The Department of Small Solutions (2024)

as a part of 10 TAGE FREISCHWIMMEN at Theater Rampe

in collaboration with Emilia Dorr, Teppei Higuchi, and Maryna Mikhalchuk

The Department of Small Solutions was a government department created in the framing of the 10 TAGE FREISCHWIMMEN Festival. Taking the form of a bureaucracy, we collected the small problems of the city of Stuttgart during our open office hours. Then, we tried to find as many solutions to these problems as we could.

We asked participants to fill out a bureaucratic form titled “Application for a Small Solution (ASS)”. This form was interspersed with small fonts that offered an alternative way to deal with the form: providing a different answer, changing answer, or to disfigure the form itself. Perhaps smallness may is a method in attending to the personal, to alternatives that might radically connect us to one another.