Keep coming back! The Glossary will be growing with the Festival!

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“Dungeon” or “The Dungeon Department”

Dungeons were once dark, underground chambers in old punishment systems, where, in the early modern era, the Enlightenment tortured its opponents—heretics, witches, and deviant bodies. Today, the term, often linked to a historically inaccurate medieval period, refers to the imaginary caves and settings of fantasy cultures and role-playing games. More importantly, it describes the semi-hidden spaces of BDSM culture, where intimate fantasies and the consensual exploration of pleasure and pain take place.

The practices, aesthetics, and ethics of the dungeon are intriguing because, unlike the visible practices of theater or academia, they are excluded from public view. These activities do not occur before an audience, and those who enter are not just observers or thinkers. To step into a dungeon is to leave the public sphere and join a close-knit community. A safeword is sometimes necessary, not as a sign of inherent danger, but as a reminder that trust is crucial for play to happen.

darkness, invisibility, opacity, magic, the body, queerness, erotics, extasis, intimicy, the unseparability of pain and pleasure, bodyhorror, body fantasies.

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“The Field” or “The Field Department”

The Latin word “Campus” originally referred to the areas of universities where students moved between buildings through parks, carrying their books and also residing there. However, it soon came to denote neoliberal and sometimes private universities, which, on their campuses, established their own rules and could keep others out. Eventually, it came to describe corporate campus complexes that offer amenities to their employees, who must work there, creating a self-contained environment reminiscent of New England university towns.

This is quite different from the original meaning: in Latin, “Campus” simply referred to a field or an open space previously used for agriculture, not enclosed by walls but situated outside the city walls. These areas were used for storage, games, sports, military exercises, vegetable cultivation, and festivals. Unlike in the city, where foreign cults’ temples were prohibited, such temples could be built in these open spaces.

Using the word “Field” instead of “Campus” carries a promise that the exclusionary walls of the university may become porous or crumble, allowing people to walk over the remnants of the university—where perhaps new plants are growing—without necessarily knowing that it was once a university. It suggests that something new can emerge from these remnants, something we may not yet understand.

Coproduction, permeability, migration, exchange, crowds, festivals, inclusion, gardening, cohabitation, camping, starting anew, worlding, fictioning, weather, ecologies.

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Gardeners:

Ida Daniel, Tilman Aumüller, and Zuzana Žabková are friends and artists who, about a year ago, realized that collaborating on the next edition of the Implantieren festival made sense. Filled with visions, frustrations, dreams, disappointments, and hopes, they have developed ideas and poetic desires that shaped the current festival’s concept, which focuses on art as a means of learning, experimenting, and hacking together to challenge exhausting and redundant ideological hierarchies and systems.

In the beginning of this process, while meeting, discussing, and playing a game together with Ruth Schmidt, Philipp Scholtysik, and Narges Behrouzian, they developed the idea of different departments that would serve as the main infrastructure of the festival, conceptualized as an imaginary university. Diving deeper into the current state of art-making and its struggles to find a space for commonality in the art scene in Frankfurt and beyond, they envisioned it as a university in ruins—a university that learns from brokenness and allows us to be broken and ruined.

With the production help of Felix Heimbach in the beginning, they initiated the process of growing the economies and ethics of this festival until Felix decided to become a real gardener. At that moment, Mariya Barashka and Nathaniel Knopp joined the team and helped keep the festival alive despite the budget being more broke than expected due to the funding cuts most artists and institutions are experiencing at this time.

This team is today glad to host and invite artists, neighbors, lifelong students, enthusiasts, and skeptics to join this three-month-long journey and turn the traditional romantic picture of melancholic ruins into a more raw and sensitive place with the agency to learn from collective melancholia, pleasures, and rage.

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Persian Dramaturgy:

The Gatherings of Implantieren ‘24 follow the “Persian dramaturgy”

More than 30 years ago in freshly Post-Socialist Bulgaria, advised by her granddad, Ida read Gore Vidal’s epic historical fiction novel Creation, in which a fictional Persian diplomat from the 6th-5th century BCE, travels the world comparing different political and religious beliefs. Along the way, he meets renowned philosophers like Zoroaster, Socrates, and the Buddha. Despite his strong Persian identity, Cyrus is half-Greek through his mother. It is in that book that Ida read about a Persian procedure that stayed with her till today and shared in a conversation with Nargess, Zuzana and Tilman: The state wisemen of Ancient Persia had the following way to find the right decision in three days. They would discuss one day and write down their first decision. On the second day they would drink a lot of ”soma” and continue discussing until they reach their second decision on the same problem. Then they would go to sleep, wake up on the third day with a hangover, get together and reach their final decision on the matter.
It turned out that this was not known to Nargess and it might very well be a fictional procedure imagined by the author, but still we found that story in support of our desire to create gatherings in which artists and audience experience intensified times together.

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The Ruined University: Vision

When the university moves away and with it its cohesive power vanishes, it leaves behind a jumble of concrete, student infrastructures, and abandoned ideas. It is a fertile yet perilous terrain. The university has shaped Euro-Western societies for centuries: through exclusion, sophisticated critique, a patriarchal concept of knowledge, alternative student life, and notions of individualized learning. What should we do with these ruins in the face of current disasters? What can we save instead of tearing everything down completely? And what do we need to learn anew in order to bring about change?

Imagine the walls of the university becoming porous, former outsiders beginning to infiltrate the campus. Deep below, the doors of the dungeons where the Enlightenment kept its enemies start to rot. Ghosts, heretics, plants, and other beings begin to mingle and start to appreciate the brokenness of this place. What can grow from these ruins that would compost the Euro-Western university into a new diversity?

(From the Open Call of the Festival)