Stasi-Dada
Conversation with Artist Gabriele Stötzer, Moderated by Sylvia Sasse
In the days of the GDR, Gabriele Stötzer was one of the many artists and authors who were watched, for years, as well as 'demoralized' by order of the Stasi. Today, she works to 'demoralize' the material that the Stasi collected by ‘dadaizing’ it.
The file kept on her consists of thousands of pages of 'assessment reports' filled out by intelligence agents, observational protocols from more than twenty different unofficial employees, confiscated letters, surveillance photos, sketches of her apartment, of her private ‘Galerie im Flur’ (Gallery in the Hallway), and protocols concerning the surveillance of her circle of friends. On 4 December 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she and a number of other artists and activists occupied the Stasi headquarters in Erfurt and ensured that the Stasi would not be allowed to continue destroying the records they'd kept. She was also one of the first people to allow excerpts of the exhaustive records kept on her to be published. We will speak with Gabriele Stötzer about that time, about spying, about her artistic work in the underground, and about reading and re-appropriating Stasi records.
Prof. Dr. Sylvia Sasse is Professor for Slavic Literature Studies at the University of Zurich, co-founder of the ZKK (Center for Arts and Cultural Theories), co-publisher of ‘Geschichte der Gegenwart’ (Contemp More
Gabriele Stötzer is an artist, poet, and performer. In 2013, she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in honor of her contribution to the reappraisal of the communist dictato
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