A revue about humanity, sex, death, and that certain nothingness.
The Cartesian coordinate system of our reality vanishes like a pixelated trail in the digital night sky. "Damn, they were actually quite nice!" are perhaps our last words in an attempt to retrieve what we've swiped away. The attempt fails. Reality no longer wants to conform to what book knowledge has accumulated over centuries. We can mourn the loss of modernity and pull a puppy-dog face. But puppies generate clicks. And with that, we're right in the middle of the self-transformation of our tiresome present-day world. Retreating to libraries offers less and less in times of the artificial swan song of European humanism. So we let texts and images dance, actors with them, and install strings of lights at the end of the tunnel.
In its own production studio in the upper foyer in front of the Green Salon, IDIOLAB is creating texts, films, and performances during the 2025/26 season. The hybrid form of dramaturgical reflection and artistic production is understood both as a diagnosis and as a strategy for self-transformation, in order to say something about the all-powerful "idiocy of the bourgeoisie" (Marx) or to be heard and seen within it. For beneath the mask of the idiot installation, as once demanded by the Dadaists following Pere Ubu, lies ultimately a dialectic of the "most new human being"—as an idiotype of the many individuals and the individual many. Who are we, and what will we be? Are we, in the end, not the swipers, but the swiped away? ... Addressing such questions remains and is the task of the Idiolab.
IDIOLAB MANIFESTO
The continuation of global hooliganism through artistic means
I CLICK YOU
We are writing about the present, not yesterday or tomorrow. Trump & Co. have hijacked the world's political reins. Like the Pere Ubus of our time, they subvert norms, celebrate the absurd, and preach the contradictory. Their bullshit has been piled up on an altar. Political trolls hover like gods above algorithms, nudging us. Sometimes even an entire continent. With a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and by scrolling through clips and memes, we confirm their power and admire or despise them, which in the click economy is synonymous.
THE COUP
Enough is enough! Because these silicone gods and trolls have stolen their methods from us artists. The radical exploration of self-motivation was and is our great achievement—perhaps the only one, if we're honest. We have distorted aesthetic egomania so narcissistically that in modernity it has curled into the most beautiful idiocy. Remember: “What we lack, what interests us, what is rare because it possesses the anomalies of a precious being, the freshness and freedom of the great anti-humans, is | THE IDIOT,” wrote Tristan Tzara in 1921. Following Ubu, the Dadaists were concerned with the rebirth of the idiot from the spirit of an incoherent society. That is why Georges Bataille wrote in the first issue of Acéphale magazine in 1936: “The age of reason and culture is over.” Headlessness as a program, in the face of headless politics.
AGAINST ARTISTIC DECENT
But the sublime idiocy of the arts has been appropriated and disfigured by today's political gamblers. We artists, on the other hand, have become respectable and retreated into artistic research, political organizing, and ecological justice—important, good, public-benefit things, in other words, of which we haven't the faintest clue. Take Guy Debord, the Situationist. What was he all about in the late 1950s? Rioting and drinking. Is what came after that more than a footnote?
INSTEAD OF SUBMISSION: UNDERBEAT
Since we artists hold the copyright on idiocy—and NOT the Trumps, Modis, Putins, Erdoğans, and other political XXLs of this world—the Idiolab opposes this idiotic politics without pandering to rationalism as a liberal promise of world enlightenment. We decide who's a clown and who's a derp face!
Because from the IDIOLAB's perspective, being expelled from the art paradise feels disgusting. Do we really want to continue as if the bowl, and not the crack in the bowl, is the measure of all things? Where are the Useless Idiots™ in this brave new world? A scientific life cannot be lived, and yet everyone tries to keep the optimization machine running at full speed – from YouTube workouts to productivity hacks. In this sense, the probability cloud of AI fits perfectly into the most probable of all worlds. Everything is process-oriented, percentage-based, relational.
ORGAN GROOMING
The IDIOLAB aims to represent, at the pivotal point in world history—which is always right now—the self-understanding of thought in the present and its collateral imaginings, to bestow upon theatrical events a new, multifaceted organ, in reference to the spleen, the "all-rounder among organs" (chatGPT). This desire for an organ is and remains the fundamental mission of all theatrical events, and no neoliberalism, no careerism, no trendsetting, no tight budget can shake it, as long as the concept of theater is to have any meaning. You can surgically remove a frog's croak and still claim it's a frog. That's correct, but if being correct is all you are, then that's not enough. 90% theater is no longer theater.
The IDIOLAB, like the whisperers of the Roman emperors, has the function here of constantly reminding us what 100% means, what is what and what is not. We see the IDIOLAB as an autoimmune reaction, as the body's plasticity within cultural events.
SUSPENSION OF ALL APPS
The current crises in East and West are rooted in the temporal foundations of thought; they are based on the colossal challenge of nihilism, which accompanies the late capitalist age like a faithful companion. If, in modernity, meaning has been replaced by value, and value is determined by political economy, then the inventiveness of emancipatory thought extends only as far as the next update of the utopia app. The theatrical organism must not become dependent on apps that feed the dystopian present and must take action itself in order to survive.
MIND HUNTING
Ultimately, the IDIOLAB also aims to be the advocate for the idiots of all countries, to offer refuge to art refugees who have been cast aside by nation, morality, and scientism, and to polish the farcical side of the world-historical coin with them. Unlike the film *Idiocracy*, we're not engaging in a critique of stupidity: *idios* refers to the self, not to stupidity; idiocracy is the rule of the self. Rather, we start from what Deleuze called the New Idiot, a conceptual figure of our age who desires the absurd and sacrifices the true, the beautiful, and the good on the altar of YouTube. Because the absurd is the real, and the real is the absurd. Because flat-Earthers, not round-Earthers, now set the standard for performance. Because one can be both troll and ideologue and thereby become unassailable. Because the online mobs are proclaiming a war of all against all. "What to do?" you ask. — Everything! TL;DR: We want to reclaim world power. Join us!
- Concept, Direction & Environment: Sebastian Kaiser, Zoran Terzić
Assistant Director: Lara Weidemann
