Désert’s art-installation Paukenschlag (The Drum-beat) is created in easily recognizable visual-forms to command the viewer’s immediate attention:
- (a) A billboard
- (b) A souvenir display-case
- (c) An LED text-streaming message-board
- (d) A pocket-size fanzine/magazine and
- (e) An offset-printed poster
Die Trommel (The Drum) Bar has no conspicuous face, it is an invisible place facing a Berlin cemetery. It’s empty façade does not reveal the turning disco ball nor photographic records of long dead drag-queens. It’s unmarked door and discrete knocker expose no trace of the Bacchanalian revelry to the hymns of German Schlager-music that lie within.
Every sub-cultural social group requires their own spaces of history- their own place of refuge from other minorities or from the dominant order. Through these spaces, those long gone and those that remain- a subtle cumulative memory creates a cultural history passed on from generation to generation.
An exemplary model of this phenomena may be found in Berlin’s Neukölln quarter, in the form of a typical German Kneipe (Bar) named Die Trommel - a bar frequented by an enduring Berlin minority. This particular minority was once besieged by the terror of the Nazis and later marginalized again during Berlin’s postwar occupation.
Die Trommel, though known as a gay-bar is more precisely a Queer-bar established before the Queer movement of the 1990s. It represents a minority genre of pubs in decline for decades. The clientele of the bar was often a loose and sometimes close-knit community of gay men, heterosexual women, lesbians, hetero and bi-sexual men and a range of people who might fall under the descriptions of transgender, such as transsexuals and transvestites. These Berliners, and their visitors, spanned the breadth of classes found in Berlin, thus a businessman and a factory-worker or a housewife and a sex-worker might occupy the same space and privilege.
This small locale has been the space of private joy and secret friendship between acquaintances, locals and their neighbors for nearly 40years. It is a space that cultivates extended family among strangers- creating fast friends and most certainly rivals. It is noteworthy that such a place of intimacy has served as a repository of memory. Die Trommel is a public living-room informally inscribed with layers of posters, flyers, trophies, awards, party invitations and the ubiquity of photos documenting celebration and untimely loss.
Paukenschlag was commissioned for the exhibition The City and Memory curated by artist Maria Linares as part of the annual 48Hours Neukölln Arts Festival Berlin.
The blog site: derpaukenschlag was used during the exhibition
