Of All The People In All The World

Stan’s Cafe

Performative Exhibition – Mülheim an der Ruhr edition

Are we really living in post-factual times? What do we base our decisions and our actions on? How are we supposed to know where we’ve actually got to?
The British theater company Stan’s Cafe has found an unconventional, humorous, touching and above all enlightening way to allow statistics to speak for themselves. And all they use is rice. In pile after pile each grain represents one human being. A landscape is created in the great hall of the Ringlokschuppen Ruhr which signifies the world: political relations, historic conflicts, present day crises and wars but also personal events, love stories and glimmers of hope.
Numbers disappear and become stories while the immersive installation ‘Of All The People In All The World’ constantly changes. Piles grow or diminish, fresh mounds are added while others are swept up and taken away. Here are all the refugees who have found a new home in the region next to all those people who have helped them, as volunteers or working for authorities. There you’ll find all the ex-miners in the Ruhr region next to those who are still working. Newcomers next to long-term residents. The male members of Mülheim city council alongside the tiny heap of their female colleagues. Children who will go blind today and die within a year next to all those who will be born on this day.
Working together with the city statistician and armed with all kinds of research, Stan’s Cafe dig deep into the numerical world of Mülheim and the Ruhr region. And, as people here once did with coal, they bring the surprising potential of population statistics about a region undergoing structural change to light. In the firm belief that facts are facts – even if we can use them to tell different stories. The human lives behind these facts cannot be simply tweeted away – yet at the same time all facts are resources that are being fought over.
What can statistics tell us about the world? How do abstract facts relate to real people? ‘Of All The People In All The World’ invites us to use our own questions and statistics to become part of a poetic, playful landscape of manifold narrations which we nevertheless still need to interpret for ourselves.

Saturday, 24 June, 6-11 PM
Preview at ExtraSchicht
(Entrance only with ExtraSchicht Ticket)

Talk „Where are we now? Perspektiven der Silent University Ruhr“
Mülheim an der Ruhr, Dezentrale
Wednesday, 7 June, 6 PM

Talk „Politische Partizipation von Geflüchteten und MigrantInnen in Zahlen“
with Justin Fonkeu (Silent University Ruhr), Matthias Frense u. a.
Ringlokschuppen Ruhr
Tuesday, 27 June, 7:30 PM

Workshops for adolescents aged 10-14
During opening hours
Registration via mail to Zsolt Kaldy, zsolt.kaldy@ringlokschuppen.de

Silent University Ruhr participates in the conception and realisation of „Of All The People In All The World“ Edition Mülheim an der Ruhr.

OPENING HOURS

Admission free

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