Gang Signs: Berlin’s new art collectives
First published in Sleek magazine, Summer 2013
Three p.m. on the eve of Gallery Weekend, the glitziest of Berlin’s annual art events, and I’m sitting in the Kreuzberg living-room-cum-HQ of La Mission, a “Hedonist-doomsday-cult-art-collective” (their words). Cult member Mandie O’Connell, a dramaturge and performer, is addressing a copy of their new EP “Time is Up”. “We’re sold out on Juno, the online record store,” Pablo Roman-Alcalá, DJ and Chief Hedonist, grins. He’s due to play at Soho house for the launch of the Marrakech Biennale later in the evening, and is concerned about how “art people sipping small glasses of white wine” will react to the music the former Bar 25 DJ plays.
Performing their post-Brechtian anarchist theatre in the basements of bars, galleries and vintage clothing stores in Neukölln and beyond, la mission’s hybrid practice refuses to be categorised. Comprised of three core members, O’Connell, Roman-Alcalá and Luis-Manuel Garcia, their practice spans techno production, performance art and hedonist theory. Rooted in Situationist practices, nineties San Franciscan punk band The Nekkid Cult of Hickey, Andrzej Wirth’s avant-garde theatre, and Garcia’s investigations into “affect and Intimacy at electronic dance music events,” La Mission is many things, including a satirical doomsday cult, a music label, a magazine, an art collective, and a group of dance-music-lovers with a very dirty sense of humour. the collective’s musical output forms the departure point for their performances and builds on the ideas that they are talking about in clubs, bars and in Pablo’s living room.
“The music is the source text for the performance,” he says. One of the cult’s main inspirations is Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, a “physically violent but hilarious art gang” in New York, whose practice was based on Situationism. The next performance will be durational, taking place over 12 hours in the cellar of a vintage store in Neukölln, with the audience watching via surveillance cameras. It will be an enactment of Mandie and Pablo’s “creative bed-ins” but also an investigation of bundling, a colonial american tradition of courtship, where a courting couple, lying on a bed, is sewn into sacks so that they can’t touch each other. “Working as a collective is a much richer, fruitful and more honest experience. I think being alone in your studio is selfish. [This way] you become a better artist,” Mandie notes.
La Mission, from left, Anja Struck, Mandie O’Connell, Pablo Roman-Alcalá and Johannes Brandis