In Europe, a Sports Field, the collective Freundliche Mitte turns our continent into a playing field: What’s the space we are dealing with and what does the Democracy Report have to say about it? Europe, a Sports Field undertakes a journey through various countries and periods, visiting all the places once or currently occupied as individuals, gatherings, resistance. The game brings players to places of protest at both the centre and the edges, following movements like Occupy or the Arab Spring, all the way to the Middle Ages with their peasant uprisings and witch-burnings until where bodies are no longer allowed to gather and spaces have to be occupied in different, more volatile ways, by interference. With Europe, a Sports Field, Freundliche Mitte try to find impeded, prohibited, past, failed, successful and future common grounds in the shape of an interactive game in which absurd instructions and quotes mingle with interviews and narratives to make up an alternative fiction that no longer leaves the public sphere to the racists, fascists and other enemies of humanity.

The performance collective Freundliche Mitte (“Friendly Centre”), established in 2011 by writer Gerhild Steinbuch, set designer Philine Rinnert and actor Sebastian Straub, have chosen to work without the authority of a director. It constantly grows by new accomplices from different artistic and scientific fields and collaborates with experts from various initiatives and societies. Freundliche Mitte’s works at brut include the colonialism project Darkness (2016) and the performance installation MOUNTAIN ONE (2018) as well as ORATORIO EUROPE (2019). Since 2018, Freundliche Mitte have been working closely with Vienna musician b.fleischmann.