SAT 27.08 The Path to the left hand
Shedhalle / Events / August 2011 / Saturday, 27 August, from 2 pm
Marcus Maeder/ Jan Schacher: Der Pfad zur linken Hand, 2011 (Plakat)
27 August – 11 September, 2011
Der Pfad zur linken Hand (The left-hand path)
A topographical audio play by Marcus Maeder and Jan Schacher in Zurich and Graz, 2011.
path territory Zurich: Alter Botanischer Garten (Old Botanic Garden, Zurich, Pelikanstrasse)
The audio play can be downloaded from august 2011 on as App for iPhones and Androids
At the Zürich Völkerkundemuseum there will be devices on loan for the path (Tu – Fr 10 am – 1 pm, 2 pm - 5 pm, Sa 2 pm – 5 pm, So 11 am – 5 pm)
Der Pfad zur linken Hand (The left-hand path)
A topographical drama.
Test version. Location: Old Botanic Garden, Zurich.
Production: ORF Kunstradio und Musikprotokoll Graz.
World premiere: Musikprotokoll am Steirischen Herbst – Dom im Berg/Schlossberg/Stadtpark 6. - 9. 10. 2011, Graz.
Der Pfad zur linken Hand is a radio play, a ‘nomadic game’ that, as an app for smart phones and media players with GPS and compass functions can be walked in a test version at the Old Botanic Garden in Zurich (August and September 2011). A small number of loan units will be available at the reception of the Ethnographic Museum (Völkerkundemuseum). The listeners “err”, wander through the park, with their devices, headphones, and the app installed on them, and encounter segments of the text distributed in the park.
The game is construed as an invisible, solely audible maze in which and out of which the listeners have to find their individual (kind of ‘left-hand’) path. The episodes of Der Pfad zur linken Handdistributed in the Old Botanic Garden are not being told in the progress of events nor causally linked but form a polyphonic cluster that has to be walked and explored. The topics and discourses presented in Der Pfad zur linken Hand are characterised by scepticism and dissent, by the refusal to accept the actual state of affairs.
Marcus Maeder and Jan Schacher view Der Pfad zur linken Handas an “acoustic genre picture of a society that has made the global market and its power relations the basis of its cultural, social, and political structure. It shows the picture of a society shaped by omnipresent monetary relations and entanglements, in which the concentration of myths has become that large, that dense that the myths themselves indeed have become a thicket”(Marcus Maeder). Obviously, the Old Botanic Garden, connecting the banking district of Zurich with the new stock exchange, has been carefully chosen as the location: a relic of conventional concepts of nature and growth is changed into a labyrinthian thinking path furthering processes of cognition and of the overcoming of power relations.