Johnny Pavlatos
Olala Weimar

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In a site-specific project, Johnny Pavlatos explores the queer Schöneberg of the Weimar Republic. Around Nollendorfplatz and in Motzstraße, a long gay, lesbian and queer history can be discovered through the cafés, bars, nightclubs as well as the venues of artistic performances. The term „Regenbogenkiez“ (rainbow neighbourhood) is still firmly established today. There were many well-known and lesser-known meeting places in the 20s. In the Nationalhof at Bülowstaße 37, for example, balls for cross-dressers were celebrated during the Weimar Republic. Various clubs met here, such as the ladies‘ club „Violette“, and regular events were held for a queer audience. The „Dorian Gray“ at Bülowstraße 57 was an English-speaking meeting place for elegant women and the „Hollandais“ at Bülowstraße 69 was a queer dance café under the U-Bahn arches. The travesty shows at „Eldorado“ in Motzstraße were known far beyond Berlin and were described by numerous writers. The abrupt and violent end of this queer diversity after the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933 is representative of the end of a cultural scene that had created spaces and opportunities for the self-expression of minorities.

Pavlatos‘ approach was to locate historically important places of queer people and to enable new access to these places. Pavlatos collected nearly 60 locations, including their owners and types of events. In a second step, Pavlatos collected impressions of the historical places as well as information in texts and images, which were then translated into a composition. Pavlatos explores the gender identities and social utopias lived in these places by combining historical material with sounds. With this self-developed method, Pavlatos transferred feelings of work and love, suffering and joy, for example, into sounds. As well as the way bodies moved in these places, how colours and fabrics determined the spaces. Pavlatos calls the process of arranging emotions and forms to create a score a post-phenomenological method. Real and imagined experiences become sounds to recreate and experience moods, feelings, bodies, movements and gender diversity. Musically, Pavlatos experimented with pitch, speeds and a choir for this purpose. For example, the café „Dorian Gray“ can be experienced acoustically with a composition based on the jazz of the 1920s.

Pavlatos also created a poster for each location. The visual language of the posters incorporates both pictorial elements from historical posters and historical logos as well as new forms and colour schemes, with the help of which the moods and atmospheres of the places are reproduced. Pavlatos sees the resulting visual and acoustic compositions as a way of making spatial and temporal potentials from Berlin in the 1920s accessible. The aim is not to revise history or to create a meta-history that fades out the Nazi era, but to be able to grasp the present and thus make a different future imaginable. The lesbian, gay and queer utopias of the past should become utopias for the future.

Text: Dr. Silke Förschler

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Johnny Pavlatos

Johnny Pavlatos is a sound artist, radio artist, socially engaged public artist & performer. Johnny’s practice takes the form of radio transmissions, public performances, installations, social sculptures, radio dramas, sonic collages, graphic scores, and public space interventions. Johnny’s practice focuses on explorations into the ways in which social & economic fragmentation affects gender performativity and how queer theoretical ideas may disrupt this production.

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