SEKRET Eine Tränen-Bar Performance — Wiebke Mueller

“Emotions are bound up with how we inhabit the world ‘with’ others.”

– Sara Ahmed

In a bar in downtown Karlsruhe, the audience encounters a touring trio with a peculiar story: Once upon a time, there was a moth living in the jungles of the Brazilian Amazon. This moth was called Gorgone macarea and had a habit that seemed rather unusual for a creature on Earth. Gorgone macarea drank the tears of sleeping birds. For the moth, it was a reliable source of nourishment in uncertain times. After all, even back then, the Amazon rainforest was considered a so-called tipping element, capable of disrupting the global climate balance. As Gorgone macarea’s habitat changed more and more, and the birds gradually disappeared, the moth set out in search of other tears. Along the way, it heard that humans shed a kind of tear unlike any other creature on Earth: emotional tears. And so, the moth decided to invite humans to share their tears with it.

Since then, the moth and its two companions, Sadgirl and Fluss, have been touring from bar to bar, drawing the audience into their universe for one night. A universe where tears are the main ingredient of the evening—served in every cocktail.

"Sekret" is a performance about and with the tears of our time. Through the stories of the three protagonists, the audience is immersed in a world of emotion, affect, and fiction. The phenomenon of emotional crying is explored through socio-political, pop-cultural, and poetic themes. Through the characters of the Moth, Sadgirl, and Fluss, the performance examines concepts and phenomena such as the staging of tears, pain, tears as taboo, tears as cliché, white tears, and tears as bodily fluid. We ask: Who sheds tears, how, and where? When are they cried? What do they stand for? And what intentions lie behind the 70-100 liters of tears that a human sheds in a lifetime?

Wiebke Mueller works as a freelance scenographer, costume designer, and artist. She studied at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, the Bauhaus University Weimar, and as a guest at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has worked and presented her projects at venues such as TJG Dresden, Residenz Leipzig, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, GfzK Leipzig, 4Bid Gallery Amsterdam, and Staatstheater Karlsruhe. She is a co-founder of the spatial collective "Kollektiv Kubik" and has been collaborating with it regularly since 2017.

"Sekret – Eine Tränen-Bar Performance" is Wiebke Mueller's final project at HfG Karlsruhe in 2024.

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Kontakt: wbkemllr@gmail.com