Works 2021 - 2026
Tom Plischke, B.D.C. and Friends
2001, 10-day 24-hour festival
Premiere: Beursschouwburg, Brussels
A durational festival project that introduced many of the ideas that would shape the following decade of deufert&plischke’s work: rethinking curation and the role of the artist-curator, reinventing the institution, expanding the use of space and time, and reconsidering the relation between performers and audience. Artists and visitors were invited not only to attend performances and workshops, but also to inhabit the venue between events and even overnight.
(nao) se pode falar
2001, performance project
Premiere: Andaraí / Goethe-Institut, Rio de Janeiro
A three-month performance project developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
How to knit your own political body
2001, series of live art interventions / participatory choreography
Premiere: ZKM, Karlsruhe
A performance series critically engaging questions of visibility, action, surface and representation in different performative contexts. The first chapter addressed transsexuality and transgender experience.
Frankfurter Küche
2001, artist label / long-term collaborative platform
Premiere: various locations
Founded with Pirkko Husemann, Frankfurter Küche positioned itself in an expanded field of theatre through a consciously non-binary understanding of the inseparability of work and life. It generated performances, publications, audio and video works, artistic actions and symposia.
As you like it
2002, durational choreography
Premiere: Tanzquartier, Vienna
Calculated repetitions of text, music, video and movement form the core of a work that resists interpretation despite initially appearing to explain itself. A sudden shift close to the end overturns the theatrical arrangement and challenges theatre as a site of representation.
I like Erika and Erika likes me
2002, 96-hour non-stop live action
Premiere: 1822-Forum, Frankfurt/Main
A 96-hour reflection on Joseph Beuys’ I like America and America likes me (1974). Seen through a shop window, the artists performed everyday actions—cooking, sleeping, working, having sex—turning spectatorship itself into a critical apparatus.
P.I.P. (picture = performance = picture)
2002, durational installation
Premiere: Mousonturm, Frankfurt/Main
Two performers act back-to-back at separate tables. Only through mirrored video projection do they appear together within a single image. A spatial arrangement about perception, difference and projection in which visitors themselves become part of the image.
b-visible
2002, 72-hour queer symposium
Premiere: Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Ghent
A curated non-stop queerathon of performances, lectures, interventions, installations and workshops on gender politics in theory and practice. The theatre was activated everywhere except on stage, while the empty stage itself became a resting place.
InExHaustible
2003, choreography
Premiere: Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Ghent
Starting from Antonin Artaud’s idea of theatre as both exhausted and inexhaustible, the work explores how movement generates meaning through repetition, intensity and fragile embodiment.
Directories: #1 Europe Endless
2003, audio-video performance
Premiere: Beursschouwburg, Brussels
A montage of memory, childhood, family, identity, gender trouble, grief and becoming. Personal history and artistic biography are woven into an associative landscape that would later expand into a larger series.
As if (it was beautiful)
2004, choreography and slide show
Premiere: ImPulsTanz Festival, Vienna
A schizophrenic theatrical machinery of voices, faces, fingers and bodies. Based on the solo fleur (anemone), the work marks an important point in the emergence of deufert&plischke as an artistic double.
Sofia SP Science is Fiction
2004, theatre piece
Premiere: Natfiz Theater, Sofia
Set in the year 2468 aboard the Sofia/SP space station, the work imagines a research centre for cultural and scientific memory after interplanetary catastrophe.
eporue (l’anti-toi)
2004, single-channel video, 14'23''
Directories: #2 Songs of Love and War
2005, audio-video performance
Premiere: Schaubühne Lindenfels, Leipzig
The second part of the Directories series opens personal memory toward broader reflections on mourning, narration and artistic method. Here, deufert&plischke begin to define themselves as an “artist twin.”
Portrait of a Stone
2005, single-channel video, 11'44''
Directory: tattoo
2006, choreography
Premiere: deSingel, Antwerp
Starting from childhood memories, the work investigates the relation between memory as anatomy and movement as alter ego. Movement is generated, transmitted and transformed exclusively through writing rather than observation—an important step toward the later practice of reformulation.
Veronika Blumenstein – Moving Exiles
2006, curated festival project
Premiere: Schwankhalle, Bremen
A festival of reconstructions—performances, lectures, workshops and a scholarly salon—centred on the fictional Polish choreographer Veronika Blumenstein.
M.I.N.E
2006, single-channel video, 12'14''
Premiere: Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main, in the framework of Dictionary of War
Based on Ghérasim Luca’s text The Inventor of Love, the film explores the fragmented self and the impossibility of containing the “I.”
Reportable Portraits / Notice Me!
2007, choreography and reenactment
Premiere: steirischer herbst, Graz
A choreographic quintet based on portraiture and movement. Instead of emphasizing the presence of bodies on stage, the work traces resonances, overlaps and kinships between them through language, space and time.
Zuhause
2007, single-channel video, 12'52''
Premiere: University of Hamburg, in the lecture series Democratic Bodies
A video work developed in an academic context around questions of body and democracy.
KonSequenzen: Rhythm is it!
2008, performance / game
Premiere: Tanzquartier, Vienna
The audience receives instructions and stages the evening itself, while deufert&plischke remain present with closed eyes. The work examines the limits between play and seriousness, participation and consequence.
Zuhause / Deutschland Herbst/Winter 1977/78
2008, video work
Premiere: ZKM, Karlsruhe
Created for the exhibition Vertrautes Terrain.
ANARCHIV#1: I am not a Zombie
2009, choreography
Premiere: Kampnagel, Hamburg
The first part of the ANARCHIV trilogy does not resurrect the dead but gives living pasts a future. It moves through the unruly terrain of personal archives, erased tapes, fading memories and marked bodies.
ANARCHIV#2: second hand
2010, choreography and reenactment
Premiere: Kaaitheater, Brussels
An early social and participatory choreographic work. Materials—texts, films, images and movements—are passed into “second hands,” collectively reformulated and performed again, including by the audience itself.
The Emergence Rooms
2010, participatory installation
Premiere: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien / Tanzquartier, Vienna
An almost empty art space becomes activated by visitors who connect thread, text, image and memory. A social, tangled and feminist environment emerges through collective making.
ANARCHIV#3: Songs of Love and War
2011, participatory choreography
Premiere: Kampnagel, Hamburg
Love and war become two magnetic poles within a shared performative field. Drawing on Wagner’s Ring and the medieval Nibelungenlied, the work creates a texture of musical and choreographic action in exchange with the audience.
Das Entropische Institut
2012, collaboratively curated installation
Premiere: Tanzfabrik, Berlin
A collective experiment with an open outcome. Every working day begins and ends with dancing together. Galleries, theatres and museums become temporary institutes shaped by everyone who enters them.
Europe Endless
2013, audio-video performance
Premiere: Goethe-Institut, New York
A reformulation of Directories: #1 Europe Endless and #2 Songs of Love and War ten years later. Personal stories intertwine with the myths of Hermaphroditus and Europa to ask how gender, territory, love and language shape identity.
Niemandszeit
2014, participatory choreography
Premiere: Tanzfabrik, Berlin
A revisiting of earlier works through an exchange of roles with art students, who become mentors in the reactivation and weaving together of movement, text and audience participation.
EinSehen
2015, site-specific intervention / social sculpture
Premiere: Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin
Performers distributed throughout a building invite the audience to write notes, memories or comments directly onto their white clothing. Participation becomes inscription, encounter and gift.
Durcheinander
2015, speculative participatory reenactment
Premiere: Tanz im August, Berlin
Can theatre be living space, parliament and academy? A 24-hour temporary theatre inside the theatre, combining workshops, lectures, concerts, nightly parliamentary sessions and tableaux vivants in a shared environment of coexistence.
Just in Time
2016, workshop, ballroom, archive, film and performance
Premiere: Tanzfabrik, Berlin
Developed with local groups in many cities, the project collects favourite movements and letters to dance. The letters form an archive; the movements become the choreography for a closing ballroom event.
Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe
2017, single-channel HD video, 25'57''
Premiere: K3 – Zentrum für Choreografie, Hamburg
Inspired by Édouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the film translates pictorial composition into moving image and performative presence.
InsTanzen plus
2018, self-generating choreography
Premiere: Festspielhaus, St. Pölten
A project centred on intergenerational encounters, developed with the ensemble Tanz 60 plus. Personal memories and bodily experience shape the first part of the evening before the audience joins in an evolving choreographic action.
Just in Time / Installation
2018, participatory installation
Premiere: Tanzplattform, Essen
A mobile Just in Time space presenting letters to dance and favourite movements from several cities, while also inviting visitors to contribute their own.
Spinnerinnen (las hilanderas)
2019, workshop and participatory installation
Premiere: ifa Galerie, Berlin
A temporary space inspired by Arachne as a figure marked by exclusion, transformation and resistance. Visitors are invited to weave, speak and write together.
Liebestod
2019, choreography
Premiere: Tanz im August, Berlin
A work on love stories as epic material for human relations. Collected stories from Berlin and Dresden unfold on stage through songs, duets and trios, gaining a second life in performance.
Spinnen (Pop up)
2019, workshop and participatory performance
Premiere: Fabrik Potsdam
Developed with primary school children through movement games, stories and clothing memories, culminating in a collective dance performance that invites everyone in the room to join.
What are you afraid of?
2020, durational site-specific performance
Premiere: Museum of Russian Impressionism, Moscow
Performers in white tights and T-shirts sit, stand or lie with closed eyes in the museum. When addressed by visitors, a dialogue begins around fear, and responses can be written onto the performers’ costumes.
Retrospektive Felicitas P. Berg
2020, speculative archive and workshop exhibition
Premiere: Engelskirchen
A collaboratively curated retrospective of the fictional artist Felicitas P. Berg, exploring her imagined oeuvre through collective reconstruction and archival practice.
A Worn World
2020, workshop, club, archive, dressmaking and performance
Premiere: ANTI Festival, Kuopio
Distributed across a sewing studio and a club room, the project gathers clothing memories and garments, sewing, knitting, discussion and dance into a shared social and performative environment.
Twinkle Toes
2020, site-specific screening
Premiere: Schauspielhaus, Wuppertal
During the pandemic lockdown, the facade of the empty theatre became a projection surface for passers-by, combining views into the deserted building with drawn favourite movements from the city.
MA
2020, single-channel HD video, 33'30''
Premiere: Kampnagel, Hamburg
A film in which five garments tell stories of their ghosts. Originally conceived as a stage production, it became a film during the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring the in-between space between skin and fabric.
20 years of turmoil
2021, single-channel HD video, 9'53''
Premiere: spinnereischwelm
I like Erika and Erika likes me
2021, single-channel 4K video, 19'35''
Premiere: Beuys-Performancefestival, Wuppertal
A filmic reworking of the 2002 live work, intertwining a reflection on an early Joseph Beuys drawing with his 1974 performance and new images shot in the forests around Wuppertal.
Familienangelegenheiten
2021, open studio / workshop
Premiere: Alte Samenklenge, Elmstein
Together with their two children, deufert&plischke temporarily inhabit a house in the Palatinate Forest and invite the whole village into an open studio of movement, sewing, writing and dream workshops.
Elmstein
2021, film
Premiere: Alte Samenklenge, Elmstein
A film documenting the residency and the multimedia project Familienangelegenheiten, centred on the mythical forest creature Elwetritsch.
Who is afraid of …?
2022, happening
Premiere: Neuer Kunstverein, Wuppertal
A porous environment in which performers and visitors give space, body and voice to fear. Over several hours, a constantly changing landscape of people, movement and music emerges.
The Flying Archive anarchivTANZ.digital
2022, mobile and digital installation / film programme
Premiere: Moovy Festival, Cologne
Based on the long-term project Just in Time, this work activates a growing archive of letters to dance and favourite movements as installation, sound environment, film programme and participatory platform.
A Worn World – Los Angeles Edition
2022, workshop, club, archive, dressmaking and performance
Premiere / edition: Odyssey Theatre / Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
A Worn World – Montreal Edition
2022, workshop, club, archive, dressmaking and performance
Premiere / edition: Goethe-Institut Montreal
A Worn World – Kuopio Edition
2022, workshop, club, archive, dressmaking and performance
Premiere / edition: ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival
ELFRIEDE VOSS – Reconstruction of an Invented Life
2022, collective exhibition / speculative artistic reconstruction
Premiere: Spinnerei Schwelm
Developed within the project Künstlerinnen erfinden, the work centres on the life and oeuvre of the fictional Schwelm artist Elfriede Voss.
ICH TONI ROTH
2022, collective invention / exhibition project
Premiere: Protestantisches Pfarrhaus, Elmstein
Developed with local residents, this project invents the biography and body of work of the fictional artist Toni Roth from Elmstein, shaped by local memories, stories and imaginations.
Familienangelegenheiten
2024
Premiere: spinnereischwelm
Collaborative Installation on the family as smallest political cell where decisions are negotiated.
Stoffwechsel
2024
Premiere: spinnereischwelm
Collaborative Installation with artist Johanna Tuukkanen on the stories that our clothes hold.
Wenn sie tanzen
2024, single-channel HD video, 41'53''
Premiere: spinnereischwelm
Fountains
2024, performance / installation / film / concert
Premiere: Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal
Fountains (Film)
2024, single-channel HD video, 32'18''
Premiere: spinnereischwelm
Ballroom Bliss
2025, participatory choreography and ballroom
Premiere: Pina Bausch Zentrum, Wuppertal
Ballroom Bliss Handover
2025, participatory choreography and ballroom reworked by Moeketsi Koena and Gaby Saranouffi (Johannesburg)
Premiere: Bapedi Hall, Soweto
Works with the RONA COLLECTIVE:
Rona
2025, single-channel UHD video, 52'26''
Premiere: Bapedi Cultural Center, Soweto, Johannesburg