The Parents’ Bedroom Show

Elisabeth von Samsonow’s performance „The Parents‘ Bedroom Show“ in Maximiliansstrasse Munich refers to the codes of intimacy glued to the bedroom furniture, and furthermore adresses the Freudian fantasy of a „primal scene“ ever sought after that would have taken place exactly on that site. The parents‘ bedroom appears as a site of crossing histories/ biographies, as the individual memories as well as the political and historical are present to the same degree in the parents‘ bedsheets. In theirs beds, the singularity of their desires is tinted with the political violence of their time. This is the point where the crucial aspect of time occurs that organizes the interface of performance and photography as forms of investigation under the auspice of „infantile“ (preoedipal) curiosity as the origin of the eros/ the will for knowledge. The performance „The Parents‘ Bedroom Show“ draws on the fact that „infantile“ curiosity might not only address the parents‘ intercourse, but their intertwinedness with the political, the „extimate“, of their time. As performance is a time based event cutting the edge of time and projecting it into a non-ritual space of density and meaningfulness, photography produces singularities of an absolute past becoming perennial. Juergen Teller in this project is not a photographer archiving the performance but partner in crime employing chronomanipulations as a means to invert time or the life-death-vector. As there is a constitutive link between performance and modes of archiving like photography and video, the show makes explicit how this link has to do with manipulations/ re-creations/ artistic resettings of time and the present that end(s) up in shaping history and and transformations of existing narratives.