FIT FOR FUTURE or HYPER HYPER or MELANCHOLIA

Excerpt from an interview in WUK Online Magazine:

Question: »The core of the project consists of three performers labouring away on treadmills. How did the idea for this setting come up?«

O.W.: »I can’t remember. I developed the concept for the project in the summer / autumn of 2021 and submitted it for project funding, but looking back now, I can only vaguely and piecemeal reconstruct how the three treadmills came about – I don’t keep a diary, and it’s a bit of a shock to me now that I can’t find any notes or sketches from that time either, sorry… But there were certainly those ›aha‹ moments – whether it was because I was staring, fascinated, at the shop windows of gyms at the time, or because I’d heard that a fellow artist of mine from Hamburg had suffered a heart attack whilst jogging a few years earlier, or whether it was the fact that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I could no longer manage to go for my lovely run in the Prater twice a week.
In fact, the development of the concept coincided with the time when Daniel Aschwanden – an important colleague of mine and an artistic marathon runner to whom I owe a great deal – died. Shortly after Daniel’s death in July 2021, I was in Copenhagen (where I had first met Daniel almost exactly 20 years earlier), and there I met the artist David Sebastian Lopez Restrepo, who, in one of his projects, ›Movement for Static Action By Great Danes‹, was seemingly pedalling endlessly on his bicycle.
I can’t remember where the idea for this installation with the three treadmills ultimately came from. I only know that, in the autumn of 2021, it was an obviously logical decision – and one that felt right to me.«

The full interview is available online in WUK Magazine (unfortunately only in German): ›MÖGLICHKEITEN DER GESTALTUNG EINER HYPOTHETISCHEN RESTBIOGRAFIE‹
Here's the essay ›50+. Ramblings on the Project...‹
And on tanz.at there’s a review by Rando Hannemann: ›Otmar Wagner lässt laufen…‹