Back to Germany - A résumé

We really enjoyed our work in the Yemen and are very thankful, that we got the possibility to do a Light-/Video-/Soundinstallation of this dimension at the Bab al-Yemen. It was great to become a part of the daily life, especially during the festive atmosphere of the Ramadan. Even if we had tough times dealing with electricity and non-existent cables, it always turned into moments of big luckiness, when things finally worked out in the last moment.

During our second stay in the Yemen, Rene and I had to change a lot regarding our first conception. We soon realized, that our origin idea to do an interactive installation had to be modified, since so many people were meeting each evening at the Bab al-Yemen, curious sitting all over the place and waiting for images/music. So everything became more kind of an event character, but for us there is nothing to regret about it [exempt from the fact, that our original plan - hanging around at a cool swimming pool in the afternoons, once the installation is running - was foiled, because we had to work all the time on our computers, editing new video material and sounds, since we still wanted each evening to be special :-) ]

There have been a lot of people, who helped us where they could, and without them this project would have been not possible at all. We would like to thank Frank Werner and Guido Zebisch from the German embassy, the Yemeni ministry of Culture (and especially Jamal Majam), Patrick from the French embassy and Joel, Julian and Mohamed from CCCL Sana'a as well as all the other great French people we met in Sana'a, our Yemeni staff members at the Bab al-Yemen, Fouad, Selim, Ahmed, Ismael, Maher and Abd Al Malik, Jean-Baptiste Lopez, the nicest photographer of the world, who provided us with images for the installation, the Yemeni painters Amna Alnuseiri, Talal Alnajar and Madhar Nizar, who also provided us with video-material, Michael Bepler from the Hrz Giessen, our Professor Heiner Goebbels and last but not least Bastian Roos and Carolin Möllmann, the two best interns the German embassy ever had.

conclusion

A conclusion drawn by the Yemen Observer after the last showing:

press releases

That is what the (english speaking) press wrote about the project shortly before and after the launch of the project:

Yemen Observer


Yemen Observer


Yemen Times

Finissage / October 3rd.

Tomorrow, on October the 3rd., will be the official finissage of the project. There will be a representative part with a dinner, some speeches and live-music, before our installation finally will run for its last day. Check the webpage of the German Federal Foreign Office, which promotes the project in the framework of the "Day of German Unity abroad". We also already started to upload some new images to our Flickr-account.

German Federal Foreign Office
Our Flickr-Account

The press conference at CCCL Sana'a

Here you will find some exerpts from the speeches by the French cultural attache, the Yemeni deputy minister of culture and the German embassador. If you also want to listen to Rene, the French deputy embassador and me, go to our You-tube-channel, where you will find a second video with some parts of the official press conference, which was held two days before the installation was launched.

Our YouTube-Channel

The first video

Our friends from the French Cultural Center (CCCL Sana'a) produced a short trailer of the installation during September 23th. It is synchronized in French, but gives also some first impressions to non-French speakers.