X & Z

What did you do when you were the same age as me? What will the world be like when I’m your age? What is important to you now, what do you want to change?

These are the questions that each conversation begins with–in Berlin, Cairo or Lancaster–and each conversation begins with an agreement that two people, one each from Generation X and Generation Z, want to get to know each other and continue a converstion over four years. Puberty meets mid-life crisis, doubts starting out meet doubts taking time out. Both share an unease with the present, gloomy prospects for the future and a desire to do something to change things. Between them lie thirty years of life experience or expectations. Once a year they will meet in front of their phone cameras for an exchange as equals. Each time their faces will look different–but how will their expectations and fears, hopes and abilities evolve? What will happen to them and what will they control in their own hands?

With the long-term project X&Z Mats Staub and his team want to encourage an art form that has become a rarity: the art of listening to each other. Spanning generations but also spanning locations and lived experiences. Younger and older people everywhere are concerned about what is to come, they know about the challenges involved and try to deal with them–we are now all entering the final years in which the rise in global temperatures can be limited to 1.5%, but the demands and consquences of this crisis vary greatly between areas with different climates and levels of prosperity. There are good reasons for younger people to blame older ones and for poorer regions to blame richer ones. But might it also be possible for generations and areas of the world to learn from each other together?

X&Z is based on Mats Staub’s many years of experience with conversation-based art projects and takes on a new time dimension: it will accompany the processes of how people and their dialogues develop over a period of four years–following the youngest teenagers from 14 to 18 and the oldest from 16 to 20, while the adults range from the threshold of their forties into their fifties. What does it mean for young people to grow up in an information-saturated environment, surrounded by dystopic scenarios? How do these change their views of what older people have already lived through?

From 2030 onwards, X&Z can be presented as a video installation: the audience will be able to move around freely, as was the case in 21–Memories of Growing Up. For the participants (and production team), X&Z is a slow advance into an uncertain future. For the audience it will be an encounter with various different pasts and realities – where recent events are made present; as well as with personal developments over the last four years; real lives in different parts of the world; as well as one’s own teenage years and underlying emotions. In all the conversations, what matters is honesty, the things people are sure and unsure about, and the joy of being alive.

X&Z is conceived as a project that will grow and that can develop beyond 2030, depending on the partners who can be found to produce, present and finance it. So far, a pilot project with five teenagers and adults has been running in Berlin (the first filming took place in June 2023) and the Berliner Festspiele are co-production partners. In 2026 first conversations shall be filmed in Lancaster, Frankfurt, Kairo and Bern. In collaboration with our local production partners we will look for four young people and four adults per location who are willing to take part in hosted conversations on camera in each of the next four years.

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The conversations will be conducted by mobile phone, while the participants will each be filmed with a second mobile phone camera. This setting requires local technical support but will ensure superior visual and audio quality (it is not dependent on an internet connection and can be done using the high quality back camera on a smartphone)–and also that each person is sitting in their own room, which, particularly for teenagers, represents a familiar everyday setting. It is envisaged that for the first conversations the participants will meet in one place (a private home with three separate rooms would be suitable); in the succeeding years, however, the hosting could be done remotely without need of a travel budget and in the event of one or other of the participants relocating elswehere, it would be technically feasible to set up a temporary studio there (all that would be required is the two phones, two LED lamps, tripods and a black cloth). For visitors to the installation this creates a significant visual difference with a Zoom conversation, where all the participants look directly into the camera. In X&Z two people can always be seen who are being filmed while talking on the phone (once from the left hand side, once from the right hand side) so that when they are displayed on two monitors arranged at a slightly oblique angle, their eyes appear to meet, while their speaking and listening faces can always be seen clearly.