Following receiving the GRAIN prize during FORMAT 2013 Meichsner began to research and develop a proposal to make new work for the Library of Birmingham.

The working title for the new work is  RE-ENACTING IN UK.  The project is a resumption of personal work which explores leisure time activities and their relation to daily life. Whilst the latter is often characterised by routine and responsibility, leisure or ‘free time’ is assumed to provide freedom to do whatever one wants to do.  Yet, despite this freedom there seems to be a persistent need for structure and security and organisiation.

Participating in a Living History Display often means submitting to a particular organisational and power structure, characteristic of the respective time, clearly defining the scope of action for men, women and children. This power structure does not only limit freedom but also provides identity and the security of a clearly-defined frame of action, aspects that in today’s society are consistently pressurized.  The new work will explore this topic from another angle asking why re-enacting the past is so seductive as leisure time activity. Perhaps experiencing a hard life as during the medieval may ground its re-enactors and give them a more comfortable feeling about their actual lives, which may have become a bit too safe and predicable.