To swap, English for swap, exchange, trade: the Ghanaian-German project Swap Families transfers these practices to the family microcosm. The artist collectives Futur3 (Cologne) and eX-para-Mental (Kumasi) send each other parcels with everyday objects, photos, recipes and stories from their family worlds. An artistic process then begins in the other country, which approaches the objects and stories sometimes associatively and playfully, sometimes in the form of re-enactments and reinterprets them using various means.
What is the relationship between culture(s), society(ies), tradition(s), families (as social constructs) and the individual person? What stories are told about and within families? Swap Families explores these questions and brings together possible answers in a multidisciplinary performative installation as part of the africologneFESTIVAL. An artistic exchange in mutual consensus and an intercultural treatise with perhaps unexpected narratives.
BY AND WITH Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Kimathi Calistus Agbanu, Irene Eichenberger, Stefan H. Kraft, Vera Obeng, Luzia Schelling, Franklin Yohuno | ARTISTIC DIRECTION André Erlen, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Stefan H. Kraft | DRAMATURGY Sandra Nuy | SPACE and COSTUME Petra M. Wirth | SOUND DESIGN Jörg Ritzenhoff | LIGHT DESIGN Boris Kahnert | PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Kerstin Ortmeier | PROJECT MANAGEMENT Frank Ellenberger | PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT FUTUR3 Theresa Heusssen | OUTSIDE EYE Sarah Youssef | PRODUCTION Futur3 & africologneFESTIVAL | SUPPORTED BY Fonds Darstellende Künste/Neustart Kultur, Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, German Embassy Accra, City of Cologne
Futur3 is an independent theater collective based in Cologne that has been staging contemporary, socio-political and culturally critical themes since 2004 under the artistic direction of André Erlen and Stefan H. Kraft – interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary at changing locations and in changing constellations. Futur3 is constantly rethinking theater formally, questioning it and reinventing it as a theatrical hap-pening, walk-in installation or parcours performance. More information at www.futur-drei.de
eX-para-Mental (Kumasi, Ghana) is first and foremost an idea. It is an artists’ collective made up of lecturers, students and graduates of the Department of Painting and Sculpture of the Faculty of Art of the College of Art and Built Environment of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. The collective is a kind of laboratory for testing experimental, multidisciplinary, lively, emerging artistic and theoretical positions. It also functions as a platform for the examination of our complex and complicated contemporaneity.
