Villa Serpentara Fellowship 2024
Eva Desseker
*1959, Karlsruhe (DE)
Lives in Berlin (DE)
Section: Performing arts
Vita
Eva Desseker is a costume and set designer and has been a freelancer for major international opera houses and festivals since 1990. After studying art history and classical archaeology in Freiburg, her artistic development began in the 1980s at the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (artistic director Peter Stein). Initially an employee of Moidele Bickel, she started early on to work closely with Klaus Michael Grüber and the artists Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, Antonio Recalcati. This a formative and intensive collaboration continued until Grüber's death in 2008. The Schaubühne's special approach during these years, the months of intensive preparation for each play, allowed her to explore all the areas that are necessary for a performance from the ground up. One important focus was the independent and intuitive learning of unusual dyeing and processing techniques or the invention of new materials from existing old ones. Throughout her career, she has always maintained and advanced her artistic strategy for costume design through a free associative approach. She always starts of by creating her own free world. The sketches, collages and improvisations initially seem to have nothing in common with the usual readable figurine – until they reveal a clear dramaturgy like a golden thread in the further process and become a figure. The final focus is always on the performer. During rehearsals, she works with them on the costume as a second supporting skin between the role and the person to create a complete tableau. Last seen in May 2023 in "La Bohème" at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, directed by Claus Guth. Since 1990, other important collaborations as a freelance costume designer included projects with directors Luc Bondy Bob Wilson, Patrice Chéreau, George Tabori, Andrea Breth, Alvis Hermanis, Karin Beier, Janusz Kica, Evgeny Titov and their stage designers Karl Ernst Hermann, Richard Peduzzi, Johannes Schütz, Duri Bischoff, Etienne Pluss. Another formative collaboration was the one with Karl Lagerfeld, who designed the costumes for Hofmannsthal's "The Difficult Gentleman" for the Salzburg Festival in 1991. She remained very close to Moidele Bickel, both as a friend and professionally, until her death in 2016. To this day, she continues to look after her Bickel's estate, which she left to the Akademie der Künste Berlin in her will.
Residency
Workbooks, drafts, collages and notes on many productions were created during my intensive collaboration with Klaus Michael Grüber and the artists Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, Antonio Recalcati. This extensive material has been lying dormant as creative energy in my archive boxes for years. It is actually a source, a treasure, because it reflects a period of the procedures in the creative life of all those involved. To me, making these mostly very free designs accessible and understandable, which served as the basis for the costume work, is a part of theatre history. During my stay at Villa Serpentara, I would like to open the boxes, review them, compile and explain them in writing, match them with photo and film documents, and then turn them over to the Akademie der Künste for the Klaus Michael Grüber Archive as an example of the artistic collaboration between production, stage and costume design. The aim is also to work on a publication about legendary costume designer Moidele Bickel, whose countless drawings and designs are for the most part stored at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin