Unacknowledged Loss
Kunst und Rituale
by HAU Hebbel am Ufer
Theater der Zeit, 2018
ISBN 3957491630
The opening page of a chapter on Claudia Hill in Unacknowledged Loss, a book of artist interviews built around ritual and grief. Beyond the chapter title naming her, the page carries no text, just the portrait, introducing the interview that runs across the following pages.
A German-language interview with Claudia Hill in Unacknowledged Loss. Asked what drew her to the project, she says she has not had burnout herself but knows the feeling of total exhaustion well, and that ritual interested her because it questions capitalist, functional structures. She also describes her life and work as unfolding in a constant, spiral-like transition, each stage growing out of the last.
The interview continues in German, with Claudia Hill tracing the family-rooted story behind her ritual: her parents, grandparents, and brother, and a conflict she describes as the ground being pulled out from under her, an abrupt loss of trust rather than a gradual transition. She dedicates the ritual to people who feel they cannot live the life they want, and recalls church visits at Christmas and gift exchanges with neighbors as the closest thing to ritual in her non-religious upbringing.
The interview continues, with Claudia Hill explaining why she values her dreams and writes them down each morning, and describing a household ritual: her family eating dinner together every evening without phones. She also recalls missing a sense of ritual and community as a young mother, and how moving to Berlin answered that need.
The interview continues, with Claudia Hill recalling the experience of lying in a coffin with the lid closed during an intensive first week of work on this project, an act she says left her unexpectedly calm rather than claustrophobic. She then begins describing her own ritual, titled Softcore: a first evening built from constraining hard materials, a second from soft clothing standing in for family members, worn in sequence and then cut away.
The interview closes with Claudia Hill describing the second half of her ritual: climbing onto a neighboring rooftop to sing a single melody for over thirty minutes with a rose held in her mouth, a segment she calls 'Learning how to speak from love.' She says the ritual only succeeds if it moves past form into real emotion, something she says she can judge only weeks or months later.
The German-language title page for the documentation of Claudia Hill's ritual Softcore in Unacknowledged Loss. It dedicates the piece to anyone not living the life they would want, and credits its two days: ropes by Dasniya Sommer for the 'hard' first day, ropes by Jeanne Sardou for the 'soft' second, with sound built around the Stooges' 'We Will Fall,' recorded the year Hill was born.
A color photograph documenting the second part of Claudia Hill's ritual Softcore, described earlier in the book's interview: Hill sitting cross-legged on a rooftop ledge at dusk, a rose in her mouth, singing above a courtyard of onlookers gathered below.
A spread from the photobook documenting the performance Unacknowledged Loss, with no caption text on the page itself. Two production photographs are stacked: a lone performer caught mid-gesture on the darkened main stage above, and the ensemble below in a brick-walled studio, hoisting raw wooden pole frames past a scatter of chairs, apparently during a scene change.
The following spread in the same photobook, again without caption text. The top photograph is a close-up of the wooden frame being tied off with rope by two performers; below, a wider view of the brick set's exterior shows the earlier solo performer now reduced to a small figure, glimpsed seated inside one of the set's window frames.
