Vor Gericht
Performative Installation
600 x 300 cm
UQBAR, Berlin
12.06.2020
"This is how space begins, only with words, with signs put on paper."*
The work takes as its starting point §169 of the German Court Constitution Act (GVG), which prohibits filming and photography inside courtrooms. As a result, the legal sphere relies on alternative modes of notation—such as courtroom drawings, stenography, and audio transcripts—to record what cannot be visually represented. The installation explores how these non-visual systems of documentation can be translated into spatial and corporeal forms.
The research focuses on the Neue Maxburg in Munich, a postwar building by Sep Ruf and Theo Pabst that embodies transparency and openness—standing in stark contrast to the nearby historic Palace of Justice. Architecture here becomes a metaphor for the embodiment of an abstract system: law as a spatial, social, and symbolic structure.
Seven conceptual terms—hierarchy, tension, process, stagnation, penetration, conformity, transparency—form the basis of the work. Dancer Amie Jammeh translates these notions into movement, tracing the floor plan of the courthouse through choreography. The body becomes a living carrier of notation, interwoven with the linguistic, spatial, and institutional codes of justice.
The installation offers an entry point into reflecting on the judicial system and its invisible architectures of power. It asks how the unseen—legal order, institutional control, social regulation—can be rendered tangible through movement, space, and material translation, turning the act of representation itself into a site of critical inquiry.
*Georges Perec, Träume von Räumen
DANCE
Amie Jammeh
MOVEMENT ANALYSES
Cary Rick (Institute for Movement Analyses)
Amie Jammeh (dancer)
Anna Konjetzky (choreographer)
STENOGRAFY
Peter Erhardt (Stenographers' Association Ettlingen)
DRAWINGS
Sara Chaparro
SPEAKER
Reiner Frey (President of the Regional Court of Tübingen)
VIDEO + EDITING
Magdalena Stateva
GRAPHICS
Julia Emslander
