Sommerspiele

Eszter Salamon is an artist, choreographer, and performer. She develops multidisciplinary work with a transnational and transhistorical approach to construct works that challenge dominant narratives and highlight forgotten perspectives. In 2014, she began a series of works that explore both the notion of monument and a practice of speculating and rewriting history. She creates performances, installations, and films that are presented in theatres, festivals, and museums around the world.

Sommerspiele (Summer Games) is a surrealist fiction set in the former site of the Berlin Olympic Games (1936), consisting of a 70,000-seat football stadium, a swimming pool, and an open-air theatre. A character resembling German avant-garde artist Valeska Gert wanders around, as an intruder, a troublemaker, and a disruptive figure. The architecture of the site still bears the traces of Nazi violence and the complex relationship that some artists had with the regime, while others, including Gert, were considered to be creators of “degenerate art”. Set against the backdrop of buildings now used for professional sport, entertainment, and mass leisure, the film reveals the links between past and present and the fail ings of collective memory, activating a form of poetic resistance. Using the grotesque, Gert’s critical tool, Sommerspiele questions the representation of bodies and the violence to which they are subjected, tackling the question of memory and art’s capacity for resistance, as well as the relationship between nationalism, fascism, and sport.