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deufert&
plischke
spinnereischwelm
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coming up:
Single-channel video, 50 min., color, sound
Various languages with English subtitles
2026 (ZAF, GER)
A film by:
Gaby Saranouffi, deufert&plischke, Moeketsi Koena and Thabiso Heccius Pule
First screenings:
⥟ March 4th 6 pm / Goethe Institute South Africa / Johannesburg
⥟ March 7th 1pm / Bapedi Hall / Soweto
⥟ April 9th 7:30 pm / Pina Bausch Zentrum under construction / Wuppertal
⥟ May 9th 7:30 / online worldwide premiere / link will be published here beginning of May.
artistic statement
Since 2001, deufert&plischke have understood themselves as an artists’ collective working in shifting constellations. Their work engages with choreography, electronic music, film, photography, video, and media installations. What connects these practices is less the medium than the way the works come into being.
At the center of their artistic research are the human body, vulnerability, and the ambivalence and complexity of gender and identity. Their projects emerge from encounters, relationships, and collective experiences, and from the spaces that open up between social interactions.
From the beginning of their collaboration—as an artist couple, as artistic twins, and later as a family—authorship has never been singular or clearly defined. In the art world, authorship often functions as a means of producing identity, power, and market value. Power, however, always carries the risk of abuse. Deufert&plischke therefore understand their collective and familial way of working as a conscious practice: an attempt to explore alternative social possibilities already within the smallest social unit.
Their works do not aim at representation, but at the emergence of real, temporary societies. Art, in this sense, only comes into existence through participation. Whenever they work with other artists or with members of the urban community, everyone involved is invited—and required—to actively contribute to the creation of the work.
As early as 2005, this approach led to the development of AnArchives: open collections of materials shared without copyright, accompanied by the invitation to transform them into something else. Following the principle: Give me your material, and I will show you what you do not do with it.
Over time, the social radius of their practice expanded. In the Emergence Room, first realized in 2010 at the mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, the exhibition space consisted solely of materials that visitors could manipulate and use to shape the room themselves. Inspired by the myth of Arachne, a walk-in spider space emerged, whose form and structure developed entirely through the actions of the participants.
In later projects such as the Entropic Institutes, realized in cities including Sofia, Mülheim, Tel Aviv, and Hamburg, the entire city became the playing field. In the small village of Elmstein in the Palatinate Forest, the collective went one step further: together with the entire village, they invented a fictional artist, reconstructed her complete body of work, and built a museum for her. Authorship, the notion of the artwork, and collective memory thus became shared social processes.
In recent years, the collective has included Kattrin, Thomas, Moritz and Simon Deufert, Lena Berger, Karen Zimmermann, Nilüfer Kemper, Philipp Czychon, and Lea Gerschwitz. Based at spinnereischwelm in North Rhine-Westphalia, the collective develops projects through long-term artistic research, sustained collaborations, and international exchange.
Rather than working through short-term interventions, deufert&plischke build enduring working relationships with artists, cultural institutions, and local communities. Long-term collaborations connect their practice to Kuopio and Oulu in Finland and to Los Angeles in the United States, while an emerging partnership is currently being developed in Johannesburg, South Africa. These connections form continuous lines of dialogue and shared production across different social and geographic contexts.
Social sustainability is central to their artistic approach. Their work is fundamentally collaborative and participatory, growing out of specific local contexts while remaining closely connected to the people and places that shape it.
From spinnereischwelm as a point of departure, their projects have been realized in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Tel Aviv, Alexandria, Athens, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, Istanbul, Oulu, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Bergen, Stamsund, Copenhagen, Singapore, Kuopio, Warsaw, Poznań, Prague, Žilina, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Barcelona, and Madrid.
spinnereischwelm
The spinnereischwelm is a registered non-profit association dedicated to promoting contemporary art in rural areas. Located in the heart of Schwelm, the association creates an open space of possibilities for artistic practice, exchange, and social discourse. At the core of its work lie issues of great social relevance: horizontal forms of collaboration in rural contexts, the lived realities of women in the countryside, precarious living and working conditions, as well as questions of the body, sexual, and gender identity. spinnereischwelm e.V. often develops its projects together with the residents of Schwelm—through a participatory process that incorporates the perspectives and experiences of the local community. Among its most recent projects is Fountains, an artistic exploration of bodily boundaries and the taboo of bodily fluids, which—at Schwelm’s former outdoor swimming pool, the Schwelmebad—addressed questions of intimacy, shame, and social norms.
Funding & Partners
The work of deufert&plischke I spinnereischwelm is made possible and supported by many funding partners, including the «Spitzenförderung Tanz des Landes Nordrhein Westfalen» and the «Kunststiftung NRW».
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