Tag: Die Strasse

Join us for another instalment in FADO’s Walk-And-Talk performance series.

Free, all welcome.

Clint Enns takes us on a cinematic Walk-And-Talk through the work of Karl Grune’s 1923 film, Die Strasse, narrating the film as a performative-intervention.

Enns’ Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] re-imagines Karl Grune’s 1923 Die Strasse as a walking film. The film follows movements of a man who leaves his home and drifts through the city at night, each step carrying him deeper into the dangers of the street. Cinema as walk, narrative as restless wandering.

The artist’s reworking intervenes in this walk by adding a textual element and voice, shifting the film from “silent walkie” to “talkie.” A detour[nement] where new stories emerge in motion.

Clint Enns is a visual artist, writer, and curator living in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. His post-cinematic practice consists of reworking existing films, disrupting their conventional narratives and forms. His interventions destabilize the cinematic image, turning familiar works into sites of critical play and reinterpretation. By appropriating and manipulating filmic material, Enns challenges the permanence of cinema as a fixed cultural object, presenting it as malleable, thinking though the ways moving images persist, mutate, and circulate in a post-cinematic landscape shaped by digital technologies and remix culture.

© Karl Grune, Die Strasse, 1923. Film still.

Curated by Francesco Gagliardi and Julian Higuerey Núñez

There’s a storytelling technique, originated in procedural TV and later adopted by narrative films and videogames, in which two or more characters have an important conversation while walking between places. The technique is generally used as a way of conveying large volumes of information in a dynamic way, while introducing the audience to the relative placement of various locations and communicating a sense of urgency. As a narrative device, it effectively functions as a way of combining two distinct vectors of a narrative (the visual and the aural) into a more compact and efficient whole. 

This technique is referred to as Walk-and-Talk. 

While there isn’t anything analogous in the realm of performance art, walking (to and from the site of a performance; as a component of the performance itself; as a stage of the creative process) and talking (as part of the performance or around it, like in the “artist talk”) are, for artists and audiences alike, such commonplace components of the experience of making and watching performances, that they tend to be taken for granted and disappear from view.

In this new, ongoing series, FADO highlights and investigates these foundational gestures of the performance art vocabulary—walking, talking—through performances and discursive interventions that explore their intrinsic mutual imbrication. After all, isn’t the stroll of the flâneur always also the articulation of an argument? Aren’t the verbal excesses of every character in a classic novel who pines for an unattainable elsewhere just another way of getting there?

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2024: The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony: A Travelling Circus by Cason Sharpe
2024: part of the ramble that remained in the end without by Mark So
2025: FADO & the Independent Artist’ Union march at the Labour Day Parade in Toronto!
2025: Your New Normal: An Afternoon with Margaret Dragu
2025: Die Strasse [Back Alley Edit] by Clint Enns
2026: Walk-And-Talk, the audio podcast series (coming soon!)