An examination of the theme of naturalness or everydayness and the conflict between the seemingly natural and the staging it contains. In a diorama everyday objects are unnaturally condensed in a demarcated, exhibited space. They try to create a common context while at the same time negating it. In the abstracted form of a diorama, the failed attempt of an everyday representation emerges. In the videos two actors speak dialogues using the Meisner technique in front of an everyday backdrop, framed in an aesteticizing way.

In the acting exercise of the Meisner technique, „authentic“ emotions are used to bring to a head an initially implicit conflict. This prolonged conflict repeats the unnatural density of what are originally natural elements in the diorama, and just as a situation is frozen there to stand as an example of its original context, the repetition exercise shifts the relations between relevance and meaning.
I have always been interested in the Meisner technique because it uses real emotions for the stage in a private setting and comes close to a form of therapy for both the performers and the audience.

Then, thinking about dialogue and how it is analysed to reveal patterns of behaviour, I came across social science research and its studies of interviews. Similar to watching a diorama, transcribing „normal dialogue“ or „natural dialogue“ freezes a moment and considers it exemplary. A transcript is the first stage of a „translation process“ on the way to a thesis and thus stands in the limbo between documentation and interpretation.

with: Monika Celina, Stefan Mehren, Christina Arndt, Yun Huang, Sebastian Kowollik, Rea Andrea Kurmann, and the cooperation and support of Ursula Renneke