"The corner was simply gone"

Quite possibly. We do a lot of projects, but the mappings are the most effective in terms of publicity. Our first mapping for Museum Night 2019 was the first big mapping in Dortmund, it was exciting and it really hit the spot. Not only with the spectators, but also in the U: employees from all areas came to us and had tears in their eyes because they saw what the Dortmunder U can radiate. I found that very remarkable.

The idea was that the large bookshelf would run diagonally up the side of the house, so we hid the corner. The corner was simply gone.

But our approach is always to tell a story. In France, there are mappings on many churches, some of which run for months, and in Karlsruhe there is the Schlossleuchten, where mappings are repeatedly projected onto the castle over a longer period of time, but these mappings usually only play with the façade parts. In other words, they dissect the building, let the baroque figures run over it or let something come out of the building. That's always a little story too.

But we always want to convey a message beyond that. To make the building speak. When we ask "What Is Europe?", as in Mapping 2021, then it also comes out of the building, then a head comes out that asks me: "What actually is Europe?"

Exactly. The building as an attitude. It conveys the attitude of the people who work there and for whom it stands. The Dortmunder U can be a mouthpiece because it is the building in Dortmund that many people identify with.
And when this building starts to speak to society, then I think that's something special.

In any case. In 2021, we traveled through the history of Europe, from the Crusades, the First and Second World Wars, the deportation train to the refugee crisis, and then critically asked the question: Is Europe this history? What kind of attitude are we spreading in Europe right now and what do we stand for?

It was the most technically complex and the most significant in terms of the narrative. But the most political, I would say, was the mapping in May 2022 for the 50th anniversary of the FH, which was characterized by the impression of the war that had broken out in Ukraine shortly before.

That was our first two-parter. It tells a dystopia and a utopia of our future, between which the audience on the museum forecourt could switch back and forth at any time at the touch of a button. Both productions therefore always ran simultaneously and had to be dramaturgically precisely coordinated so that switching back and forth also made sense in terms of content.

In terms of content, the point was that small changes are not enough. It's not enough if we just drive less, because we actually have to rethink the entire transportation system. Hence the title "Moments Of Transition", and "transition" also meant switching between utopia and dystopia.

There were also very personal lyrics that we wrote ourselves. Lyrics about the question: How do I actually see my own future? And the texts were also divided into utopian and dystopian ones.

With this mapping, we realized that even mappings have limits because they are always tied to a façade. In addition, we can't and don't want to keep expanding the technical side because it would then become more and more expensive and consume more and more energy.

It's harder for me to say that about the Museum Night mappings, where the feedback is often just "totally awesome", "convincing", "super show" and so on.

But the mapping for the FH's 50th anniversary was different. We explicitly asked the visitors to talk to us. The mapping ended with the fade-in "answer the call" and at the same moment the phone in the telephone booth, which was part of the set-up, started to ring.

And then you could go in there and talk to one of our actors about your own thoughts and feelings about the war and specifically about the current war in Ukraine. Many people took advantage of this and there were many personal statements and discussions on the topic.

My colleagues and I also spent a lot of time in the audience during the mapping evenings and talked to people. Everyone was willing to share their thoughts because the mood of the mapping was right.

It wasn't as big a show as usual, but more reserved, maybe a bit more intellectual, but it really created a conversation situation on the forecourt. People talked to each other, openly and honestly, about something that moved them.

• opened in November 2017
• since then managed by Harald Opel
• sees itself as a research facility
• its full name is "Digital Research and Presentation Center of Fachhochschule Dortmund for Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, 360-degree film and immersive worlds of experience"
• Four employees in 2017, around 20 in 2022
• the employees come from the fields of film, film and sound, computer science and scenography at Fachhochschule Dortmund and film studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum

• immersive space in the foyer of the Dortmunder U
• Fulldome in the foyer of the Dortmunder U

• Dortmund Academy for Theater and Digitality
• Dortmund Museums
• Co-production laboratory of the city of Dortmund
• Mining Museum Bochum