Messy History Lessons

"Messy History Lessons" is a three-part work consisting of an analogue report, a digital sketch for the internet and a performative realisation on the theatre stage. Caroline Kapp is completing her directing studies at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich with this project. Together with her team, she is investigating voids in the memory work of female historiography. They ask themselves how bodies in theatre can become carriers of memories and create an archaeology of the invisible. Five women decide to cut the linear threads of historiography and search for the traces of a possible but forgotten future.

The term Messy History goes back to the designer Martha Scotford. Her Messy view seeks to uncover, study and include the diversity of alternative approaches and activities. A Messy History is not one conventional history, but many histories that are scattered, that are not listed in monumental catalogues, that we cannot find in the library because they have never been recorded.