The Life and Work of St. Renate, Part I: DER QUARKEIMER

VOLKSTATA
is a group of artists founded in 2020 consisting of Ulrike + Günther-Jürgen Klein and Achim Krämer + Robert Farrar. Coming from different fields of art - painting, film direction, performance, literature - we have joined forces to realise our common vision of a folk theatre as a cross-disciplinary and genre-bending collage of styles.

At Wiepersdorf we are presenting our latest production, the superhero oratorio "Renate and the Ant People" - the first version of book 2 from the cycle Life and Work of Saint Renate as a total work of art consisting of installation and oratorio for four performers. We understand this work as a snapshot of a continuously developing work - a work in progress.

Following the performance in Wiepersdorf Castle, we will hold our third VOLKSTATA festival from 18 May to 18 June in the Berlin project space Zwitschermaschine under the title TIPI TIPI TIPSO APOKALYPSO - with live performances by over 20 artists. All rooms of the gallery
will be lined with wall-filling large-scale drawings and installations - as stage and exhibition space in equal measure.

The basic idea of VOLKSTATA (which comes from Volkstheater and is reminiscent of Dada) is Volkstheater as art. And for us that means celebrating a festival together with the audience and the participating artists.

Robert Farrar, author and musician, and Achim Krämer, performance artist, have been producing theatrical-musical events since 2012 (e.g. Merlin's Berlin), and since 2018 they have been writing and producing their own plays as Farrar Krämer Komedi in the tradition of anarchic-queer theatre.
Ulrike+Günther-Jürgen Klein have been working as an artistic couple since 2014. For their four-part epic "The Vampyr Lady...didn't always look like shit", they developed a new installative narrative format for art spaces. Between 2017 and 2020, they showed the Vampyrlady as a continuation series in various Berlin art spaces and galleries.