LOSE COMBO Jörg Laue Idea/Concept

GREEN LINE is the third part of the project series performaps, which explores the possibilities of a time-based artistic cartography in hybrid forms of performance, concert and installation.

Based on the title-giving UN-controlled strip of land that divides the Mediterranean country of Cyprus into the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus in the south of the island and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, GREEN LINE addresses questions of inaccessibility and the arbitrariness of cartographic demarcations.

In an illustrated lecture, the two performers reconstruct the historical circumstances of a provisional crayon line on a city map, after which the buffer zone was not only named, but which actually became the almost uninhabited stretch of land that divides Cyprus. They fathom the multilingual nested etymology of the mines between mine, weapon and writing instrument, which touches on ancient Roman pitfalls, medieval diaries, mineral pigments and picturesque miniatures, but also the accidental invention of the first electronic musical instrument – the theremin. And with the help of wandering words, they return to the cultural epoch of the Bronze Age via the island’s copper mines.

Meanwhile, the duo Tocar realises Jörg Laue’s 72-minute sound-cartographic composition green line layers in interplay with a noisy-moving 6-channel tape, which was created from a series of archaeological, geological and political maps on the foil of the latest map of Cyprus by the United Nations peacekeeping forces in Cyprus.

Fire lines, volcanic rings, endemic plants, mountain formations, current and ancient mines and temples become graphic material for the musicians‘ multi-layered sound explorations along the Green Line – intersected only by two canonical compositions for violin and piano by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Crumb, in which connecting dualities are practised in an exemplary compositional manner.