The shopping mall is a utopian place. An entire city is assembled in ideal-typical form below a glass roof under which time would appear to be frozen. Tropical plants create a paradise-like atmosphere. The wares displayed in shop windows patiently await their future owners. Apparently, they possess no more life of their own than the mall as such. Architecture and merchandise alike seem mute. And yet, they do possess a voice. The stories they could tell if they wanted to! The floor-tiles, for instance, that remember the footsteps of every shopper who walked across them without even noticing what was under their feet. And the consumer goods on sale have first-hand knowledge of people’s futile attempts to find happiness in them.

The Hamburg-based activists Ligna have been developing radio-ballets as interactive forms of radio-plays – in which audiences almost unconsciously turn into subversive crowds – in festivals around the world. For Ciudades Paralelas they focus on the shopping mall as a form of parallel city.

Ligna

LIGNA has existed since 1997. The group consists of the media and and performance artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen, who in the early 1990s began working at the Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. They produce the bi-weekly programme Lignas Music Box, which asks the listeners to call in and play their favorite songs over the telephone.
All works by LIGNA regard their audience as a collective of producers. Such temporary associations can produce unforeseeable, uncontrollable effects that challenge the order of a space.
One LIGNA model of media usage is the Radio Ballet (invented in 2002), which provides radio listeners with a choreography of excluded and forbidden gestures in formerly public, now controlled, spaces. Other models are the Radio concert for 144 mobile phones, which lets the radio listeners participate in a process of collective composition, or The new Man, a theatre play without actors, which engages the audience in complex gestural interaction.

www.ligna.blogspot.com