A sustainable Future for a Ruin

Energy efficiency in a listed factory building? That's a challenge, isn't it? Stage designer Jakob Engel, head of the Naturtheater Naxos project, sees this task as an opportunity for a pilot project. Together with the platform for young performing arts, studioNAXOS, he is implementing it in a former grinding machine factory. "The Naxoshalle lends itself to being a laboratory precisely because it is in ruins. Unlike in fully air-conditioned theater buildings, where deconstruction is more of an issue, the same questions arise in a ruin as in a new building." The building materials used, the thermal insulation, heating and energy costs, the life and useful life of the building – all of these play into a building's carbon footprint.

studioNAXOS will be building a climate-neutral theater, a walk-in construction, in the Naxoshalle in the coming months. In doing so, two central questions are being raised: How can a 19th-century industrial site be transformed into a sustainable 21st-century laboratory that facilitates innovative ways of working, collaborating and storytelling? And what aesthetics can help to reflect a radically transforming environment? Building is the second project phase for the Naturtheater Naxos, funded by the #TakePlace grant from the Fonds Darstellende Künste. The building will be constructed through collaboration between artists, scientists and architects. Under the glass roof of the former machine hall is one of the last buildings of an otherwise long-demolished industrial site. The company NAXOS-Union produced emery paper and grinding machines there until it languished through globalization and filed for bankruptcy in 1989.

Around the turn of the millennium, art and culture landed in this industrial wasteland. The huge listed machine hall, 80 meters long and 30 meters wide, has been run by an art cooperative since the turn of the millennium. As squatters, in 2000 the members of the independent Theater Willy Praml created their own venue in the Naxoshalle with its two side galleries. The German-Turkish cabaret Die KäS was added, the experimental theater teAtrum VII set up its rehearsal rooms in the hall and the Jugendladen Bornheim set up a studio. The wasteland area, which had "degenerated into a kind of 'Bronx'" as the Theater Willy Praml describes it, became a lively, romantically dilapidated and precariously financed cultural quarter in the immediate vicinity of the international production house in Mousonturm. Soon the area was caught up in the gentrification process: a new district is being built there, between the densely populated Frankfurt neighborhoods of Bornheim, Nordend and Ostend.

In 2014, studioNAXOS moved to the collectively run cultural site. The platform for young performing artists from Hessen produces and shows theater, music and performance – and, together with the other initiatives in the Naxoshalle, has managed to raise the venue to a new level. "In recent years, the Naxoshalle has become enormously important as a production house for Hessen's independent scene," says director Jan Philipp Stange, who runs studioNAXOS together with four other people and who is also responsible for the Naturtheater Naxos. Part of the professionalization is the cultural-political endeavor to stabilize one's own work. In the brand-new Frankfurt coalition agreement between the Greens, SPD, FDP and the Volt party, the Naxoshalle has its own entry: "In addition, we support the development of a production house for the independent scene involving studioNaxos and Theater Willy Praml at the site of the historic Naxoshalle taking energy-efficiency into account."

Energy efficiency in theater is the artistic research drive of studioNAXOS and now, also a political mission. In addition to Jakob Engel, the core team of the Naturtheater Naxos includes art historian Manuela Mehrwald, who is researching collectivity in digital space and developing a website that serves as an information and networking platform along with Arthur de Buren, a young architect from Switzerland. Located on the border between architecture, sustainability discourse and theater, de Buren is studying in Paris with the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour. He has been involved in Latour's exhibition projects "Down to Earth" in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau and "Critical Zone" at the ZKM Karlsruhe, among others. It is the second part of the title of a book that inspired the French sustainability mastermind Latour that is behind studioNAXOS’ search: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins."

Learning to live and survive in ruins: what do Jakob Engel and studioNAXOS base their search for climate-neutral theater construction and operation on, in technical terms? Heat and light are two core issues they have identified — "two big climate factors for municipal theater stages," says Engel. The big theaters should also be able to learn from their project. They have excluded artificial light from their natural theater. The Naxoshalle with its skylight is hard to get completely dark anyway. Whether they will perform during the day or at sunset, as in ancient times, is still open. So far, the Naxoshalle is also not heated or cooled. "It's okay until November, then we will be performing in the cold," Jan Philipp Stange tells us. Sitting close together, the audience warms each other in the winter months. "In that respect, a more climate-neutral theater probably doesn't work at all - because you have to deal with climatic conditions within the Naxoshalle," Stange says. "Unlike living spaces, however, you can't warm up a venue until half an hour before the performance," Jakob Engel says, citing a central idea for the Naturtheater Naxos. "That's when people are there and generate warmth." For the set designer, the theater as a ‘warming room’ is a beautiful idea that encompasses social experience and ecological operation: "Shared theater experience should bring both shared warmth and climate participation."

The team is still brainstorming ideas and is planning a temporary building for the time being. The idea is to encourage people to think about sustainable theater production and alternative public spaces. At the same time, it will serve as a venue that can be reassembled and dismantled: "We don't want anything that ends up in storage or, in the worst case, is thrown away," explains Jakob Engel. "That's a production cycle that doesn't work anymore." On his screen, the set designer shows a collection of construction ideas and models – a mobile cinema made of wood covered with canvas, an outdoor venue; London's Arcola Theater; thermal image experiments by architect Philippe Rahm, who is interested in atmospheres; Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo floating on water at the 1979 Venice Architecture Biennale; a theater raft built for Zurich's Manifesta. This collection of ideas will later be made available to the visitors of the Naturtheater Naxos.

The construction should stay in place until November. Then, with long-term funding from the city of Frankfurt or, better still, the federal government, as Jan Philipp Stange would like, a permanent solution for the Naturtheater Naxos will be sought. "How can the ecological issues of the Naturtheater be incorporated into the development of the Naxos production house and be given a future in Frankfurt am Main?": This is how Jan Philipp Stange formulates the task. From the outside, studioNAXOS is already well advanced on this path towards a theater of the future.

In the series "Kunst trotz(t) Krise" (Culture despite the Crisis), cultural journalists Elena Philipp and Georg Kasch take a look behind the scenes of funded projects on behalf of the Fonds Darstellende Künste. What is the impact of the fund's #TakeThat funding as part of the NEUSTART KULTUR program of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media.