ERMITAGE [drafts]

With Joscha Baltha, Antoine Caxape, Elena Wolff and Nick Romeo Reimann. Contributions by Achinoam Alon and Christian Naujoks.

Sentenced to 42 days of quarantine, Xavier de Maistre in 1790 embarks on a journey around his room. He uses the limitations imposed on his physical freedom of movement and the time thus gained for contemplative expeditions into the vast interiors of his soul, while not far from his comfortable enclosure the revolutionaries are at work to abolish that very interiority. From his exile in Savoy, again in privileged surroundings, de Maistre publishes his travelogue in 1794, establishing a genre of literal armchair travel literature. Three variants of this genre – de Maistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre, Guillaume Dustan’s erotic autofiction Dans ma chambre (1996) and Ernst Jünger’s essay Der Waldgang (1951) – are explored by three performers within an installation.

The piece was performed at Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, in July 2020 as part of K 2020. A recording was subsequently shown at the same venue as part of the exhibition This house is not a home [mise en abyme] alongside contributions by Lukas Duwenhögger & Julian Göthe, Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff & Gloria Hasnay, Niklas Lichti, Katrin Mayer and Christian Naujoks.

Produced by Otto Falckenberg Schule / Münchner Kammerspiele.