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write-up/kultureflash_20.01.2008
Ben van Berkel
At the beginning of his strangely beautiful novel Steppenwolf, German-Swiss writer Herman Hesse’s alter ego Harry Haller is given a ticket to a ‘Magic Theater,’ in which he later finds himself participating in a series of fantastic, drug-induced, hallucinatory episodes, including a discussion with Mozart and the fatal stabbing of his friend Hermine.
Whereas Dutch architect and UNStudio founder Ben van Berkel’s Theatre of Immanence may not offer such labyrinthine delusions, it does promise to have a “multidisciplinary character” and investigate an “interchange between ideas, theories, and communications of artists, architects and a cultural theorist” in a “continuous world of emerging realities”.
Immanence, as you’ll remember from your Latin classes, comes from in manere – to remain within – a concept that thinkers have used to describe a divinity that is inseperably present in all things (one can find God wherever one seeks). An educated guess is that van Berkel traces a philosophical trajectory from Spinoza to Deleuze (who called his final essay Immanence: A Life) on the stage of his theatre. The question, it seems, is whether the electronic sign above the entrance echoes that above Hesse’s delirious playhouse: “Magic Theater. Entrance not for everybody. For madmen only!”