Anne Diestelkamp
cultural programmer, artistic researcher/ editor and translator
Performative City Walk
Evamaria Schaller
Public Space Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
During VIDEONALE.20, unlike in previous editions of the festival, video works were presented not only at the Kunstmuseum Bonn but also at six unusual exhibition sites throughout downtown Bonn: in a former retail space, a club, a project space, a van, a former centrifuge, and a shop window. To make the connections between the video works more tangible for the audience, my colleague Annette Ziegert and I developed a concept for guided city walks. We commissioned various artists to create impulses or participatory performances for the walking routes. During the performative city walk Inter–ruption with Evamaria, we explored queer-feminist perspectives on the urban space of Bonn. Taking VALIE EXPORT’s work Syntagma as a starting point, the artist devised public-space interventions, group actions, and questions concerning the representation of different bodies in public. The walk led along several of the VIDEONALE.20 exhibition sites, including the club Blow Up, where Julia Scher’s Lip Sync 2025 was shown, and Atelier Meissner, which featured I AM THE FIRST LESBIAN I EVER MET by Dani and Sheila Restack.
📷 David Ertl