwerk-köln and i had to somehow sort out this situation. also the girl, who wanted to buy our oven, canceled because we couldn't provide someone who could deal with high voltage and unplug it, so we needed to find a new way to get rid of it.

on thuesday morning i was half an hour late, for our coming-together-having-breakfast and-becoming-soul mates-time, which started at nine and was a bit pushy about organizing the picknick, which caused a short argument with MARKUS and ulla.

KARINA was proposing to open and close eyes, voice and heart. i wondered how it is possible to open and close my heart so quickly? and also open towards whom? close in which direction? the most dominant sensation of my heart was pumping and contracting in increasing intensity, while attempting and failing to follow. in a duet with JASCHA, we wanted to touch but were not able to, we wanted to communicate but could not, so we built an absurd relationship of hesitating and stagnating movements and verbal utterances.

while i had my studiengespräch with MARTIN, jovana went home to give the the fore or fifth hand oven back to the guys from gerätemarkt 24 were we bought it a few months ago for three times as much money.

from ulla's workshop i remember mostly an extensive interaction with a - from its original purpose alienated – chair. MATTEO joined me, we had a short unspoken agreement of how to operate with this object, turning and rotating it at different paces, but then we dropped that.

the salad i made arrived to the pick nick one hour after everybody ate.

in RAPHAEL's workshop ulla turned into a vibrating amplifier under my hands. she was shaking so hard her black and white striped t-shirt formed psychedelic pattern. then there was this collective orgy with plastic bags, only nikos was out and i was asking myself, does a plastic bag know if it is relating to amplified sound, breath or physical manipulation by a dancer?

in matteo's body archive histories, meanings and values of objects were constantly rewritten, invented, and transforming. matches, toys, tobacco, chalk, icons, a hat and also clothes that i unconsciously left in the room. ketchup became blood. a chalk became something to write with, became a marker for a murderer, became a not enough appreciated poetic text, became a reformulated question, became a snowflakes, so maayan could become frau holle.

little objects shifted the atmosphere of the whole room and were after mindlessly put aside, individual childhood memories met the need to create scenarios together, things were taken apart, became threatening, but markus hedgehog was not shaved, nobody destroyed the identity card and the train ticked, no one smoked a cigarette, and as ÖZLEM noted nobody put the building on fire.

in the feedback round JENNI had one question and two comments.

jovana went home so the guy who bought our fridge on ebay could pick it up.

in jascha's workshop i was hugging raphael for half an hour. we were moving quite clumsy not like one organism, but I still felt somehow good. after i felt stupid, when finding out that raphael was in constant pain while sustaining in this uncomfortable position.

In my workshop POLYXENI, INGO, NINA, nikos and ulla became floating entities. they were sensing the allowance of expansion or were falling asleep.

In one of NIKOS tasks I was looking into NICK's eyes for a very long time. his face started to morph. i became very familiar with every surface of his face, observing the tiniest movement, trying to detect the underlying emotion. my mouth was dry, the muscles around my lips pulsing, i had to resist smiling, my hands turned green in nick's eyes in contrast to my pink t-shirt.

in the feedback round jenni had one question and one comment.

the ball pit and the platform are both systems in a state of chaosmos between chaos and order. inside a frame, laws of operation could be invented, pursued and dropped on an individual or collective level. the relation between local and global events was complex, not following a linear logic, temporary agreements, values, imagined realities were negotiated, shared and abstained from.