April 10–12, 2026
ANTIFASCIST WORKERS’ THEATRE Today
OPENING – LECTURE – PERFORMANCE – WORKSHOP
The theme of the opening weekend sets the tone for the exhibition and connects us directly with Asja Lācis’ concern: How to act, what to do as cultural workers in times of crisis and war, of increasing authoritarian and fascist tendencies worldwide? Together, we will follow in Asja Lācis’ footsteps with the help of a time-space machine, a lecture on the possibilities of an antifascist future, and performances, continuing to write Lācis’ story into the present.
April 10, Friday
5 pm // OPENING
7 pm // WELCOME – Clara Herrmann (district mayor), Stéphane Bauer (Director of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien), Konstanze Schmitt and Mimmi Woisnitza (curators)
9 pm // CONCERT
Anti-fascist yodeling duo Esels Alptraum
Founded in Neukölln in 2015, the Berlin duo Esels Alptraum sees itself as the »1st Anarchist Traditional and Folklore Association« and radically breaks with the image of Heimatkitsch and conservatism. The two yodeler Admirabla Gaya and Commandanta Elenos tie in with the idea of a politically reflective, critical re-trading of folk art, to which Lācis was also committed. With a mixture of yodeling, punk attitude, and political activism, they act as the »wrecking ball of folk music«.
April 11, Saturday
1–5 pm // LECTURE-PERFORMANCE-WORKSHOP
Raum/Zeit Lācis. An archivo-experimental lab – Luise Meier (Berlin), Simone Niehoff(Hildesheim), Florian Thamer & Tina Turnheim (Mannheim), Mimmi Woisnitza (Lüneburg)
(Registration until April 9 at asjalacis@posteo.de)
Florian Thamer and Tina Turnheim, both working at the intersection of theater studies and theater practice, activate selected archive material around Asja Lācis with the help of theTime-Space Materializer (ZRM) they developed in 2018. In an interactive video and sound performance, traces of Lācis are brought into a ghostly present together with the audience. The project sees itself as a participatory experiment in which the participants playfully dissolve time boundaries and spatial barriers.
Based on Asja Lācis’ practice of proletarian children’s theater, Mimmi Woisnitza and dramaturge and theater scholar Simone Niehoff (University of Hildesheim) activate further historical sources on children’s agitprop in the late Weimar Republic in a performative-interactive lecture format. Using the artistic methods of the past brought into the space and the audience in this way, we can ask: How relevant are they for intervening theater forms today?
In a Werkstattbericht, author, theater maker, and performer Luise Meier talks about DasLexikon der Erinnerungen (The Encyclopedia of Memories) – a multimedia, ongoing collection of stories, memories, and anecdotes about life in rural areas of the GDR, that she is constantly expanding. The project presents itself as a practice of history-making in relationships and encounters: between generations, the present, future, and past, between rural and urban dwellers, between GDR contemporaries and those born later who are trying to understand a country whose traces they bear, but which no longer exists.
7 pm // LECTURE
Experimental freedom. Antifascist future begins today – Ewa Majewska (en)
Ewa Majewska is a feminist theorist of culture, associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland, working on the queer archive theory project “Public against their will. The production of subjects in the archives of ‘Hiacynt’ operations”; author of seven books, including Feminist Antifascism (Verso, 2021) and articles in: e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies and others. She lives and works between Berlin and Warsaw. More: https://ewa-majewska.com.
April 12, Sunday
2 pm // PERFORMANCE
Performance Walk – Zhenya Efros, Start: Kunstraum Kreuzberg (de/en)
Zhenya Efros was born in St. Petersburg in 2004. He left Russia after the outbreak of the war. Today, Zhenya Efros lives in Germany; he is studying costume and stage design with Barbara Ehnes at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK) and was part of Nina von Mechow’s scenography class at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His work explores queerness, antisemitism, and political bodies.
5 pm // PERFORMANCE
Cyankali. A drama about self-determination, loss, and women’s bodies (based on Friedrich Wolf) – Anna Stiede with Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen (de)
Location: Grüne Bühne, Hellersdorf, admission 10/5 euros.
With Cyankali, Anna Stiede and Panzerkreuzer Rotkäppchen bring Friedrich Wolf’s 1929 drama back to the Berlin stage in a powerful new adaptation – wild, precise, timeless. The play draws a compelling line from the struggles of working women in the Weimar Republic to the present day and highlights how much the right to abortion reflects the progress of political conditions.
Followed by an artist talk with Anna Stiede and Zhenya Efros (de/en)