50 Aktenkilometer

Rimini Protokoll takes Stasi files out of the archives and into the city’s present day: In Berlin-Mitte around a hundred people answer questions, tell their memories or reconstruct on tape acts of surveillance at the scene of the crime. Looking at the familiar everyday of the present while listening to sound bites from the past produces a strange optical
illusion for the user.

Through the use of smartphones, the audience are pedestrians who become »insiders« encountering over 80 »acoustic bubbles« in terms of observation reports, character profiles, operational plans, verbatims from memory and original sounds from the archives.. This dive into the time of the cold war of distrust is tracked and thrown into present day Berlin with the bureaucratic process of filing applications, filling out forms and reading what people in their immediate environment recorded about their lives. What do observations sound like to those who were observed, at the location where they were made, and how quickly can one go from being a bystander to an active agent? Experienced either alone or in groups, the aim of this walkable radio play is to deal with the role of the surveillance system – searching for the audio-gateways into the city under the city.

A Deutschlandradio Kultur and Rimini Apparat production in co-production with HAU - Hebbel am Ufer Berlin.

Funded by the Governing Mayor Berlin – Senate Department for Culture and Europe–Department of Culture and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

With advisory support by the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic and the Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft e.V.