Partners / Julia Tieke / Hospitability
Partners: Julia Tieke
Durational performance, installation, social space, 30.05.-06.06.2021, Errant Sound, Berlin
Feeling an urgent need to leave my flat that I have been renting since 2005, and in which I had spent more time in the last year than in any previous one, I decided to actually live at Errant Sound for the time of my residency, a good three kilometres away from home.
Social Acoustics
Starting from the concept of listening as “inner hospitality”, I was going to reanimate my ability to be a host. Part of the process was to collect masks, used and unused, sewing them together, in an attempt to transform them, their function, their aesthetics, their social meaning, and to transform the room at the same time through their charged presence.
It’s a matter of not losing the ability to host, the knowledge of hosting, the conditions of being a host, and a guest. Not so much out of fear that we are forgetting our everyday practices, but more so because I simply miss it.
So, I am giving a frame to hospitality. An excuse if you like. Setting up an experiment, a durational performance to refresh hospitability. Between a public and a private situation. A frame for hospitability, for socializing again. A guest myself, but as a host.
Part of the set-up would be me sewing masks together. As important and useful as they are, acoustically they discourage conversation, muffle voices, create a rather anti-social acoustic.
Collecting Masks
The actual work started with a call at the beginning of April 2021, when I sent out emails to friends and wrote posts: “I am collecting masks”.
People reacted in many ways, from asking straight where to send the masks, to assuring one was going to sterilize them beforehand or stating that it felt like giving me worn underwear.
Fetish - disgust – intimacy – banality - hygiene – closeness – embarrassment.
Letters arrive, envelopes with masks and greetings on postcards. Neighbors drop some at the doorstep, friends go for a walk and hand over masks. Someone gives me her first mask: “Je suis sickofthisshit”. Walks by the canal, coffee on benches, a walk by the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park. A meeting in some garden, a coffee by the open window at a friend’s flat. He had cleaned and tidied up before I came. He hadn’t received any guests in a while.
Attempts at DIY masks. Make-up traces. Coffee spills. Torn rubber straps. Half-stitched names. Broken wires. Branding. Slogans. Logos. Claims. Some keep their first mask; some give it to me. I am keeping mine. Some want to keep it as memorabilia, some want to wear it in cold winter times.
Unused medical masks from China, a big pile. With rubber straps that break too easily. All these masks, more than 100, had arrived too late to my friend’s father’s company to be used. He had died in the meantime, not of Covid-19.
Someone’s mother had sewn a first model before community masks spread, she had used an old bra – the cup roughly fitting on mouth and nose, the strap already attached. Too bad she threw it away.
A shop for sustainable fashion gives their customers free masks with their shopping. They’re not selling anymore. A friend arranges for a whole box of brand-new eco cotton, carefully sewed masks.
Staging Home
Moving into Errant Sound.
Another call, another email: visit me! I want to host you. Friends, guests, pass by; some drop more masks. The first guest comes, and we sit by the river Spree, two courtyards down. Smoking cigarettes. A wine. A beer with a late guest. Another beer. Picnics and lunch. Breakfast and ice-cream.
Seagulls, pigeons, bats, a swan, a heron. People fishing. A woman and a man. The TV tower, sunsets, trains, and urban railways.
Guests look at the set-up. The bed, next to the sewing machine, the piles of masks, the flip-flops. Someone associates a sweat shop. Another one homework for textile industries.
After one and a half days only, I feel at home. Feel a faint sense of intrusion into my privacy when the co-residents come to work. Sleeping makes the difference. Hosting makes the difference. As short as it may be. Knowing a door code, having a key, greeting the neighbors, buying a croissant across the street in the morning. Taking the trash out. Cooking, doing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom sink.
The first three and a half days, visitors don’t overlap, funnily. They come one after the other, don’t meet. But then A. comes, brings M., and soon N. joins. We are enthusiastic about the spontaneous encounter. Sitting by the river again, over drinks, snacks, small talk, big talk.
N. says it’s a rite-de-passage, and I agree.
I take a rapid antigen test every day. At what would be the KitKat Club in other times. After three days, I get a member card, no longer need to register myself in advance. I can just walk in, show my card, and get tested. Unwanted memberships.
The Sound of Sewing
The room has filled up with hundreds of masks. I count 914, maybe a few less, maybe a few more. A sewing machine to process them.
Processing. Sleeping in this room means to really process. Materially, mentally.
The window to the street as a stage, which I open in the morning by lifting the heavy roller shutters. I amplify my work noise, connecting the private and the public space through sound. The street gets busy with passers-by during the week from 8 am to 4 pm, otherwise is quiet.
Sewing sounds and distortion sounds from the masks hitting the mics, touching them, being pulled across them. Projecting the sounds onto the street means prolonging them, enlarging them, it reminds me of the first phase of the pandemic when everyday sounds from inside – a vacuum cleaner, music, phone calls, conversations – were heard more easily on the street, because there was virtually no car noise. I remember a walk in April 2020, between 10.30 and 11.30 pm, in my otherwise busy neighborhood, with not a single car running past me.
Who sews in the industry? Who sews at home? Who has sewn my mask? Invisibly. Inaudibly.
I move out of Errant Sound, feeling that I have worked myself – and possibly some guests as well – through some of the exceptional emotional states of the previous 15 months, with a mixture of reproductive activities and transformative actions.