Brecht - Fragments

Raven Row, London, June - July 2024

Another remarkable and ambitious exhibition by Raven Row, presenting the never before shown archive material of German playwright Bertolt Brecht alongside daily live performances of a montage of 4 of his unfinished plays.

Whilst the majority of the gallery became the stage for a small cast of actors directed by Phoebe von Held (exhibition co-curator as well as set designer), 4 of the rooms were dedicated to the display of delicate paper manuscripts, montages and archive material loaned by the Bertolt Brecht Archive in the Berlin. We were tasked with designing vitrines especially for this material to satisfy the environmental preservation requirements of the lending institution.

The interior of the vitrines needed to be inert and atmospherically sealed with wireless temperature and humidity monitoring. Light levels in the galleries couldn’t exceed 50 lux. To meet these requirements we developed a series of folded powder coated aluminium trays with a projecting perimeter lip detail to support toughened glass lids on neoprene sealing strips. The underside of these trays have removable trays containing silica gel humidity control cassettes and monitoring equipment which can be accessed without disturbing the delicate works within the vitrine.

The trays are supported on a modular framework of steel square hollow section comprising of a standard corner leg element, and varying lengths of connecting rails between. The larger vitrines are supported on 40mm SHS and a series of smaller vitrines for showing A4 scale material are made from 30mm SHS. All legs have a sleeved adjustable foot detail to enable the vitrine tables to stand level on Raven Row’s historic timber floors. In the most extreme case the adjustment between on end of a vitrine table and the other was 80mm! The square plate feet (slightly larger than the leg section) with radiused corners gives the vitrines a quiet but deliberate poise.

The smaller vitrines in the upper historic rooms were designed to enable a tilting fillet to be fitted between the frame and the vitrine tray to angle the displayed work into the room. This can be removed to revert to standard flat vitrines in the future, and all the vitrines can be dismantled for storage in advance of future use.

One part of the archive that couldn’t be shown in the standard vitrines was a manuscript comprising of 10 double sided pages of text and pasted images. Shown in a small and narrow gallery space on the top floor of the gallery, we designed a liner ‘goal post’ type stand for a cantilevered sandwich of perspex sheets which held the pages suspended above a folded sheet beam onto which text translations could be added.

Photograhs - Jones Neville