Daniel Hopp is an Austrian artist working with performance and film. He stages social circumstances and orchestrates his protagonists in precisely edited video works and decided to forward all proceeds from his book project to the Centre of Arts and Wellbeing in Karachi. In their Library of Peace, 309 children, the co-authors in this project, share a part of themselves- their sense of identity, their explorations of the notion of friendship and what that entails, their ideas of harmony and inclusion and their dreams and visions for a future where there is place for all to express and share.

How does one talk to small children with little emotional and intellectual vocabulary about such abstract ideas such as peace, harmony and inclusion? We took the route of storytelling about what the children already know through their experience - the joy of having a friend, the fights with the friend and the making-up after all while learning and growing together. For us, the adults who have forgotten the child inside- it is not important what we “taught"” the children, rather, what we learned from them:

Peace: being happy and calm and having fun learning new stuff
Inclusion: Making space for every one regardless of how different they may seem to us
Harmony: Making beautiful things together

Daniel Hopp - TRAP - Interviews Concerning the Risks and Opportunities of Artistic Collective Practice

DH: Baby, how can one empower oneself in THAT?

Trap captures Daniel Hopp's collaborative artistic practice at the intersection of performance and film through a collage of interviews with former collaborators, friends and companions. Parenthetically, the potentials, limits and risks of collective artistic processes are revealed. Trap is not just an artist's catalog, but a book object as much as a mise-en-scène. Somewhere between fairy tales, sociology, aesthetics and network marketing, the protagonists of Trap meet in a roundtable discussion that never really happened as one. The question of the actual reason for this encounter constantly arises. Who can say whether it is a trap?

Interviews with: Harry Baer, Kenneth Dow, Amna Mawaz Khan, Dr. Charlotte Klink, Lena Mai Merle, Imran Mushter Siddiqui, Wolfgang Kerim Schroeder, Dr. Philipp Zehmisch

Design: Caspar Reuss

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