Being sad is not a hobby

Last year, Henning Fehr and Philipp Rühr became acquainted with the professor for architectural history and theory Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis in Jamaica. Together, they visited Island Village, a shopping centre with entertainment facilities in the city of Ocho Rios on Jamaica's north coast. It mainly plays host to cruise ship tourists and is housed in buildings that display an idiosyncratic interpretation of traditional Jamaican architecture. Six months later, they all travelled to the Düppel Museum Village in Berlin and the Gross Raaden Archaeological Open Air Museum near Rostock. Both sites present replicas of Slavic villages of the 9th and 10th centuries. These three places make up the basis of Henning Fehr's and Philipp Rühr's project for the Künstlerhaus Bremen, which introduces their new video Empty Village as part of an installation. The German and Jamaican villages filmed by the artists consist of approximate reconstructions of historical structures. Their appearance builds on the intention of enabling an authentic experience. Yet they end up confronting tourism with architectural history, self-marketing with identity politics. Over the course of filmed conversations with Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, the head of the Düppel Museum Village discusses the ways in which, since its founding, the site has incorporated diverse time eras into one architectural ensemble that serves various functions. He evokes actions that occasionally take place there, for example re-enactments of historical occurrences, or regular "living history" performances--an active and educative tool used to convey a sense of the everyday life of the past. The film stages the coexistence of surreal as well as didactic or pragmatic dimensions and recalls the interaction of traces, uncertainties, and memory in historiography. --Museum website.