SAFE. FROM LIVE CONCERT TO SOUND JOURNEY

SAFE premiered in Kaaistudios in 2018, long before the corona-crisis. Today, Julie Pfleiderer’s performance feels strangely consistent with our lives.

The current pandemic is causing waves of bacillophobia and fear of infection in our society. In Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995), a woman called Carole White suffers from increasingly intense allergic reactions that ultimately make her life almost unlivable. It is unclear whether she is a victim or an attention-seeking manipulator. The performance SAFE is searching for the causes and symptoms of our times: depression, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, borderline syndrome, burnout, 21-century diseases. Is it possible that our daily life inside the digital panoptikum (Byung-Chul Han) is marked by a craze for communication and consuming, self-optimizing, self-display, transparency that is leading into an abyss and possibly into a global mental collapse? How do we become hostages of our environment, like Carol Whites of today, test rabbits of sophisticated hidden power techniques?

As both a concert and a performance, and inspired by the film, SAFE sketches an image of hypersensitivity. The contemporary Western world wants to find explanations for everything, and so does the human mind. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, says writer Joan Didion.

What is your safe place?
Is it your home? A specific room perhaps?
Maybe a place where you know you’re not alone?
Somewhere you can look people in the eye?
Is it a place of predictability? Where you know what to expect?
Or is it a quiet place? Within?
A place of forgiveness?
Is safety a storm for you? Somewhere you get picked apart, are being challenged?
Or is it a memory perhaps?
What is your safe place?

SAFE is an immersive journey into the human mind, constructed as a game between environmental influences and our own fragmented thoughts.
What starts as a concert gradually evolves into a sophisticated live audio play – a cognitive experience captivated through headphones and binaural listening.