The Honey Project performance installation 2018

Baustellenfest, Haus am Waldsee, Sculpture Park, Berlin 25.8.2018

"Honey Project“ deals with language, culture and religion.

The two artists Nezaket Ekici (from Turkey and Germany) and Shahar Marcus (Israel) want to integrate the cultures and languages of the world into their project. The aim is not to create a "colour sound" of many cultures. The work should go one step further: The aim is to internalize the cultures and languages of the world, to think ahead to the peace that people attain when they understand each other.

In concrete terms, people from 13 cultures and language areas will be involved in the performance. From a scientific point of view, 10 major languages and cultural areas dominate the world: Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese and Panjabi/Lahnda, but also the languages of the two artists: German, Turkish and Hebrew. Each of the actors must be able to speak or write one of the 13 languages. Ekici and Marcus, together with the performers, randomly select terms from 13 dictionaries in different languages. In the performance, each actor will use his own handwriting as an expression of his culture to write 13 words with honey on a glass pane. These are then spoken out loud by the actors and then written on the glass pane in their own language with their fingers dipped in honey. Then the performers change their position and lick the concept of another language from a glass pane. This gesture refers to the intended mixing of the world's largest language and cultural areas, which have been separated up to now: The performance ends when all participants have changed their position 13 times and the perfect mixture has been achieved. The process of licking and eating, on the one hand existential and on the other sensual, becomes a symbol of internalization. The actors not only absorb the culture of the others until all the actors representing the whole world have absorbed all the cultures representing the whole world.

Honey scripts, which are physically absorbed, are handed down in Moroccan Jewish culture, whose ritual is communicated through the current song "at our village Tudra in the Atlas mountains" by Yehoshua Sobbol. The song describes how in Morocco, after 5-year-old children who have just started to read the Bible, enter the synagogue dressed in the finest clothes and write the learned letters with honey on a blackboard, after which they lick them off. In this way, the letters that stand for the Bible are supposed to pass directly into the body. On the tongue, the Bible appears sweet as honey. And in the Song of Solomon, chapter 4, paragraph 11, the Bible is really described as "milk and honey".

In the performance "Honey Language Project" linguistic, cultural and religious differences of the foreigner are symbolically appropriated and balanced in this way. In which all participants incorporate the words of others, cultures and languages are internalized in order to think ahead to the peace that people attain when they understand each other.

Honey, 13 glass plates, 13 bowls, 13 pedestals, 13 wine glasses, 13 dictionaries, 13 music stands

4 hours

Performers: Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus; Jérémie Pujau, Ok-Hee Jeong, Seow Yi Qing, Gabriela Madeira, Haruka Tomatsu, Michael Stephenson, Meve Avdic, Ahmed Said, Silvia Camagni, Mica Figueiredo, Svetlana Lenichko

Production: Shay. T Govhary Assistants: Natalie Wieland, Natalia Blanco Camera : Julian David Bolivar Editing: Branka Pavlovic Photo: Andreas Dammertz

Curator: Dr Katja Blomberg

Thanks to the Berlin Senate and Haus am Waldsee Berlin and the whole team