Sabine Hänsgen
Associated Researcher
Research Focus “Media and Cultural Communications” (University of Cologne)
E-mail: sabine.haensgen(at)uni-koeln.de
Sabine Hänsgen studied Slavic studies, history and art history at
Bochum university. She has been a fellow at the Institute of
Cinematography in Moscow. Her Ph.D. dissertation dealt with Sovjet
cinema. Her principal areas of research are Russian-Soviet media
history; cross-media aesthetics, and avant-garde and post-avant-garde
studies. Currently Hänsgen is a research fellow at the federally
funded research project “Media and Cultural Communications”
at the University of Cologne. Hänsgen also works as a freelance
publisher, translator, and curator. Since 1984 she has participated in
the performances of the Moscow-based “Collective Actions”
group and worked at the video store of the MANI museum in Moscow.
Publications (also under the pseudonym Sascha Wonders, with Günter
Hirt): Kulturpalast. Neue Moskauer Poesie und Aktionskunst (Wuppertal
1984); Moskau. Moskau. Videostücke (Wuppertal 1987); Lianosowo.
Gedichte und Bilder aus Moskau (München, 1992); Präprintium.
Moskauer Bücher aus dem Samizdat (including a multimedial CD;
Bremen 1998); Sovetskaja vlast' i media (Soviet Power and the Media;
ed. with Hans Günther; St. Petersburg, 2000).
Homepage
The Office of the "Collective Actions" Group: A Work of Art Based on Documentation”
The common thread in the performances by the group “Collective
Actions”, which have been occurring since 1976, is a trip out of the
city into the rural areas around Moscow. There, an empty field commonly
becomes the stage for minimal activities that focus on elementary
spatial and temporal structures of perception. However, these
performances are not to be viewed as a naïve form of neo-Rousseauean
cultural escapism, and their significance goes beyond the immediate
perception of an elementary situation. To the members of the group, all
visible phenomena are linked to an invisible dimension whereby the
specific “living” gesture within the performance equals a new impulse
in an open-ended interpretative spiral in which text and situation
mutually condition each other. The aesthetic dimension of this movement
is expanded beyond the scope of the performance to the textual
commentary itself. After the trip out of the city the group begins to
compile a documentary volume about the performance. In my lecture I
want to ask how bureaucratic techniques allow for the emergence of a
documentary work of art based on the compilation of a very diverse
series of genres (descriptions, photographs, diagrams, videos,
narratives by the participantsa, theoretical speculation, discussions).