Friederike Meese

Friederike Meese is a stage designer and graduated with honours from the Berlin University of the Arts under Hartmut Meyer. She spent a long time in the USA, Czechia and Russia and realised international opera and theatre projects in Russia and Hungary. She understands the creation of narrative spaces as a multi-layered act and expands it: more and more often, she involves children or young people in her projects on an equal footing and explores this collaboration. In 2019, she created a stage work with young people as part of the Ruhrtriennale.

Meese also locates stage sets in urban space, which she reads as a conglomerate of built structures and the people moving within them, inviting her to create temporary architectures, such as the geodesic radio globe on the Funkerberg in Königs Wusterhausen. Wood, with its primal potential, and serial forms are integral to her work, and her ongoing search and research is devoted to the essence of the material.

The town of Olevano is a place of urban life and history, both personal and general. I am dedicating my stay here to searching for traces of this place. From the tactile reality that I see, my path leads me via documentation (drawings/notes/photography) into the two-dimensional realm and from there back again to a spatial narrative in the three-dimensional realm.

How do built space and the built environment – both historical and new – affect people's lives? What narratives does this space write, and how do people's lives and movements in turn produce a distinctive place, despite a time seemingly dominated everywhere by digital media and consumption? What role can the nature of urban space play in this?