MONKEY_UP

2008 – 7:36
Two-channel installation

MONKEY_UP examines regimes of control through the body.

The work was created during a period of radical suspension: my partner was in a coma following a brain tumor. While one body lay immobile, the surrounding world continued to accelerate. Movement persisted elsewhere.

The installation juxtaposes parkour, acrobatics and digital game figures. Parkour begins close to the ground, drawing from an almost animal intelligence — negotiating obstacles rather than conquering them. Acrobatics embodies vertical precision, repetition and disciplined risk. Both practices rely on relentless training; falling and rising are integral to their logic.

Opposed to these real bodies stands the virtual realm. Digital avatars fall, die and instantly restart. Reset is built into the system. Control appears programmable.

In lived reality, there is no reset. There is only duration.

MONKEY_UP exposes the tension between digital reversibility and biological irreversibility. It confronts the contemporary fantasy of mastery with the vulnerability of the human body. Movement becomes neither spectacle nor triumph, but persistence — a fragile counterforce to collapse.

The work asks how bodies inhabit systems that promise control while concealing contingency. It reflects on resilience not as performance, but as the minimal act of continuing when certainty has dissolved.

parkour runner

Paul Wehrwein

Acrobats
Katrin Bochert
Marissa Papy

thanks to
Sven Beck
Carlos Meyer
Mark Pipper

skater
Alfons Meloni
Christian Bensch
Christian Müller

sound
Andreas Störmer