Lose Combo: pacific aspects

With "pacific aspects" Lose Combo continues the project series "performaps" started in 2017, which explores and unfolds the possibilities of a time-based and performative cartography in hybrid forms of music theater, performance, concert and installation.
LOse Combo is convinced that the productive potentials of cartography for an artistic description and critique of social and political processes in our world can come to the fore in a special way, especially in time-based works. With reference to concrete questions, procedures and objects of cartography, it is therefore our concern in the project series to conceive performative processes as a radical practice of mapping - and thus to design their results as ephemeral, living maps.

The focus of German trading companies since the mid-nineteenth century, the Marshall Islands were part of German South Sea colonies from 1885 to 1914. Coconut plantations were established and exploited on a large scale in the Imperial Overseas Territories. In the course of this, „Western“ nautical charts and „modern“ ships gradually displaced traditional Micronesian navigation for reasons of efficiency, while ethnology began to take an interest in the artifacts - and so the colonizers looted them for the scientific institutes "back home."
After World War I, the remote Rongelap Atoll was the last of the Marshall Islands where navigators were still trained, secret knowledge passed on - until American atomic bomb tests on neighboring Bikini Atoll between 1948 to 1956 made this impossible forever. The last Micronesian navigator died in 2003.

From here, the performance unfolds broad thematic arcs to a range of other Pacific aspects, from rising sea levels to freshwater imports, from the vast Pacific plastic waste island full of ghost gear to issues of provenance research, from the first circumnavigation of the globe to the sinking of the "Rainbow Warrior" …

The musical center of the project is a (carto)graphic composition for flexible instrumentation, which Jörg Laue developed last year on the basis of Micronesian stick charts as part of a NEUSTART KULTUR research grant from Musikfonds.