menu

Engel & Sommer

Country : Germany

(UN)COMMON SPACES Emerging artist

We are performance artist Jascha Sommer and set designer Jakob Engel.

After our first collaborative work in public space No Future Club (2021) we are in the process of co-founding a new company with others for outdoor performance formats that address issues of climate justice, sustainability, and a new contemporary practice: How do we deal with the fact that the world as we knew it is coming to an end? How do we learn to say goodbye to the way we live, feed, move and interact with each other? How do we learn to die?


At the Hot House in Pristina in April 2023 we presented our emerging project On Endings (working title). In this work we are interested in how our view of the future changes in a time where we face dramatic climate change and how this affects our actions in the present. It is an immersive audio installation and performance in which the audience will be seated in a tent architecture around a fire and undertakes a shared multi-sensory journey. The work is based on the concept of a mourning ritual: We create an atmosphere of contemplation that targets a radical change of mindset and our actions as a vulnerable species. We ask: Who are we? And how do we survive this together? The work will premiere in May 2024. 

 

Jascha Sommer works as a performance and multimedia artist. With his artistic performances, installations and walks, Jascha Sommer creates intensive encounters and spatiotemporal interruptions – in art spaces as well as in public spaces, hotels or race courses. He studied theatre- & literature studies in Bochum and Paris and media arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with Mischa Kuball, Julia Scher, Phil Collins and others.


Jakob Engel is set designer and director. He creates immersive atmospheres on theatre stages, public spaces and the digital realm. Last year he studied to reflect on the need and possibility of a (post)anthropocentric art institution. He studied fine arts at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts with Jeanne Faust and Angela Schanelec and in postgraduate diploma 2 at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He was a scholarship holder of the BMBF and the Freundeskreis der HfbK and is winner of the Lichter-Art Award.