Teutônia
In June 2011, the first Complaints Choir of South America began to form in Teutônia, Brazil as part of a travelling program for the 8th Biennial of Mercosul Visual Arts in Porto Alegre. The choir was conducted by musician Lucas Brolese. At their first meeting on 9th July, roughly 45 citizens of the small town produced around 500 complaints for their song, ranging from social injustice in Brazil to the fact that the fire engine of Teutônia (a present from Germany) can only travel at 40km per hour. (Teutônia has a large population of descendants of German immigrants.)
The first public performance of the Teutônia Complaints Choir, aka Coro de Queixas de Teutônia, took place on 23rd July at 2pm in the Administrative Town Centre (an interesting building mimicking German Fachwerk architecture). This was followed by performances in Montenegro and Porto Alegre on 24th July and 11th September respectively.
Dresden & Berlin
The Nordwind Festival invited the Kalleinens to coordinate two choirs simultaneously, one in Dresden and the other in Berlin. On 5th October 2013, online invitations went out to the cities for people to join the choirs for their first rehearsals on 2nd and 3rd November, which can be found here for Dresden and here for Berlin. Some people from Berlin also created a short animation for the Nordwind Festival, explaining the basics of the complaints choir project for beginners with the aim of encouraging citizens of Berlin and Dresden to sign up (in German).
After four additional rehearsals for each, the performances took place on 22nd and 23rd November for Dresden, and 27th and 30th November for Berlin. The Berlin choir was conducted by Miss Le Bomb (aka Catriona Shaw) at HAU, and one of the specific complaints for this choir was about the new developments in the local airport. Oliver notes how, after reading and listening to roughly 40,000 complaints for the project overall, it gets more difficult to find new complaints, and many of the complaints in Berlin were quite similar to previous big cities, such as noisy neighbours, dog sh*t and public transport. However, Berlin did come up with some unique complaints, such as 'soon I am dust'.
Roughly 30 complainers joined each choir, and the songs contained (as always) a great snapshot of private and civic life in those cities. The choirs received good coverage in the German news.
Khurvaleti/Shavsvebi
As of 1st April 2014, Tellervo and Oliver completed the Complaints Choir project with Artasfoundation in the above two settlements for Internally Displaced People (IDP) in Georgia. Artasfoundation had invited the Kalleinens to take their project into the country in the hope that their art of complaining could act as a mediator in the Georgian conflict. The aim or diplomatic mission of this NGO (non-governmental organisation) is to use art as a foundation for processes of peace or change.
This crisis situation in Georgia had meant that people had to move out of the state of South Ossetia into the above camps with very difficult living conditions. Being mostly farmers, these people also had very little, and were stuck waiting in these villages. This new context for the Complaints Choir project brought a welcome challenge.
