Be Part of Something Bigger

2014 is Gob Squad’s twentieth anniversary year as an artists collective. Twenty years of collective work is twenty years of times past during which the group has grown, devised, planned, rejected, discussed, argued, aged, loved and learnt. Work and private lives have become inseparably fused. Highs and lows have been shared. There has been fame and failure, children have been born, relationships have come and gone and offices have been rented. To mark and reflect upon two decades of collective work HAU Hebbel am Ufer will become Gob Squad's home for an extended and excessive weekend of art and performance, talks and films, theory and practice, magic, music, and hot soup. Be Part of Something Bigger invites the public to pursue questions of how we work and live together and whether it is the way we want it to be and examine and celebrate the phenomenon of the collective from many different perspectives. 

Rather than Gob Squad performances being the focus of the weekend, three selected ones, Are You With Us?, Before Your Very Eyes and We Are Gob Squad And So Are You, aim to create a space, both physical and mental, to pause, look at the past, survey the present and spin possible futures in the company of invited artists and theorists, such as Phil Collins, Terry O'­Connor (Forced Entertainment), Kai van Eikels, Harrell Fletcher, Friederike Habermann, Mieke Matzke, Juliane Re­ben­tisch, Richard Sennett, Kate Valk (The Wooster Group). 

A part of Gob Squad's collective visual memory will also be made accessible in the form of diverse video installations, and a film programme looks at work and ways of working, visions and obsessions, alternatives, wrong turns, and the abyss. 

Be Part of Something Bigger will also celebrate the preciousness of the moment through magical interactions which offer an opportunity to lose yourself in the moment as well as in the crowd. There will be a Queen cover concert with Scout Niblett, Peaches, Masha Qrella, The 100 Year Old Band, She She Pop, Showcase Beat Let Mot and Damian Rebgetz, along with a mass reconstruction of dance scenes from films and music videos and DJ sets by DJ Phono and Bobby Friction.