Tagtool

We didn’t need introductions, so we started jamming straight away. First a skate ramp in the outskirts of Berlin – we arrived, four of us in a car, no kids around, a school day. The tools: A trumpet, an assortment of drums and things to hit the drums with, a suitcase filled with smelly paint and used brushes, some fat marker pens. It was about to get messy. We were preparing a performance of RZM in the Ukraine a month from then, and this was the session to kick things off.

The three letter acronym came about as a result of the project’s evolution over the years. It all started in 2002, when Ritsche Koch began to explore the more neglected places of the city through unsolicited trumpet playing and painting in a duo with Thomas Bratzke, aka Zasd.

Thomas, who had been an active part of the Berlin graffiti scene since his teens, had developed a very forceful and authentic visual language when working to music – he realized early on that the signs and “artist logos” that are the stock of much of street art have no place when the medium is a fluid continuum of time and space. But he did translate all the skill and energy that made his tags stand out on the streets into this medium.

As Ritsche & Zasd, they performed in the subway, in derelict buildings, and in their kitchens, sometime to audiences, often only to passers-by. They frequently collaborated with other artists, musicians and dancers. I remember joining them for a performance in Kreuzberg in 2006, where we put up one of the very first versions of the Tagtool at the after-party.

One of the collaborators eventually became a regular of the project – drummer Christian Marien is the M of RZM. A beat alchemist, picking up trash and making it sound golden, he’s also an incredibly alert and aware performer. The first time I worked with him was when he subbed for a children’s theater production. He was the drummer bee, and his costume, made for somebody else, wasn’t exactly a good fit.

When Ritsche asked me to join RZM as a guest for the gig in Chernivtsi, among other things I was up for it because I saw a good opportunity to combine Tagtooling with traditional painting. We already had made some steps into that direction, but this was different. Whereas before we had treated the painting surface more like a canvas for both analogue and digital painting, the work of RZM is focused on the whole space, and the movement within it.

After the rehearsal in the skate park, we had arranged some days at Kunstwerkstatt Tulln in Austria. In several sessions a day we explored the possibilities. Much emphasis was on our spacial relationship during the improvisation. We discovered an interesting aspect of projection painting: On the Tagtool, you can be physically far away from the action, but you can interact at close range with the other performers – you project yourself. To keep things in the flow, we decided that Thomas and me would be free to use both the brushes and the Tagtool at any time.

When we arrived in Chernivtsi, we were presented with a beautiful but very rundown building, right in the town center. The facade, facing the busy pedestrian street, was impeccable – behind it, everything was in shambles. It was a decayed elegance, an old theater filled with dust and rubble – layers of texture wherever you looked.

There were two sessions in the building – the first one, closed to the public but recorded on video, was a walk through the hallways that ended up in a room with arches and a door with wooden stairs. Both the spotlight and the projector were placed so we could rotate them as part of the performance, which made for some pretty dramatic, sometimes even comical, emergent situations.

The main performance on September 24th was in the much larger theater space. We set up the Tagtool to cover two projection areas, one pointing at the imposing concrete wall behind the stage, the other on one of two canvases that had been placed at the wall to the left of the stage. A large and very attentive audience turned out. It was definitely a challenge to play the whole space – the connection between the performers had to be maintained across long distances – but it worked, no doubt also due to the intense rehearsal regiment in the days before.

For me, the start of a performance with RZM is like flipping a switch. It’s entering a state of pure nonverbal being. There is no purpose other than to react to the other’s actions, to contribute something to the flow of things, or to instigate change.

And the Tagtool felt very much at home in the middle of the rubble, dust and paint. It’s for projects like this that we came up with the thing.

There’s an exhibition by RZM titled “Boombox M” running at Galerie M in Marzahn, Berlin until March 18th 2010. Definitely worth checking out. More information here.

More pictures:
Photos from the session in Tulln
Photos from the performance in Chernivtsi

The event was organized by Robert Bosch Stiftung. Many thanks to Judith Stumptner for her support.