Let's write a Fairy Tale

Let’s write a Fairy Tale is about an invitation to a site-specific formal dinner, creating a participatory process, playing with gossip and facts, triggering curiosity, making guests become writers, andcreating an urban fairy tale.

The intention of the project Let's write a Fairy Tale was to play around with urban mythologies, gossip and fake news to challenge people’s imagination. To realize it, we focused on some real facts and rumours about a local character and a special location in Stuttgart: Österreichischer Platz. We invited people to join us for a formal dinner on-sight. Through a participatory and playful approach of mixing facts and gossip, we triggered curiosity and collective thinking among our guests and gave them the chance to become co-writers of an urban fairy tale.

By means of this performative experiment, we examined possible ways of how urban myths are developed these days and approached a whole set of questions: How does our society interpret facts and gossip – how intuitive can we be in our creativity even when we cannot really define TRUE/FALSE. How do we read facts when we are so close to the historical past they are referring to? Are we objective or subjective in our interpretation of the past? What do we choose to remember and how? What are the aspects we choose to pass on to the next generation like “knowledge”? How does it feel when we have the power and/or responsibility to be the keepers or makers of the past? Do we want to highlight something (moral norms, criticizing mentality or a political situation, etc.) and are we doing it in an objective way? How does our personal background affect our memory? And, last but not least, what about the future?

The performative dinner offered the opportunity for collective urban dreaming, reactivating the power of urban desire among the participants. It was also about experiencing Österreichischer Platz and keeping the place – which is currently used as a temporary space for urban experimentation – alive.

Time

June 2019

Location

Stuttgart

Team

Pavel Naydenov

Valerie Rehle

Nathalie Wachotsch

in collaboration with Stadtlücken Verein