Versuch über die nachhaltige Ordnung merkwürdiger Dinge
Immersive theatre parcours through the hidden backstage world of Stadttheater Gießen — where props, costumes, and furniture gain AI-generated voices from the people who made them.
Deep within the Stadttheater Gießen lies the Fundus — an archive of objects that have witnessed kings, lovers, and catastrophes on stage. In Versuch über die nachhaltige Ordnung merkwürdiger Dinge (A Trial for the Sustainable Ordering of Curious Things), ArtesMobiles transforms this usually closed space into an immersive theatre parcours, opening it to audiences in groups of up to 14.
The central conceit is that each object in the Fundus has been given a voice: a voice clone and LLM trained on interviews with the craftspeople of every workshop — carpentry, metalwork, the paint studio, costume, props, masks, and stage technology. Nothing is pre-recorded. What the audience hears is generated live, in the moment of encounter. The project makes a precise argument: only through digitisation does an object gain contour and distinctness; as long as it is merely one of thousands in the storeroom, it is lost in the noise.
The narrative is driven by Emma Casali, a new directorial assistant desperately searching the Fundus for the right objects for an upcoming production. The objects refuse to cooperate. They have opinions, alliances, and wills of their own — and they recruit the audience as accomplices.
Alongside the performance, a searchable database of the Fundus is being built for the first time, so that objects can be located rather than re-purchased. The work connects to ArtesMobiles’s previous project Fifty Degrees of Now and is part of the Fonds Zero programme of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, which supports radical sustainability in theatre practice.
Dancers from the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen perform alongside ensemble actors of the Stadttheater throughout the event.
Media
Collaborators
- Creative Coder — Meredith Thomas
- Direction & Text — Nina Stemberger
- Audiovisual Direction & Creative Coding — Birk Schmithüsen
- Stage Design — Anna Cingi
- Web Design — Eleanor Vincent
- Klimabeauftragter — Patrick Schimanski
- Mitarbeiter des Klimabeauftragten — Jakob Deuter
- Performance — Der Geisterjäger — Levent Kelleli
Institutions
Stadttheater Gießen, ArtesMobiles, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Kulturstiftung des Bundes