I Love You, Goodbye

A Performance/Happening, where performers cook regional dishes to explain their origins to an inquisitive parliament, presided over by a ruthless Mr or Madam Speaker.

I Love You, Goodbye is about looking for shades of grey in a world that seems increasingly black or white. I Love You, Goodbye stares binary opposites in the face and challenges them to find some middle ground. I Love You, Goodbye is a collective ritual of letting go, saying goodbye to things we love in order to recast our relationships with them under new terms and conditions. I Love You, Goodbye is about cookery, cultural difference, social class, ambition, failure and the difficulty of making stark choices in a complex world.

The project takes the form of ‘editions’ where the performers cook meals, sing songs and pick fights in relation to certain themes. The first edition was The Brexit Edition performed on the date the UK was set to leave the EU, 29th March 2019. The second edition was The Digital Detox Edition, which cast a critical eye over life online, presented in the context of Claiming Common Spaces II at FFT Düsseldorf. The third edition was Unfuck My Brexit Edition hosted by Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany in August 2019. Version four, The Brexit and Beyond Edition marked for the official date the UK left the EU, 31st Jan 2020.

I Love You, Goodbye (The Brexit and Beyond Edition)
How could you say Ich liebe dich, when you never actually understood my culture? We are products of history, you and I. We are the outcome of decisions made in special councils, debating chambers, bedrooms and boardrooms. Pledged to be wed before we had even laid eyes on each other, like royal houses that after centuries of fighting, marry off their childrem to each other (Hannover, Wetting, Windsor and Saxe Coburg).  In the name of “Never Again” it was our destiny to be together.

When we met at the university exchange, you and I, we both ended up sitting together in the identity politics class where it was love at first sight. We believed it was us that were making the choices, that we were in the driving seat. All the choices that we made, we saw as part of who we were rather than some prearranged destiny.
Your exotic ways were novel, your knowledge of foreign language films and your wild desire to get naked anywhere was both shocking and exciting.  You loved my sense of humour and my cheap taste in fashion… Oh and your accent! Our differences gave us decades of amusement and fascination.

In fact on the subject of language, what does the word Heimat precisely mean?
But in the meantime, history moved on, and everything changed behind our backs…
At midnight on the 31st Jan of March 2020, the United Kingdom left the European Union. Gob Squad are a German/British group that came into being through meeting on university exchanges in the nineties.  You could say we are the children of the European dream.  Time to reflect on the two sides of midnight.

A production by Gob Squad and HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin.