Schlafwandeln: Pause – Ende – Reset
Mareike WenzelThursday 08.09.2022
From the age of 18
Language: German
Prior knowledge necessary ×
Translation into English ×
Barrier-free WC ×
Childcare ×
Wheelchair accessible participation ✓
Translation into sign language ×
It starts suddenly, in the middle of the night. You wake up, your heart is racing, everything around you seems to be screaming at you and spinning. You are awake, that will be your new state. While everything around you sleeps, you seem to enter another world. Days and nights are alike in their somnambulistic state. We walk the same streets, seemingly participating in public life, yet we have entered another world.
At least 50% of all people who experience perimenopause suffer from insomnia and other severe symptoms as they enter it. We continue to drag ourselves to work, do care work, try to keep our heads above water in the capitalist world of work and life. While we feel like we are swimming underwater in a bubble that separates us from everything else, we continue to function on the surface.
Last September, Mareike woke up at 2am while rehearsing for a play in Hamburg and sleep never returned. It was replaced with sleepless nights, days like being in a trance, fear of losing control, balancing on the tightrope and trying to hold everything together while the ground slowly disappears under her feet.
In this interactive audio walk at night, together with fellow walkers, the performance artist Mareike Wenzel explores and goes through her own sleepless nights and those of other women during the perimenopause. We enter the somnambulistic in-between world together, exploring the city from this state. In interviews with various people, Mareike tries to find her own access to this space. What does perimenopause do to us? How do we perceive ourselves and our environment? How are we perceived? Where is this space and how do we bring it into the city and make it visible? We will explore this space in depth and step out of the twilight into the city.