JUMP!STAR Simmering

The artistic point of departure for JUMP!STAR is the barely known fact that in 1,000 years from now the Earth will have a new North Star. Against the backdrop of the current pandemic, systemic racism and the successive destruction of the planet, the project’s members explored unifying and community-oriented strategies to address the question of how our present actions and decisions will affect the physical and social world in the short and long term future.

With 21 Days Listening Out Loud & Dreaming Wildly, the JUMP!STAR team facilitated an a freely accessible virtual meeting space, where people from all over the world could gather to spend 80 minutes daily together. Artists from Vienna Simmering were invited to lead these meetings and discuss with the attendees, sing together, jump, listen aloud and dream wildly together and express wishes for the future. Futurelove Sibanda composed the song Are You Ready?. The attendees were invited to join in the singing. From day 11, Sibanda requested that attendees record the song in their own language and return it to him to rehearse before performing it in the new languages from day 12 onwards. In the final session, Futurelove delivered the song in 15 different languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Ndebele, Romanian, Serbian, Shona, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog. Listen here!

The participants braided a rope made of found fabric scraps during the virtual meetings - as a symbol of solidarity during the period of separation. The participants' personal pieces of rope were then sent to the Brunnenpassage in the summer of 2020 and connected to form a long rope as part of an outdoor action in Simmering; this rope sculpture was thus created as a symbol and unifying document of this exceptional period. The resulting Double Infinity Rope is to be presented at the Weltmuseum Wien together with extensive documentation of the JUMP!STAR production, such as sound elements, research work on pandemics, photographs as well as quotations from the participants as a testimony to the present (to the exhibition).

A production of the Brunnenpassage in cooperation with Weltmuseum Wien and U.S. artist George Ferrandi. Supported by SHIFT Vienna.