Afterword to Ines Birkhan's novel "Angel Meat. Verwerfungen"

Having finished reading Ines Birkhan ‘s novel Angel Meat. Verwerfungen, you might not be aware that it is not just a novel, but the current culmination of the long term transmedia and collaborative project Angel Meat, of which it is not exactly an achievement – the project is meant to go on endlessly –, but a key manifestation, for Angel Meat is – in spite of existing through many different medias –, primarily a literature project. Having generated artworks in various fields – performances, videos, installations, websites, etc. –, Angel Meat was conceived and developed by two multimedia artists – in that case multimedia is more a technical description than a manifesto, expressing in contemporary terminology the inevitable wide range of curiosity one expects from an artist since the Renaissance – and fed by many sources during the length of its progress, in a complex but playful attempt at elaborating a ‘total artwork’.

During the long process of its conception, birth and maturation, Angel Meat organically evolved, its theoretical and quasi-abstract premises gained flesh and emotions, and therefore from experimental it became experiential, and it might be interesting – though not critical for the appreciation of the novel –, to briefly recall its very early stages. First of course you have people: Ines Birkhan is a writer as much as a dancer and a choreographer, who happens to have studied music and sculpture, Bertram Dhellemmes is a musician, performer, stage and video director and visual artist, and they started collaborating in 2003 for dance and music shows, then films and video installations. When they initiate Angel Meat in 2009, they have already elaborated common strategies to combine in a creative way not only different art disciplines and personal inputs, but also vastly heterogeneous reference fields. They’ve set the path to projects reaching other levels of complexity – not a complexity for the sake of it, that would somehow improve artistic value, but just as a reflect of reality. .

Of the issues that converged to initiate Angel Meat, some were technical, some were aesthetical, some were philosophical, many were raised during previous projects – because art doesn’t bring answers, but more questions – and needed to be processed again… There was a quest of how literature and dance could be combined on stage in a non-theatrical way – how can you not be busy with that when you’re like Ines Birkhan both writing and performing? There was redundancy to embrace the cultural hierarchy of what is relevant or efficient to build our interfaces to reality, and a desire to actively work on the issue from every perspective. There was an investigation in new ways to induce catharsis and create artworks that would immerse their audience in an intense emotional meditation without resorting to dreary old tricks. And there was the need to be intensively involved in a dynamic and exciting creative process – that is always the best way to have something compelling to share with an audience!

Detailing here the whole process would be tedious and irrelevant, and you can consider that most of it emerges in Angel Meat. Verwerfungen, in a way or another. Let’s say that little by little a diegetic world appeared, that would manifest itself in several works and through different medias. Each work is to stand on its own and be independent of the knowledge the audience may have of its belonging to a wider piece, but would contribute to it in its specific way.

The main series of works – and in a way the backbone of the project until this novel was achieved, or at least reached its audience – is the ‘staged literature’ performance series Dancing on Ashes, that is an experiment within the experiment. In Dancing on Ashes, the core of each show is a narrative written text, projected sequentially on the stage, and the performers – dancers and musicians – as much as the scenography and soundscape, provide an intense emotional and atmospheric support to the unique experience of collective reading. The short stories told in the performances, and the characters they introduce, have been incorporated in the novel, though they are not central in it. Only one Dancing on Ashes performance stood out of this model, and was a chaotic attempt at creating an alternative cabaret show, with guests artists performing acts combining comedy, music, dance and erotic exhibitions!

Another important segment of Angel Meat is a series of printed text posters, exhibited together with visual and sound installations and videos: also narrating fragments – revolving around the protagonists – that more or less found their ways in the novel, and also proposing an alternative relation to literature and the act of reading. Several videos have been released on different supports – online or not –, either as autonomous works or combined with other medias, or documenting the performances and the process; parallel web-based projects have appeared (and disappeared), sometimes providing point of views from fictional characters that didn’t obligatorily merge in the main body of Angel Meat, often camouflaged in social networks… And there are many other projects to come over the coming years, that will either deepen what has been created so far, use previously unreleased material, or develop new storylines as well as explore new disciplines.

Having been conceived as an expanded field of literature, Angel Meat was since its earliest stage meant to generate this novel, that therefore doesn’t recycle previous works, no more than it is a higher manifestation of what would have been so far only drafts: everything was elaborated as parts of a whole, and Angel Meat. Verwerfungen is as much a laboratory and an autonomous work than the performances, the videos, the posters, the websites, and everything that is still to come.

Angel Meat fed deliberately on whatever felt relevant to catch the current and strange spirit of the time – that feels unbearably but increasingly just post-post-something, with very little chance given to anything to be the beginning of whatever might happen next –, things often hidden in the many blind spots of our arts and cultures. This would include Black Metal, cheap continental transports, erotic cabaret, TV personality cult, French decadent literature, recreational drugs, Roller Derby, sex toys, antiformal dance and music, amateur political subversion, archeology, yoga, artists squats and communes, jewelry, electric guitars, pansexuality, fashion, haikus, blogging, eschatology, orchid collecting, black blocks, and many more. It was meant to deal with love, sex and death, also initiation, temptation and achievement, the way you can do after Dante, Joyce and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with the tools of experimental arts, dance, music and literature but in a way that would concern its audience. This is overly ambitious of course, and probably bound to fail, but so far it was a quite fruitful experience that at least gave birth to this book.

published in German as afterword to Ines Birkhan's novel Angel Meat. Verwerfungen, Neofelis Verlag, Berlin, April 2012.