Anna Witt
Dancing on a Volcano
Two-channel video installation, 2024
Anna Witt's two-part video installation is centered in the Wendland municipality of Gorleben, which became a symbol of the anti-nuclear movement and a center of critical debate around nuclear energy use in Germany. After the former salt mine near Gorleben was designated in 1977 as a nuclear waste facility site, Wendland became home to one of West Germany’s most significant and lasting grassroots protest movements of the post-war era. Witt explores how collective forms of protest have inscribed themselves into the bodies and biographies of activists and their families over generations, for which she conducted research in the Gorleben Archive.
The title Dancing on a Volcano is a metaphor for describing risky behavior. This phrase was originally coined by French publicist Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy to criticize the French royal family’s excessive consumption on the brink of the French Revolution. This kind of behavior has parallels with today’s predominant attitudes toward the looming climate crisis and the resurgence of pro-nuclear policies, while the title of Anna Witt’s artwork also reflects on dangers and the motivations behind activism. In the Gorleben Archive in the village of Lüchow, Witt discovered materials from a similarly named music festival, Dancing on the Volcano, organized on September 4, 1982, as a protest against the planned construction of interim storage facilities in the Gorleben Forest. The police used high-pressure water cannons against the protesters for the first time there, causing serious injuries to several people. A legal case challenging the police’s actions went to the Federal Constitutional Court, but was dismissed after ten years with no legal consequences. Eyewitness accounts of the protest describe the police escalation, but also reflect on the collective learning processes that emerged from the events among the protesters and convey how groups can develop autonomous, collective strategies for action. In this form of collective protest, skills and strategies such as standing firm instead of running, managing fear, empathizing with opponents, and constantly weighing collective goals against group welfare become essential.
In her large-format video installation, Witt works with local volunteers in the Gorleben Forest to experiment with practices of solidarity when confronted with a high-pressure water cannon. Rather than re-enacting the events of 1982, Witt’s performative experiment seeks to update the activists’ collective skills for today. Her focus here is on the physicality and embodied nature of collective action. In the video, water becomes an abstract form of violence that the group confronts through collective action. Witt is interested in the ability for collective action to be activated and the prerequisites necessary for it to be so. In the second part of the video work, this concept is projected into the future, with young adults from the Wendland reflecting on their upbringing in a culture of resistance and how their experiences have shaped their views on tackling complex challenges and fighting for climate justice.
The video is embedded in a structure of yellow slats arranged in the shape of an “X.” The yellow “X” symbolizes the resistance against nuclear waste transports in the Wendland, uniting the rural population, the church, and anti-nuclear activists who came there to support the protests. The symbol originated in 1988, when it was used as a form of aesthetic protest along roadsides and in front yards along the route of the Castor transports from Wackersdorf to Gorleben. Today, it stands for “Day X,” the point at which the 1.5-degree climate target becomes unattainable, thus condensing symbols of different generations and causes within the environmental movement.
Special thanks to all project participants, the Gorleben Volunteer Fire Department, Freie Bühne Wendland, Lüchow-Dannenberg Citizens’ Initiative, Meuchefitz, Gorleben Archive, Cultural Association Raum 2ev, EJZ, and HBK Braunschweig.
ANNA WITT, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.
Her artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political, working with performative interventions and video installations. She creates situations that reflect on social structures and the political of our everyday in the context of care, labor, class, migration and gender. The body in relation to individual and collective experiences plays a central role in her works. Passers-by in public spaces, or specific groups, - including nurses, factory workers, inhabitants of council housing or members of a youth forum, are drawn into her experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. She creates situations to initiate group decision-making processes, leaving space for individual articulation and improvisation. The performative strategies range from repeated imitation of coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, emphasizing moments of emancipatory thinking and solidarity.
In the last years, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Austria, Germany and internationally. Her work had been shown at SEMA Seoul Museum of Art; Secession Vienna; 1st Vienna Biennale at MAK; Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Austrian Cultural Forum New York; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others and she had solo exhibitions at Museum Belvedere 21 Contemporary, Vienna; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, at Marabourparken Museum Stockholm and Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo. She took part in Aichi Triennial 19, 13; Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; 6. Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and Manifesta 7 in North Italy and is the winner of the Outstanding Artist Award 2020; Otto Mauer Prize 2018; Art Prize ‘Future of Europe’ in 2015; BC21 Art Award in 2013 and Art Prize Columbus Art Foundation in 2008.
