Arrest.

stage-to-screen hybrid | 53 min | 2024

“Arrest” is an audio installation and performance by Nicola Schubert. Based on real biographies of politically persecuted women and Gestapo employees in Dortmund and Cologne, the audio piece creates a scenic-docufictional narrative of political repression. The stage-to-screen hybrid presents a cinematic adaptaion of the original stage play using deliberate camera work and editing.

In "mothercity", the aging urban space of the Ruhr district city of Dortmund becomes an analogy of the ageing female body. The film traces a process of remembering. The text as a stream of consciousness makes the thoughts of the protagonists, who move back and forth between past and future, audible. They reflect on the relationship between body and urban space. Two old protagonists seek a dialog with their younger selves.

The starting point of the film is the assumption that both the human body and the urban space are archives: What do the city and the body have in common as repositories of memories? How are memories inscribed? Through rapid image changes of urban spaces with old and young bodies, the patina of the city is equated with the patina of the ageing body.

SHOWS

EL-DE Haus Köln, July 2024

Steinwache Dortmund, Premiere, June 2024

We offer seminars on the themes explored in the production and on the broader topic of translating a stage play into another medium, to engage a wider audience. Workshops can be tailored to schools, cultural institutions, youth organizations, and similar settings. // contact