marathon: Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day

On 4 - 5 July 2012, WE LIVE HERE will take form of a 32-hour marathon: Eight Hours Do Not Make a Day.

The title of the marathon is borrowed from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV series ‘Acht Stunden sind kein Tag’. With this title, we want to frame the thinking around how we organise our lives. A socialist idea of a day was: 8 hours work + 8 hours recreation + 8 hours sleep. Nowadays, we work never-ending hours, cannot sleep and want our work to be our recreation as well. How do we want to live our days?

We have invited 25 colleagues to participate in the marathon. Each participant is offered up to half an hour of everyone's attention within which we ask them to respond to the following questions:

1. In what way would you like to work and live, regardless of the already existing structures or of what you are already doing? What is your absolute fantasy?

2. What would you need (to do) to get there?

Each participant is invited to structure their half hour whichever way they find appropriate in order to communicate their proposal. Possible formats can include a talk, an interview, an exercise, a dance, a lecture, a performance, a spatial or temporal intervention, or any other imaginable format.

All participants commit to being present for the entire length of the marathon, sharing ideas, meals and accommodation for 32 hours.