Ghost Games depicts daily life in a time of global crisis and the pandemic from the perspective of domestic dwellers in private homes. The title is a translation of the German phrase Geisterspiele, which refers to soccer games played behind closed doors without live audiences. Domestic dwellers, already atomized and isolated in private homes, are further separated from others through lockdowns, quarantines, and physical distancing, as life is lived simultaneously in two vastly different scales—within the claustrophobia of confined domestic life and within all-encompassing political, racial, and social crisis.
Ghost Games is composed from an archive of videos found online, made, and received through a public call sent out in June 2020, which asked recipients for videos of the sounds they heard while at home and of what they were looking at while they listened. Projections and sound works are installed throughout the seven empty rooms in an abandoned penthouse apartment in Herne, Germany. They blend with the physical space as videos projected directly on walls, windows, and other surfaces blend with the surfaces of the apartment. The apartment remains empty, and the presence of others can be heard through walls and windows but only seen in shadows and reflections. Domestic spaces and sounds are disrupted by activity outside the home. Ambulances, funeral church bells, workers, and protests can be seen through windows while the sounds seep in, refusing to respect the boundaries of domestic confinement. Despite bars, gates, closed doors, and security signs warning away intruders, the home, like the body itself, becomes a crumbling fortress, its borders leaky and unable to protect inhabitants from a destabilized and seemingly dangerous world outside.
During the pandemic, the labor of the invisible and precarious workers, described by anthropologist Mary L. Gray as “ghost workers”, allowed the lucky few to sequester safely in private homes. The ghostly projections in the home suggest, as Avery Gordon writes of her concept of haunting, “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely…[as] those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind field comes into view.”
*commissioned by Urbane Künste Ruhr
https://www.urbanekuensteruhr.de/de/festival/ruhr-ding-klima/project/geisterspiele
Sound Design Natalie Bookchin and Michael Kowalski
List of Contributors
Su Alonso-Inés Marful
Rebecca Baron
Bert Beyens
Alan Berliner
David Bookchin
Josephine Bosma
Johanna Breiding
Robert Bullock
Jen Castro
Cristóbal Cea S.
Mei-Juin Chen
Alexander Christian
David Clark
Jaynie Gillman Crimmins
Anna Dobrucki
Sarah Doherty
Shasha Dong
Andrew Garrison
Melissa Glick
Robert Hamiliton
Anna-Lina Helsen
Jack Hogan
Erin Elise Holland
Jeremy Height
Daonne Huff
Alex Juhasz
Gabriele Klages
Bomi Kim
Michael Kowalski
Chongchan Lee
Jin Lee
Ming-Yuen Ma
Lize Mogel
Jongho Park
Diane Poitras
Matteo Preabianca
Melinda Rackham
Jeff Ragsdale
Montse Romaní
Bahar Sabet
Janet Sarbanes
Gary Schnieder
Cassaddees Sicherer
Susan Silas
Carol Stakenas
David Torres
T. Kim-Trang Tran
Ece Uzundemir
A.P. Vague
Karen Bookchin Vislocky
Annika Wagner
Gregory Williams
Xufeng Wang
Will Yager
Young Sun Han
Silke Zeidler
Princess Eliza
Claudia Woodman
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YT
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shoaib neyazi
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Jeremiah Granger
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Dani’s World
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Omar Scruggs
THEMAJESTIRIUM1
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The Meh Channel
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