Daniel Kötter
Bühne
(Frame-Analysis, Varna, november 28 2011)
HD, 2012, 17’59”
Daniel Kötter’s most recent film Bühne examines a moment of fundamental change in the understanding of public space in post-communist Bulgaria.
The Palace for Sports and Culture in the Bulgarian Black Sea coastal town Varna was built as a prestige project of modernist architecture for the communist understanding of theatre and sport. While no changes were made to the interior design since its opening 1968, every week the main hall changes its architectural and social function.
The film stages the “theatre” itself, not as yet another art form (with its specific institutional conditions, market rules and local aesthetic and historic limitations), but as a name for the allegoric space of encounter.
In 1976 the Palace for Sports and Culture was copied as National Theatre of Nigeria in Lagos, Nigeria, portrayed in the film state-theatre #1 LAGOS by Kötter/Fischbeck.