BELOW DECK

directors MARTINA MAHLKNECHT & MARTIN PRINOTH
screenplay JAN EICHBERG, MARTINA MAHLKNECHT, MARTIN PRINOTH
lead developer LEONHARD ONKEN-MENKE
music POSE DIA
sound design DORIAN BEHNER
director of photography MARTIN PRINOTH
stage design MARTINA MAHLKNECHT
costume design GIANNA-SOPHIA WEISE
light design DENNIS NÄHR
sound engineer STEFFEN REIL
developer, camera operator LUCA KOWALINSKI
vfx, colouring JONAS LINK
main cast MARIA ANTIGUA, MANOLET CASTILLO, VANESSA FAUVEL, GADIE SANTOS, MARY GRACE WESCH
project management PAM GORONCY, STÜCKLIESEL
graphics BÜRO KLASS
production TÒ SU FILM OHG
acknowledgements to ANNA TEUWEN, AGNES NUBER, BIRGIT GLOMBITZA, GIACOMO BON, GEELKE GAYCKEN, GERRIT FROHNE-BRINCKMANN, JONAS PLÜMKE, LILLI THALGOTT, LUISE NAGEL, MARKUS WICHMANN, MARAIKE MARXSEN, MARKWARD SCHECK, PETRA MÜLLER, PUJA ABBASSI, SEEMANNSMISSION HAMBURG-ALTONA, SVENJA WEIL, SVEN MENNINGMANN, TONI MAHLKNECHT

DON’T PANIC BY BIRGIT GLOMBITZA

“You know, sometimes the storm is not outside the ship but inside the ship.” (Manolet, pastry chef)

We shouldn’t actually be here. In the belly of a passenger ship with the Filipino crew who are rehearsing a play. Millions of Filipinos work on cargo ships and cruise liners. We’ve read that somewhere before; seen, not really. Not even in the cruise ports of this world such as Venice, Hamburg, Amsterdam or Miami, where they often land, change ships or cargo or, during Covid, even got stuck for months. We belong on the sun deck, with territorially spread out towels and flip-flops. S and A class. Kate and Leonardo. Or rather: Kate and – further down towards the engine room – the staff. The eternal world order of the Titanic. Triangle of Sadness had a bloody fine moan about it. A kingdom for a lifeboat …

Now we are standing there in chirpy yellow rubber slippers that give way to our weight as if they were made of clouds or sandcastles. “Oh… hello! I guess you are the guest who shouldn’t be here?! I see you are wearing a mask, that’s fine…well, aren’t we all wearing masks somehow and playing a role?” Manolet, the pastry chef, lures us in through the curtain like in a Lynch movie. We are guests. We are being played with. A little bit of being at the mercy of others is part of it. Manolet invites us into a blue illuminated interior that becomes a walkway below deck on a cruise ship. Unlike the view onto a movie screen, the view through the VR glasses is more coercive, authoritarian and physical. A prosthetic that impacts the whole body. Its effects can be felt in the stomach, the balance has to readjust itself, every step further is a little uneasy, is a decision.

In front of us, a roundel of fabric with a yellow texture, we can touch it and – as far as we can tell – see. Touching, seeing, that makes us believe. A piece of fabric slides to the side, clearing an entry for the next performance. If we dare to advance too far with our heads, the image disappears again. As if it were behind us, in a different spatial dimension, with its own presence and independent flow of time. Space and time, we have no other coordinates to grasp the world and form sentences about it. Therein, too, lie the deeply unsettling forces of this installation.

Of course, there is – like in cinema – a contract between the audience and VR; a contract visitors pay for with their temporary belief in the diegetic worlds of the performance. Neither the gap in the curtain nor its opposite are really there. We somehow know this and get into it anyway. More unreserved, perhaps, than in the cinema, more corporeal. And so we go on into a strange narrative space with an inescapable visuality that never becomes our own. For all its Lynchean pull, it always narrates its own strangeness, too. In one of its rooms, the pastry chef now presents us with a multi-tiered cake for the captain’s dinner. In the next, the dressing room, the crew is getting ready for their own re-enactment. Work as play. Exploitation twisted into a show of self-empowerment. The invisible look at us. A ghost story. The ghosts that appear to us in BELOW DECK rehearse the uprising, become visible under their own direction. And they oblige us to look, not only at their VR appearance, but also at our ignorance.

“What they are trying to do is a funny sketch about the guests, but it’s a delicate task. How would It be possible to speak freely to those who have money and pay the cruise company and eventually give the salary and the possibility to send your kids to school? Ssshhhh, they proceed rehearsing…“

A painting, a picture ­– however abstract – “is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears. Without the disappearing, there would perhaps be no impulse to paint,” is how John Berger understands the artistic intention in “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible.” Without such consent, there would probably also be no impulse to photograph, to film, etcetera. Without these affirmations in art, “the visible itself would possess the surety (and the permanence) which painting strives to find.” In the beginning, then, is the visible, the existing, that which confronts humans as a mountain, a tree, an animal or an other. Even cave paintings served to formulate a kind of “magical community” (Berger). To create a connection between human imagination and existence. From the moving or still image outside to those inside our heads. Image production thus obtains an almost ritual function.

BELOW DECK by Martina Mahlknecht and Martin Prinoth uses immersive means and links to theater and film to take us exactly there. To a temporary, magical community. The installation is the third part of a trilogy about the living situations and working conditions on the high seas, dealing with realities that are directly linked to us and our “Western” European lifestyle, and yet remain unseen. In BELOW DECK, the existing, the visible becomes – by means of image production – ghostly, non-existent. As it is with all creatures that have been turned into images and films. The staging of the installation, from the curtain to the performance rehearsal to the perspectival definition of a placed audience, is anchored in the theatrical. The proscenium stage can also be found in the production design of early cinema. And finally, the immersive, that is two spectators, equipped with a total visual prosthetic, who move, scan walls, grasp into the void.

BELOW DECK and its tentative visitors touch the absent. An absence we would not have become aware of without this image machine creation. The crew, the below deck workers, the strangers. They disappear again after the tour. The bluish darkness in which they appeared to us is difficult to describe. It is neither night nor ignorance. It is the inside. The one behind our eyes, from which everything thought about the world emerges.

LEAFLET / POSTER