tool / 툴 is a live, multi-voice conversation between a nymph, a saint, a trickster, a ghost, and the host of a call-in radio show about mysterious streams of water, bizarre phenomena, and rebuilding relationships. The stories narrated here bring together questions of the translatability of language and the associated misunderstandings, but they also touch upon the universality of stories and myths and their placeless, timeless sounds. For tool / 툴, Mira Mann has linked together old and new stories, thus interrogating the potential that reinvention and adaptation can offer—here, the gaze is drawn toward both the traditional and the Other, at the intersection of global, social, ecological, and colonial contexts. The performance keys into Mira Mann’s interests in hybrid forms of narration, Korean folk songs, and pansori—a Korean genre of epic musical storytelling, performed by a singer and a drummer. The word pansori is formed of the syllables ‘pan’ (an outdoor playing field; place in which many people gather) and ‘sori’ (sound; music). tool / 툴 is performed with Sarah Doolan, supported by Sol-i So in the production of the musical interpretation. It was written by Mira Mann.

The performance tool / 툴 is taking place in conjunction with the group exhibition Calling at the Kunstverein and concludes the performative program that unfolded over the summer.

Mira Mann (b. 1993, Frankfurt am Main) lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2021, Mann graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their practice includes time based, collaborative and site-specific modes of working. In their performances and cross-media settings Mann explores fictional spaces and storytelling as a medium for visualizing social structures and collective memory. Their resulting discursive scenographies evolve around transcultural relations of human and non-human agents and the glitches they generate between experience and memory, reality and fiction. Mann presented performances at De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunstverein Bielefeld; KIT–Kunst im Tunnel; Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark; PiK Deutz, Cologne; Simultanhalle, Cologne; and at Kunsthalle Osnabrück.