GALLERY DISCUSSION BERLIN
"Gallery Discussion Berlin" Pamplet and Intervention with Bettina Wind, at the Gallery Weekend Berlin, May 2009.
On the first weekend of May 2009 over 40 galleries opened their doors for the second editions of “Gallery Weekend Berlin”, a marketing strategy that aims at attracting international visitors and among them potential clients. This year, galleries opened on May 1, while festivities and demonstrations of the international workers day were happening in the streets. During the late afternoon and evening we distributed pamphlets that pretended to be a cover version of the official invitation, but that contained statements and questions which were not likely to arise in the participating galleries. If and how the discussion would take place, depended on the potential participants “in situ”.
Histories of Hope and Fear. A visit to the exhibition “40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive” in Frankfurt am Main.
A gesture calls my attention, right after I entered the exhibition space: Slavoj Zizek is waving his hands fervently, his double-portrait performs an a-synchronized choreography, two Zizeks drawing invisible lines in the air. I cross the space and reach the TV sets on top of two columns; I sit down, take the earphones and try to follow Slavoj Zizek’s performance on both screens, while his persistent word cascades drop into my ears. After a few minutes the two Zizeks disappear and I see a crowd of students demonstrating and fighting with the police on one screen, while the second screen is filled by red light and electronic improvisations on Communist texts. I’m back in the Frankfurt of 68.
The performance might have taken place in the 90s, though. It is part of the two-channeled video “Ghost Loop”, the artist Pedro Lagoa had created in collaboration with the two artists of the exhibition, Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind. All material was found in the vast amount of video material collected and recorded by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm during the 20 years of its existence. Having fought for a community centre as cultural and political hub of Frankfurts neighbourhood Bornheim since the 70s, the young team of culture makers and technicians part of whom are still working there today, finally managed to open the freshly renovated tower of the former Mouson Soap Factory in 1988.
In the meantime things have changed in Frankfurt: the ambitious project of placing newly-built museums and culture institutions in a row along the riverside, had given a brand new face to Frankfurts “high culture”. The team of the interdisciplinary culture centre Mousonturm had given its culture factory a more humble look, but nevertheless had developed ambitious plans and visions as well. The initial idea was to provide rehearsal spaces and a stage for Frankfurt-based theatre companies, musicians, and street artists, as well as to produce international festivals in the tower and in the streets and squares of Frankfurt. The place ran run its own printing workshop, hosed a primary school, offered residency spaces to visual artists, and invited former professionals to exchange with the younger generation… not exactly the activities and events Mousonturm is known for by now: concerts of pop, independent, jazz, world, electronic, theatre, performance, and dance productions by international companies, seminars, workshops and book presentations, in short: a diverse range of activities attracting a diverse range of publics. Not to mention the programs and initiatives that came and went during the years in between…
So my first question when invited to write an essay on “40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive” was, how to select material and moments from a 20-years history of a place that had hosted thousands of artists, writers, musicians, performers, from Blixa Bargeld to Amos Oz, from Susanne Linke to Lone Twins? I asked to have a look on the material, the two artists Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind had gathered during their research in the tower’s archive on the top floor of the building. It turned out to be an endless amount of scans and copies of reviews, of technical information, photos, protocols and prints, of emails and letters sent to artists, producers, sponsors, and institutions. I did not get a clear image of what Mousonturm really was about, but a vast imagination of what the artist’s workload has been.
When I visited the exhibition finally on its opening night, I was surprised by the bright, transparent space, structured by grey wall areas, a yellow tape marking a possible parcour, and card boxes, open and closed. Some old wooden boards I recognized as shelves to store posters in the archive, served as basic structure upon which the boxes and their content were displayed. I followed the yellow tape line through the first years of Mousonturm up to the farthest future of 2028, when the line passed the window and faded out in the streets outside the building. In-between I found: a miniature theatre, a dictionary, a collection of photos and of strange objects, lists of technical devices and aesthetical principles, some games, a string-based model, a booklet telling 10 different stories about the “40 years of Mousonturm”… every element revealed another aspect of the centre’s results of continuous programming and networking. There was a period during which the program got dense and connected to discourses on art and politics that surpassed local debates and reached out towards the interconnected European scene of culture and theory. There were handmade technical devices that now served as a kind of “homage” to artists who have continuously developed their work at Mousonturm: Rui Horta, director of the dance company S.O.A.P. that had challenged the theatre’s technical and production capacities by international tours in the 90s; Brigitta Linde’s poetical theatre and sound pieces; Helena Waldmann’s excentric performance experiments. Names of contemporary choreographers and conceptual performers re-appear in boxes, leaflets and posters: Raimund Hoghe, Xavier LeRoy, VA Wölf, Frankfurter Küche… it would take too long to mention everybody who had left traces in the archive and the installation itself. What all of them have in common, though, is the nature of traces they left: not materialized but imaginary ones; not clear manifestations but vague memories, recalling an intensity in movement, an emotion caught in a moment, or a voice passing.
In this sense, the around twenty card boxes spread in the exhibition space remind of “time capsules” guarding what was essential at one moment, but gone in the next one. The drawings of gestures, the photos of empty guest apartments, and the texts reconstructing events do not only refer to past activities, but also to temporality and disappearance, twin sisters accompanying any kind of performance. Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years, if the last ones have brought already so many changes, so many waves of styles and fashions? Performance and music history has a short breath, though the artists themselves need to sustain their own breath during a much longer period. The exhibition, even in its playful mood of presenting different games and tracks for an imaginary future, reflects not only on time and on possible narratives to tell the past, but also on the future of a fragile landscape of culture, open to hope, fear, and wild speculations.
There is no truth in history. “To find is to invent, to work with the resistance of things”, write the artists in their first announcement. Everybody might find something else in what they found and invented. They proposed a changing site in which every week new boxes are being opened and others closed; an open labyrinth of hints and stories, that do not exactly tell the history of a culture centre, but that evoke an imagination of how a place has been shaped and filled with professional life during the last 20 years - and hopefully the future ones as well.
February 2009, Simone Sasmayoux
EINLADUNG // INVITATION finissage // performance Oliver Augst & Stefan Beck
Liebe Freunde und Kollegen, dear colleagues and friends,
Am Samstag, dem 28. Februar um 21 Uhr geht die Ausstellung "40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive" zu Ende. Eine herzliche Einladung an alle, zur Finissage noch einen letzten Blick in Vergangenheit und Zukunft des Künstlerhauses zu werfen und beim Live-Sprecheinsatz von Oliver Augst und Stefan Beck dabeizusein!
This Saturday, February 28th at 9 pm, our exhibition "40 Years of Mousonturm // A Retrospective" will close its doors. Have a last look into the potential past and future of Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, and feel invited to listen to the live improvisation, performed by Oliver Augst and Stefan Beck!
Oliver Augst & Stefan Beck: "Sprecheinsatz // Alle Künstler"
Über 3000 Künstlernamen der vergangenen 20 Jahre chronologisch gelistet und vertont in 20 Minuten...? Da muss es flott zugehen! Oliver Augst & Stefan Beck arbeiten mit Mikrofonen, Feedback-Schleifen und Vinyl-Schlagern von 1988 bis jetzt.
Ort: Station, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main
40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive
Ein Projekt von / project by Bettina Wind & Alexandra Ferreira, in Zusammenarbeit mit / in collaboration with Pedro Lagoa, Assistenz Meret Kiderlen
Die Installation 40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive widmet sich den weitläufigen Archiven und Erinnerungsräumen des Mousonturms: Was wurde hervorgebracht und was blieb zurück? Wie hat sich der Mousonturm mit seinen vielfältigen Arbeiten und Initiativen in die lokale, nationale und internationale Kulturszene eingeschrieben? Welche Aktivitäten – sei es Ideenentwickeln, Performen, Beleuchten, Besprechen, Kulissen oder auch Termine verschieben – haben im Turm und in der Erinnerung seiner Besucher Spuren hinterlassen? Und wohin führen diese Spuren?
The installation is fed by the vast archives and memories of the artist centre Mousonturm. What has been produced so far? What was left behind? How did Mousonturm affect the local and translocal culture scene? What kind of activities - developing ideas, performances, light plans, conference schedules and so forth - did leave traces in the memory of the tower and its visitors? Finally: where do these traces lead to?
"40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive"
Liebe Freunde und Kollegen, dear colleagues and friends,
Am Donnerstag, dem 5. Februar um 20 Uhr wird unsere Ausstellung "40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive" eröffnet. Eine herzliche Einladung an alle, mit dabeizusein, wenn sich Vergangenheit und Zukunft des Künstlerhauses auftun!
This Thursday, February 5th at 8 pm, our exhibition "40 Years of Mousonturm // A Retrospective" will open its doors to show the potential past and future of Künstlerhaus Mousonturm. Feel invited to join in the opening or finissage!
Ein Projekt von / project by Bettina Wind & Alexandra Ferreira, in Zusammenarbeit mit / in collaboration with Pedro Lagoa, Assistenz Meret Kiderlen
Die Installation 40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive widmet sich den weitläufigen Archiven und Erinnerungsräumen des Mousonturms: Was wurde hervorgebracht und was blieb zurück? Wie hat sich der Mousonturm mit seinen vielfältigen Arbeiten und Initiativen in die lokale, nationale und internationale Kulturszene eingeschrieben? Welche Aktivitäten – sei es Ideenentwickeln, Performen, Beleuchten, Besprechen, Kulissen oder auch Termine verschieben – haben im Turm und in der Erinnerung seiner Besucher Spuren hinterlassen? Und wohin führen diese Spuren?
The installation is fed by the vast archives and memories of the artist centre Mousonturm. What has been produced so far? What was left behind? How did Mousonturm affect the local and translocal culture scene? What kind of activities - developing ideas, performances, light plans, conference schedules and so forth - did leave traces in the memory of the tower and its visitors? Finally: where do these traces lead to?
Ort: Station, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main
Eröffnung Opening am 5.2. um 20 Uhr
Ausstellung Exhibition vom 6.2. bis 28.2., jeweils Do – So abends / thursdays to sundays
Finissage am 28.2. um 21 Uhr
mit einem Live-Beitrag von / including a live performance by Oliver Augst & Stefan Beck: "Sprecheinsatz // Alle Künstler"
"Mountains are for masochists", de Alexandra Ferreira
8 de Novembro, 16h
Galeria Plumba, rua Adolfo Casais Monteiro, nº 16, à rua Miguel Bombarda, Porto.
às 18h performance de Tânia Carvalho.
O masoquismo da montanha
Parar o tempo. O mecanismo é o da suspensão…e entenda-se segundo múltiplos significados: a suspensão/ espera enquanto atmosfera, a suspensão do conto enquanto amoldado/ censura, a suspensão da percepção do tempo.
A montanha: é quem a enfrenta a não encontrar-se mais no tempo.
O herói embebido pela exaltação sentimental da escalada ao cume, perde a cognição do tempo e os sentidos lhe vêem menos…
Não existindo uma conexão casual entre este tipo de esforço feito para alcançar uma meta e o orgulho em tê-la conseguido, deparamo-nos com uma subordinação temporal e de contrato tácito: antes a dor, depois o prazer e a glória.
A exposição Mountains Are For Masochists da artista Alexandra Ferreira propõe a desconstrução do herói, a criação de uma realidade paralela. Nos trabalhos apresentados – desenho, fotografia, performance-escultura e um pequeno arquivo – a artista relativiza o peso da “empresa”.
A sua produção cria como que uma relação entre o corpo e a montanha. A característica fundamental desta correspondência verte na combinação de frieza e teatralidade, negação e expectativa de desafiar o próprio ser. Um trabalho de Sísifo? Ou apenas uma relação masoquista?
Este heroísmo tão caricato no trabalho da artista atinge o seu limite na experiência de um mundo que já não vale o esforço de tornar as acções heróicas, o sacrifício é em última instancia, um do ut des, e o herói só faz realmente sentido se não existir uma esfera que ultrapasse o seu sofrimento e na qual ele seja feliz.
Ao final deste longo esforço medido pelo espaço e tempo infinitos, o objectivo é atingido.
Antonia Gaeta
If a pamphlet is successful...
"If a pamphlet succeeds it turns into a manifesto. If not, it ends up
in garbage bins or museums."
The State of Translocality
invites you to follow "Pamphlets", a series in the public space of
Eindhoven, (NL), performed by
lädt ein zu "Pamphlets", einer Serie im öffentlichen Raum von
Eindhoven (NL), mit
convida a acompanhar os vários eventos de "Pamphlets" no espaço
público de Eindhoven (NL), com
presente "Pamphlets", interventions à l'espace public de Eindhoven (NL), par
halua tervetuloa Eindhovenissä "Pamphlet"ille, projektille Hollantin
kaupungissä uitnoodig voor "Pamphlets", een serie in de stad
Eindhoven, met
Carla Cruz, Rana Hamadeh, Alicia Herrero, Alexandra
Ferreira & Bettina Wind.
Our first step will be part of the "Be(com)ing Dutch" exhibition at
the VanAbbeMuseum.
Feel free to join the opening on Saturday, 24th of May from 15h on, if
you are around.
Alexandra and Bettina
PS: "What's the use of pamphlets? The pamphlet is the small brother of
Book and Manifesto, sometimes seen just as short in size (5 to 48
pages, defines UNESCO), sometimes as simple, emotional, aggressive,
polemic, even ugly. How did innocent pamphlet (leaflet) become ugly
and aggressive?
Maybe in the act of translation: The "English way" of defining a
pamphlet as "pure format" performs a retrieval from the political
sphere whereas the French and German definition via content does not
take its form seriously. Let's connect both:
"A pamphlet is a printed text small and forceful enough to fly (may it
be thrown from airplanes or into university halls). A pamphlet gets
its power from the potential to draw a "line of flight". As
consequence, a pamphlet can perform a nomadic move
In this sense, it is just the right tool for the State of
Translocality; so we invited four colleagues to (counter)use it with
us in the 'Imagecity' Eindhoven."
http://translocality.blogspot
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10, Eindhoven
www.vanabbemuseum.nl
A research about mountains
Mountains
… are for heroes
… are for men
… are for masochists
… are the past
… are our geological memory
… are still there
… are being destroyed by the tourism machine
… are destroying Austrian villages
… are too mighty
… are too rough
… are sublime
… are attractive for painters
… are attractive for romantics
… are attractive for nationalists
… are far bigger than that
A research about mountains
… are for heroes
… are for men
… are for masochists
… are the past
… are our geological memory
… are still there
… are being destroyed by the tourism machine
… are destroying Austrian villages
… are too mighty
… are too rough
… are sublime
… are attractive for painters
… are attractive for romantics
… are attractive for nationalists
… are far bigger than that
A research about mountains
on mountains
Twelve steps cuts, images, imaginations, carving out the rhizomes that are inherent in the mountains’ structure to reach a rhizome of the female techno body and the scattered surface of the rock, zigzagging through it, jumping, letting fall, using the sticks and bricks and metal picks like teeth and finger nails, using teeth and nails and fingers to dig into holes, to feel the bodies weight against the rock’s sediments, will they hold, will they turn into body mass or will they crush the body into stone mass? It is a question of speed and slowness, just the right ingredients for a becoming, a becoming stone goat bird machine, the endorphin danger fear oxygen drug exhilarating the speed till it becomes part of another sphere just like performing a musical piece without controlling the fingers’ movements anymore performing the whole act of climbing a performance that cannot be taken back no return point every passage looks different when going backwards the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale a dimension that was not obvious step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling to be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still counted as valley as landscape as humanised. Where is the invisible border between up there and among others between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created with animals, humans, cottages?
Extract from a text by Bettina Wind
becomingdutch
During the next three weeks we attend the program becoming dutch in van abbe museum, eindhoven with our ongoing project series state of translocality. You can check this web site
http://becomingdutch.com/events/?s=0,9,0
http://becomingdutch.com/events/?s=0,9,0
Cabinet Magazine #27 Mountains
On 2 August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—who was already in the habit of scaling mountains and, instead of descending by the safest available route, making his way back down by the first, often perilous, pathway that presented itself—ascended Scafell, England’s second-highest mountain, in the Lake District. This time, on the way down, he got stuck, and found himself facing a twelve-foot drop to a ledge so narrow “that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself.” Coleridge survived, and in the account he later gave of the escapade, rehearsed some key terms from a mountainous aesthetic that has flourished for at least two centuries: the experience, he said, was one of prophecy, trance, delight, shame, pain, dreaming, madness, and laughter. Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. He has recently published Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and The Wild Places (2007), a tour and study of the wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. Macfarlane’s first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), essays a historical and personal description of the mixed aesthetic, moral, and scientific modes of mountain appreciation: from the crossing of the Simplon Pass by Thomas Burnet in 1672 to the disastrous attempt on Everest by George Mallory in 1924. Brian Dillon spoke to Macfarlane in Cambridge in May 2007.
Extract from: O Altitudo!: An Interview with Robert Macfarlane by Brian Dillon
(http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/dillon.php)
Extract from: O Altitudo!: An Interview with Robert Macfarlane by Brian Dillon
(http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/dillon.php)
Sculpture under Working Conditions
A pistol of grey marble is lying on a wooden pallet that composes a rough, yet symmetrical background. A clear image, it seems at the first glance: Figure on Background. But as soon as we regard how the material has been used, a paradoxical twist starts to turn the image around: How to connect the heavy weight of the pistol’s material with its (imaginary) use? How to understand the rough materiality with the clean surface in mind that constitutes sublime sculptures of marble? How to decipher the hidden narrative every pistol is pointing to – a trace of the deed – when the traces of work on the pistol itself remain so dominant?
Maybe a look on the second photo can lead us further:
We see the pistol with books, the classical arrangement of a romantic writer’s desk. This time, the background tells more about the setting: a working place of sculptors, a blurred image of other works and pallets that are used to carry stones and sculptures. The photo focuses on the works but does not leave the working frame, the working chain apart. Read from that background the arrangement of book and pistol tells about a transformation: the material that still carries the traces of its process of making is taken out of its frame, is transformed into a small narrative, a metaphoric scenery that does not longer belong to the space of work, but the sphere of art. Just as a writer might have left his notes and lines inside the books, the sculptor has left traces on the hard but smooth looking surface carved of the books; an own texture, an own style realized on a writer’s book, the old symbol for creative expression. The objects still show traces of the industrial act of machines carving the stone, but also of the intimate choreography, the movement of hands forming the stones by holding the machine like a pencil. The sculptor as writer, the writer as worker. In that sense, the sculptures can be read as a double portrait of their maker, exposing their hard materiality that needs to be worked on and the soft line of thought immerging in the act of transformation.
Let’s come back to the pistol: By exposing its materiality in a clear, yet paradoxical way, the pistol lying on a pallet questions its own classical, yet hidden discourse of stone and crime. By being part of the work arrangement pistol and books leave their classical frame and get closer to the sculptor herself, charmingly, ironically pointing out how sculpture is made “under working conditions”.
Let’s see what image will follow next.
By Bettina Wind
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
