It must have been around 1983 when the Munich Ethnological Museum exhibited a complete Tibetan village in its rooms, which on some days was even "animated" by Tibetans flown in especially for the occasion, who pretended to go about their daily business unobserved in front of the astonished public. Among our friends we made fun of this and were outraged: "You can't exhibit another culture like in a zoo! Just think, in a museum in Nairobi or Kinshasa a Bavarian village would be set up, and in the tavern real Bavarians would sit and drink beer, and on the reconstructed village square Schuhplattler would be danced. And so the idea was born for the installation exhibition "Come on, Seppl, cheer up!", an exhibition about Bavaria as seen from the outside, from Africa, for example, an exhibition that we would promote in such a way that it had already run with great success in Nigeria and Congo - and would now also be shown in Bavaria, so that people could now marvel in the heart of Bavaria at what they thought was Bavarian in foreign countries.
So we went out and interviewed traditional costume associations, folk dance groups, traditional costume fashion designers, Lower Bavarian caberettists, folk song and folk theater groups, and so on, and asked them all what they thought was Bavarian. We summarized the results in an exhibition - with 10 stations and accompanied by three theater performances, which could be seen on May 8 and 11, 1986 in the exhibition halls at Lothringer Str. 13 in Munich Haidhausen - a few days after the reactor at Chernobyl blew up a few hundred kilometers to the east. In spite of all the humor and accretion of the preparation (documented in a 450-page seminar paper), in the shadow of this catastrophe, unfortunately, hardly anyone was interested in our early contributions to decolonization.

At least that's how it might have been ... according to my first spontaneous memory, about 40 years later. In fact, it was probably a bit more complicated. Because if you read in this mentioned seminar paper, I had probably come across some similar elements in the productions of the "experimental" theater groups in Munich and the Bavarian folk culture, dance, music, and had the idea to investigate whether these same elements as significant signs in their respective contexts meant the same or different things. Because this could never have been done alone, I founded an interdisciplinary seminar with professors of theater studies, literature (Bavarian literary history), linguistics, German as a foreign language and folklore, Dr. Passow, Prof. Moser, Prof. Gerndt, Prof. Weinrich and Prof. Altmann. We also cooperated with four Munich theater groups, the Tape Theater (Colin Gilder), the ProT (Alexej Sagerer), the minimal club and the Phren Ensemble Carmen Nagel-Berninger). In the end, all that was left was to collaborate with a theater group, the latter Phren Ensemble - and together with the student group we had formed first as a seminar, then as an organizational team and organizer, we produced our own play entitled: "Larifaris Wirre Reden über die Entstehung des Seppl-Mythos".

In the movies uploaded here, you can listen to the "concept radio play" in which the exhibition in Lothringer Str. 13 is described in a flowery way - and you can listen to the audio recordings of the last two rehearsals of the said play. In addition, I found one of the interviews with the actress Rita Winhart, on whose basis I wrote the play. And an interview with the fashion designer Fr. Rainer (Fa. Lodenfrey). A collage of statements by the professors involved and the feed of an audio installation about Karl Valentin round off the audio material.