Rimini Protokoll: City as Stage

The first U.S. museum exhibition of Rimini Protokoll, a Berlin-based artist collective formed of Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, features two major works: 100% City—an immersive interactive video installation at MCASB’s main location; and Home Visit USA— a participatory performance that takes place at various private residences throughout Santa Barbara County.

Rimini Protokoll is internationally renowned for their vibrant theater productions, which often incorporate site-specific installation, sculpture, architecture, and video. Integral to their work is activating spectators as key agents who explore political and social realities of everyday life. For their exhibition at MCASB the artists invite audiences to actively delve into topics of how we define local community and national identity. Using city statistics, political mechanisms, and personal stories as their primary subject matter, the artists call attention to how multivalent portrayals of place are formed and performed.

100% City is an expansive video installation extending from a series of the artists’ past performances held in 28 cities around the world. In these performances 100 everyday citizens of each city express their views on diverse themes including aging, warfare, migration, and relationships. They tell stories and secrets, expressing alternative demographies that cut across traditional spatial, cultural, and political divides, performing “a gathering that is a city, a group just beginning to experience itself, a choir that has never practiced, an impossible entity with many faces – assembled into ever-changing new group pictures.”