Project Space: If the dancing gets too stiff, the rain needs to get dug out as ice-cubes

Through an eBay purchase, eteam (a collaboration between Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) became the landlords of a 36,000-square-foot plot of land in Germany with eight remaining tenants and seven feral lots. After receiving complaints from their tenants about the lack of access to water, eteam suggested they dig a well. When the tenants rejected this idea, eteam decided to search for water in different ways, using this exploration as both a motif and a vehicle for motion and creation. How do you look at the field as water? How do you produce water? And how do you make it visible? eteam sought to change people’s perspectives of the land. Do you still complain about the lack of water if you have the ocean around you? "If the dancing gets too stiff…" is a five-channel video installation that shows snippets from this social, mental, and metaphysical experiment. "If the dancing gets too stiff…" is also part of eteam's larger project OS GRABELAND. "OS" can stand for either "open source" or "operating system," while the German term Grabeland means land for digging, particularly land left over from allotments leased to people during the First and Second World Wars so they could grow food. This project is supported by Creative Capital, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a PSC-CUNY research grant.