The project deals with the visible and invisible rituals, which – back in socialist times – the children in GDR’s pioneers youth mass organisation carried out. The artists collaborate with a group of local children from a youth center inhabiting the former “Haus der Pioniere“ (House of Pioneers), the last of its kind inaugurated in Eastern Berlin district Marzahn in 1988. Together they collect the gestural memories of the last generations of socialist pioneers living in the neighbourhood of Marzahn, which emerged between the late 1970s and early 1980s as the biggest socialist housing project of the GDR. Their (political) gestures and deeply internalized moves – like the pioneers‘ salutation or the tying of the pioneers‘ scarf  – as well as everyday recollections are reinterpreted for the development of choreographic scripts for a series of performative interventions in different localities around Marzahner Promenade.

Through the process of playful de-contextualization the absurdity and the emptiness of these gestures comes to the fore. These rituals, meant to convey the basics of socialist ideology, seem strange and curious to today‘s children, having often been perceived as meaningless already in their parent’s generation.