Graw Böckler

[DE]

Speaking Synchronously II, Video, 2012

Catarina & Deli cultivated a new way of talk: they speak synchronously. The idea is to speak together instead of speaking with each other. If two persons talk together in a chorus they do not fight but agree. Their opinions are created spontaneously and expressed in a chorus. The opinions loose the personal relativity and become common sense immediately. It is not the "me" and "I" but the "we" that is talking.

Deli and Catarina speak together to their friends or people they meet at social gatherings. At first people are confused and amused when they are spoken to in a chorus. But it becomes quickly evident that "synchronously speaking" is a good starting point for a living together in perfect harmony.

Starring Deli Gleba & Catarina Santos. Edited by Catarina Santos. Idea & video by Graw Böckler.

Graw Böckler is the joint project of Berlin-based artists Ursula Böckler and Georg Graw, who together and independently work across the popular formats of video and still photography. In collaboration since 1997 and longtime affiliates of CTM Festival, the pair specialise in making music videos and loops, experimental films, and unauthorised commercials.

Both Graw and Böckler are part of the curatorial team of DISK/CTM-affiliated project space General Public, and operate the temporary projection space and DVD label "Raum für Projektion." They also programmed and produced the “After the Crisis” event in 2012 and 2013, which began as a series of interviews based around economic dissolution (from Argentina's 2001 bankruptcy to the then-impending European debt crisis), which expanded into a three-week-festival project. Examples of their work, which has been shown in Germany and internationally, include producing "commercials for ideas or concepts" in need of publicity, and "Question to Radio Yerevan," a multi-media exhibition featuring old jokes from the soviet hemisphere.

Over the past year, the duo has been responsible for the production of music videos for experimental pop acts Donna Regina and Molly Nilsson, and 2014 also saw the publication of After the Crisis (a project compendium) and We Didn't Learn Tango. Their latest initiative is "Let's talk about.. the weather," which adopts the so-called lowest common denominator of conversation — weather — and elevates it through artistic means.