FRIDAY - JULY 4, 2008 - 02:33:36 PM

Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin was a collaborative writing project that explored the possibilities of contemporary critical, theoretical and art writing in the context of the New Life Berlin Festival (31st May – 15th June 2008). The three main themes of the New Life Berlin festival were: Transnational Communities, Artistic Social Responsibility and Participation and Intervention. And Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin matched the structure, themes and artistic content of the festival itself: it was curated but participatory at its core, and it involved on and offline communities in examining artistic responsibility and new modes of existing for art critics. Within this model, the purpose of the programme was four fold; 1) to provide written (online and printed) critique and documentation of the festival, 2) to examine the notion of community, 3) to explore the role of criticism in relation to participatory art and 4) to act as professional development programme for new and existing international critical writers. This blog includes all the texts that were written by the 21 international writers on the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin programme, three of whom experienced the festival online from across Europe and the US. Combined, their output represents 5 interviews, 3 previews, 27 reviews and 15 opinion pieces relating to the socially engaged and collaborative art work at the festival and the practice of critical writing. There were also two printed publications produced as part of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. The PDF’s of these publications can be emailed to you on request to opendialogues@gmail.com. Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin programme: 31 May, 10.30am – 5.30pm Writers’ Workshop 2 June, 2.30pm – 5.30pm Writers’ Meeting 5 June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique 7 June, 5pm – 7pm Live Review 7 June, Publication of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin ‘issue 1’ 12 June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique 14 June, Publication of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin ‘issue 2’ 15 June, 11am - 1pm Plenary Session 7 June Open Dialogues: Live Review The Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Live Review was a showcase of, evaluation for and live critical response to Open Dialogues and New Life Berlin. Special guests included: • Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Neilsen (Wooloo Productions) • Doreen Mende (General Public, Berlin) • Tatjana Fell and Lisa Glauer (Arttransponder, Berlin) • Anonymous Representative (30 Days in New Life Berlin) The Writers The writers on Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin were Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete, Alfredo Cramerotti, Clare Carswell, Alexandria Clark, Mary Kate Connolly, Kathryn Fischer, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Christina Irrgang, Joanna Loveday, Cheree Mack, Matthew MacKisack, Carali McCall, Charlotte Morgan, Christin Niehoff, Ann Rapstoff, Valerie Palmer, Carrie Paterson, Kara Rooney, Heiko Schmid, Claire Louise Staunton and Eliza Tan. More details about the writers can be found on the CV section of http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/ Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin was facilitated by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, the directors of Open Dialogues, with assistance from Christina Irrgang (Open Dialogues Associate, Berlin). Please only reproduce articles from this blog with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. http://www.opendialogues.com http://www.open-dialogues.blogspot Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 26, 2008 - 03:06:38 AM

ART AND COMMUNICATION: ON THE POSSIBILITIES NEW LIFE BERLIN OFFERED TO REFLECT ON ART At least there’s one thing which will stay in everybody’s mind: these huge white letters on silver ground. CALL ALL ARTISTS they shout – from an oversized billboard at Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, from posters in the inner city, from all these flyers which were handed out in advance and during the New Life Berlin festival. There’s no doubt; the advertisement for the festival was overwhelming, but what about the communication of the art itself? FIRSTLY: Gaining information on the artist’s work An interview between Joanna Loveday and one of the artistic co-directors of Wooloo Productions – Sixten Kai Nielsen – points out that the individual projects of New Life Berlin have to show themselves during the festival. In regard to „Live Art“ and the nature of ongoing art projects, I understand that projects need to develop during the exhibition. Following the New Life Berlin slogan „participation and intervention“ these projects set their focus on actual interaction with the local public: over the festival’s duration they emerged both by means of civic engagement and through direct artistic intervention. But I wonder: who showed these individuals, namely the artists, to the audience, before the projects began? Sometimes, over the course of New Life Berlin, I wished that there could have been more information on the artists in advance. As both Open Dialogues Associate and a writer with Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin, a critical writing project that aimed to investigate relationships between artists, writers and audience, I found that more information on the artists’ work in general would have helped to understand the participatory aspects of the projects. Although the festival was announced as an ongoing process there was no need to conceal what its artists have already done, what they are going to do, what they are intending to do. For me, this kind of information was not all obvious from the Wooloo site. Just as people are keen to find clear information about everything they are confronted with – especially in the case of ‚art in motion’ – people like to understand artists’ intentions and their background. Moving on from the festival’s mission statement „Call all artists“ I ask: who were these artists and what was their art in New Life Berlin about? SECONDLY: Talking about art during the exhibition As part of NLB, there was an enterprise called „Arts and Conversation“ which suggested it would clarify this confusion. Yes, it supplied three presentations of art. But while „Arts and Conversation“ showcased a variety of artists, it did not supply any conversation on art as a whole. For instance: What happened during the „Arts and Conversation“/„Hack.fem.East“ meeting was a virtual tour through the exhibition which was on show in Kunstraum Kreuzberg. All this occured not in front of the artpieces themselves, as one would imagine. It was more like a walk on a monopoly-board, in which the curators stamped across a floor plan of the exhibition, painted on the ground in one of the rooms of the artspace. It was also remarkable that there was no ‚chair’ in any of these meetings, although the project itself was curated – maybe nobody recognized Katharina Valida Buch, who organised these three artist-talks. It would have been welcome if just anybody acted as the moderator of these meetings. Instead: Silence. Confusion. One of the other Open Dialogues writers suggested that the audience could have been pulled into a more lively discussion if there had been a moderator engaging directly with the main speaker. Sure, the specific art was represented well, for instance when the artist Mariana Viegas spoke, the audience got to know a lot about her photographic practice. But without any moderator or curator for „Arts and Conversation“, it was difficult to break through its monolithic presentations. The audience felt obligated to get a discussion going, and in the end each event was not about the subject “art and conversation” as expected, but a monologue from artists who represented their work on their own. What we, the audience, wanted was a more general debate on the subject ‚art and conversation’ in terms of ‚communication on art’, within art. We needed a ‚leader’ to take us through some discussions on contemporary art, who could have explained the general artistic premise of the festival to the audience, and then the specific artwork. There was a real requirement for the conveyance of an idea about the festival itself. CONCLUSION: Criticality as response to the art which is shown As art criticism comes at the end, conclusion was the task for Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. Indeed, Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin regarded this task as a serious quest for meaning. The aim was to create a debate on those contemporary artistic interventions shown at the festival. But even for an operation like Open Dialogues, which specializes in writing about art that is live or participatory, gaining access to information about the art at New Life Berlin proved to be an onerous task. By summing up the last two weeks on the blog, which is rich in content, it appears obvious that Open Dialogues completed the festival as a whole. The critics engaged with the festival not only through their writings, but also as members of the audience, as Clare Carswell already mentioned in her article on „Old Berliners, New Berliners“. To be writer as well as audience is no easy task. For this reason, the question of whether invited criticism can still be critical might appear again. But whilst you’re reading this – it might also have been answered on it’s own. IN THE MEANTIME, AND IN THE END: The Open Dialogues Blog For a certain time you will find all the infomation on the artprojects shown at New Life Berlin Festival on www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/. For the moment this is the only source that provides you – the (virtual) observer – with content on the festival. This is not only a call to all artists, this is a call to everyone who wants to find out what New Life Berlin was about. What New Life Berlin finally offered the audience in terms of reflection on the festival, is the outcome of the opinions of a variety of critics. But this collection of opinions does not allow the viewer of the blog to find out in retrospect what happend in reality. So far there are no other forms of textual documentation for any of these art projects on the Wooloo site. Instead you now have to trust the conclusions Open Dialogues provides: Open Dialogues’ contributions are the only testimony that remains of the efforts of New Life Berlin’s participatory art. There’s one thing I recognized in my experience over the last two weeks and whilst thinking, reflecting and writing on all this: art is like love – it is never possible without communication. Christina Irrgang Christina Irrgang is the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Associate and studies Theory of Art and Aesthetics at the State University of Media, Arts and Design in Karlsruhe/G and works as a freelance art critic. Contact: irrgang@iwprojekte.de www.iwprojekte.de Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 26, 2008 - 03:03:28 AM

WHEN IS AN ARTIST NOT AN ARTIST? 30 Days Two anonymous cartographers 30 days prior to the closing of the New Life Berlin festival. The two cartographers behind the 30 Days project casually make their way across a courtyard, between two flat roofed buildings and back towards the main road. Over the disused railway track opposite, they were told by the previous gallery’s assistant, a row of small art spaces inhabit the glass-fronted elevation of another vast converted industrial building. Shadowing them, I enjoy this sense of discovery and the unknown route ahead - a process invariably more interesting than much of the work on show. Photographs and notes are taken upon entering the galleries, which are assessed according to a scale known only to the cartographers. Acting as anonymous practitioners, these cartographers aim to infiltrate and subvert Berlin’s local art networks and create, over thirty days, an alternative map of the city’s artistic landscape, which can then be used and added to by future visitors. Both cartographers originate from the USA, and through their position as relative outsiders, they also aim to connect organisations by pairing up the mapped spaces and encouraging them to collaborate on a future project. These pairs would not normally work together – perhaps because of preconceptions about each other’s work, different commercial agendas, or lack of inclination to direct resources towards small, experimental projects. The results of the cartographers' activities are one Google map of locations and two collections of textual or image based information that exist online via Wooloo.org. The resulting institutional collaborations will be followed up by the cartographers at a later date. The cartographers admit that their categorisation of the galleries is subjective, and explain that any map-maker’s cultural background influences the maps that they produce. Talking to these map makers, it is clear that they are highly educated art practitioners who have de-classified themselves as artists in favour of the title ‘cartographer’. However, they say they aim to tread lightly over their chosen terrain, creating altered perspectives and relations amongst its potential visitors or inhabitants, whilst maintaining a critical distance and leaving no trace of their presence. Referring to the project in cartographic terms is therefore problematic because, by nature, the traditional cartographer stamps their ground a little, forming a subjective overview of place that is open to misinterpretation or generalisation. Cartography produces space, defining identities through difference. The inhabitants of the landscape being mapped (in this case, artists/professionals/galleries) then locate themselves within these identities, by which they define the outsider. Therefore, if the 30 Days online site and maps are to gain the level of interest and visibility that their creators aim for, the cartographers have the potential to mark their influence on the identity and boundaries of the Berlin art scene. Another subjective element of this project is the classification of artistic activity. When do we cease to define activity as artistic - when working artists lose physical proximity to each other? When they all go out for a coffee? Perhaps the cartographers are being knowingly playful with the elusive nature of the artistic act, but if so, this could be reflected more in their results. In fact, the map shows established galleries for the most part and a lack of artist-led initiatives, studio groups, temporary spaces, events or individual artists’ activities. This is probably because less formal additions would be harder to fix geographically, which would interfere with the easy use of the maps as guides. But the maps’ status as guides is also in doubt. In order to dispel the fixedness of the cartographers’ definitions, it is crucial that the maps can be adjusted by future visitors. Therefore, the project’s priority must be to provide a model for visitor re-structructuring (by adapting the original results online or creating a new map), rather than to create a definitive guide. However, the maps need to be visually clear and accessible to enable visitors to contribute. Although one of these maps is available through Google search, most of the information is stored on Wooloo.org with no direct link from the homepage (though this may be out of the cartographers' hands), and it is also unclear how the maps could be adapted. The mapped spaces are presented through an inviting visual display, yet remain separate and difficult to understand in relation to one another. Without clear links given between them, they are rendered isolated, cut off from the flow of movement in-between which defines them as destinations. On a practical level, the artists claim that adopting the title of cartographer allows them more freedom to work within the networks they are navigating, which suggests the art institutions they visit may treat artists using ’non-art’ processes more suspiciously than their professional counterparts. Perhaps as artists have historically taken the institutional framework of their working environment as subject for analysis, they seem likely to have a more complex critical agenda, and as they don’t represent the views of a corporate employer, artists are allowed a more critical position than other professionals. The re-positioning of roles also denies any distinction between the artists' work and that of other practitioners and professionals in whose fields they may be working; when acting as artists, the cartographic process may be seen as a tool in the realisation of an artistic idea, but when acting as cartographers, the emphasis shifts to the product of their activities – the map itself. This role play also enables potential audiences to engage with the maps outside of an artistic context, which, the cartographers assume, would only complicate the situation. By enforcing the cartographic status of the project, its members make sure that the map readers are simply reading maps, and not partaking in a work of art. This cloaking of the artist has implications within the network of relations existing between artists, art institutions, audiences and publics. As the New Life Berlin festival has exemplified, many artists position themselves in diverse roles, employing processes traditionally associated with other areas of study or professional work. Shouldn’t the artist’s role be declared in order to promote contemporary art practice as multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary? In fact, New Life Berlin was structured to promote just this kind of interdisciplinarity, among its communities of artists and participants. Also, though the artists have masked the project’s status as a work of art, the project is dependent on the artistic context of this festival for its promotion and dissemination, and so 30 Days’ separation from the art world is only fleeting. Perhaps then, alternatively, the cartographers’ choice not to be deemed artists within the festival’s publicity material offers a critique of some participatory and interactive projects, whose claims of shifting and merging the roles of the artist and audience are unfounded. In denying the role of the artist the cartographers suggest that, as artists, the distinctions will always remain. For now the project stands on ambiguous ground. Much like the dried out areas of land that interrupt the sprawl of Berlin’s urban system, the maps’ function is unclear. They are available for use, yet the user has an uncertain amount of freedom within them and relies on mediation for access. When the festival ends, and the cartographers remove themselves from the physical location of Berlin, the map they are offering will show its full subversive potential. Charlotte A. Morgan Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 25, 2008 - 01:21:22 PM

THREE GIRLS IN A TENT SANDWICH BOX AND BASENORTH AT THE NEW LIFE BERLIN FESTIVAL The Sandwich Box is a metal carry box that contains a small gazebo tent for artists to erect and use as they wish in order to generate an art outcome. It has travelled widely and been used by artists all over the world as part of a collaborative art project of the same name that was started in Denmark in 2004. At its latest outing, the Sandwich Box gazebo was put up in Berlin as part of the New Life Berlin Festival by a staunch and amiable group of three young UK artists calling themselves BaseNorth. They are Sarah Stamp, Nicola Smith and Anna Puhakka. They graduated in Fine Art in 2007 from the University f Sunderland in the North East of England and now work in collaboration whilst getting their own individual art practices up and running. Determined not to be stopped in their creative tracks by the lack of a studio after they were evicted from their Sunniside studio by property developers, BaseNorth are seeking ways of addressing the dilemma of how and where to make art in the early years after studentship when the funded space of the academic institution has gone. Resolute in their intention to make the best of things, they are proactive in promoting their work, making contacts and at the same time trying to raise awareness to the basic need of artists, like any artisans, to have somewhere to go do their work. This then, is a good match. BaseNorth, young artists with artistic development on their mind and Wooloo Productions, the ambitious New Life Berlin hosts, cutting their teeth on festival organization and wanting to support emerging artists. Both collaborations are burning with social and artistic issues reflecting real life cultural mobility in a participatory art context in Berlin; a city that of all in Europe right now, embodies urban regeneration. The remodelling that is going on culturally, economically and architecturally in Berlin seems to be a positive draw for artists from all over the world to come to live, work and just be here in this nascent era. A lack of affordable studio space is not the usual experience in Berlin where large dilapidated industrial spaces are waiting to be reclaimed and used by artists everywhere. Did BaseNorth know this? In Britain certainly it is a different landscape wherein artists have to beg, borrow or steal to find affordable studio space, and BaseNorth are here to tell us that. This is the point of them being here in Berlin. Whilst deciding what shape their individual professional practice will take, they will bang the drum on behalf of those of us back home who are being squeezed out of existence by the mammoth that is urban regeneration. BaseNorth erected their Sandwich Box gazebo, which they chose to define as a ‘free mobile studio’, in the blazing sun one morning on the grass parkland area outside the Volksbuhne theatre in the centre of Berlin. Then they sat in it and waited for people to come and visit them. If you did get down on hands and knees and crawl into the tent with them you found them pink and hot, chatty and cheerful amongst a clutter of drinks cartons and snacks, crayons and sewing kits, paper balls and other remnants of sporadic art production. They described their turn at the Sandwich Box project as BaseNorth International Open Studio and in keeping with most open studios, it involved a lot of sitting, eating and talking. This was art on the move, unrefined and unfinished and gathering moss as it rolled - just what the New Life Berlin festival wants to see going on. BaseNorth had a lot to say and were keen to explain their reasons for wanting to take part in the Sandwich Box project and then to bring it into the context of the New Life Berlin Festival. BaseNorth International Open Studio involves more than just the Sandwhich Box and the free mobile studio- there is also a postcard that they produced at a tourist gimmick machine here in Berlin. It has their temporary studio centre stage amongst the Berlin sights. The postcard has been posted to the folks back home, including to the property developers who brought BaseNorth’s Berlin project about. So far only a small number of the postcards have been made. Despite some research funding to come here BaseNorth didn’t have the euros to produce anywhere near enough of the art object part of their Sandwhich Box outcome. Such is the way of art making for most and BaseNorth seem knowing enough to do what has to be done in order to realise their ideas. Their postcard will function as publicity and fundraising tool as well as art agitprop. BaseNorth International Open Studio is a decisive and progressive outcome, one with real functionality and an eye to the future, despite its rather fleeting presence in Berlin. BaseNorth International Open Studio prompted those of us who did engage with it to consider the impact of life on art and its production. How the sometimes unseen forces of culture and economy shape the way artists define themselves and what they make, and what strategies they develop in order to protect and nurture their practice. BaseNorth’s outcome did meet their intention and will have an impact in terms of continuing to give visibility to this important UK issue. ‘Thanks for that’ I say, for I too am in the process of having to leave my studio because of tough economic decisions by the landlord. It would have been good to see Sandwich Box, BaseNorth International Open Studio and this energetic collaboration at work for longer than half a day. It would have been good to see more audience connect with it, with them. I was one of the Open Dialogues writers who called by to visit them on their only open morning. There were four or five of us when I was there which meant we out-numbered the artists as well as the audience. BaseNorth were welcoming and patient with all our questions, but I sensed it would all have had a little more meaning for them that morning if they had interacted with more of a local audience. There was fun to be had though, being upstaged on the lawn by two large sculptures and a glamour model being photographed by a pack of the paparazzi just feet from their tent. One of the least visible projects on the New Life Berlin programme, it is hard to see what real impact Sandwhich Box and BaseNorth had in Berlin either conceptually or physically. Perhaps there was no special reason why Berlin was chosen by BaseNorth to make this work as it was not going to afford a directly empathic environment for the issue of urban regeneration. Maybe Berlin itself was not a good environment for this issue to be aired in, but the New Life Berlin Festival certainly was. In exposing the tensions in the relationship between the corporate and the cultural producer, in engaging in art as action that may change perception and make things happen and by addressing their work more to an international audience than the local one, it fitted the ethos of Wooloo Productions perfectly. BaseNorth made a heartfelt if understated contribution to the Sandwich Box project and to New Life Berlin. They used the professional springboard opportunity that both projects offered to them in showcasing a pressing local issue to the global art community. Hopefully the issues BaseNorth raise will resonate and make some difference back home in the UK once the next batch of postcards are in the mail! www.wooloo.org/sandwichbox THE SANDWICH BOX project is formulated and conceived by Danish artist Lars Vilhelmsen in collaboration with Charlotte Mosen Jensen / Den lille Have Clare Carswell Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 25, 2008 - 01:16:49 PM

I Think You Think. What Do You Think ? Barbara Rosenthal Existential Interact 2 – 6 pm outside KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr 69, Berlin 10 – 15 June 2008 One of the most persistently visionary artists, US conceptual artist Barbara Rosenthal knows what she thinks. This is not so surprising as she’s been self-examining in her work for four decades. Most recent in her long and kaleidoscopic career of multi-media art productions, is another testing visual performance work, ‘Existential Interact’. And it’s what we think that she’d now like to hear about. Made for the New Life Berlin Festival in June 2008, Existential Interact finds Rosenthal performing street-side in Berlin’s smart Mitte area, outside the prestigious KW Institute for Contemporary Art. And when Rosenthal goes outside, she really goes outside! She has been ‘outside’ since high-school when, as alternative to cheerleader or gang-member, she fronted the school misfits and called them The Out Group. Outside for Rosenthal in Berlin means that every afternoon she plonks herself right outside KW, and as close to the archway entrance to KW as it is possible to be. A chalked rectangle she has drawn on the road with her name scrawled in it, marks her arena for her planned cerebral high jinks. Rows of catalogues and DVD are arranged on the kerb, and weather permitting, her lap-top is there too, chained to a lamp-post and playing a show-reel of some of her early video works such as “How Much Does The Monkey Count”, “Society”, “Are You Jewish”. Uninvited, but seemingly no more activist than that, Rosenthal is outside KW and approaching passersby playing out her existential interaction with anyone she can rope in, art or non-art audience will do just fine. Rosenthal knows what she is doing, and why. She has done this before. She grafted onto PERFORMA05, the first biennial of New Visual Art Performance in New York in 2005, and has performed outside several sanctioned art venues too. Milton Fletcher, writing in NYArts Magazine March/April 2006 in an article entitled ‘Taboo or Not Taboo’, describes Rosenthal’s live work at PERFORMA05 as ‘a savvy guerrilla art tactic potentially outrageous to Biennial sponsors. But just as important is the impulsive, non-processed act of performing itself’. I disagree with Milton. Based on what I see going on in Berlin Existential Interact is anything but impulsive and non-processed art making. Barbara Rosenthal is knowing, very knowing, and packs and plans down to the last detail. There is very little that is incidental or impulsive. Obsessive, neurotic perhaps, but impulsive, non-processed: no. Spending time with Rosenthal whilst she was planning Existential Interact I observed just how methodical in her preparation and planning she is. To look that improvised you have to be. Rehearsed and poised to perform her verbal manoeuvres, Rosenthal presents at first as disarmingly dippy but is in fact totally locked on to her targets, we her public. Rosenthal’s performance technique – and that is surely what it is, is an under-cover one of impromptu chat, whilst she uses a variety of puppets, assumed voices and personae to lure us closer, her less than captive audience. Contact is made with us, a smile, a throw away line, we are tripping over her carefully casual street carpet of props. She is flirtatious, sashaying and fluttering, as her arm arcs upwards whilst she makes her pitch. At other times she is a lean, mean art toreador, her arm downward stabbing one of her printed slogan cards into us, like it or not. Yes, somewhere in this artful and swaggering offer of art freebies and self-penned caricatures Rosenthal has made the hit. Whaam! The slogan cards that are shoved at her audience, like the familiar button pin badges that she is covered in, are standard props for Rosenthal and are the political looking media by which her self-revelatory aphorisms are passed on to us. The slogans ‘Life has a Life of its Own’, ‘This is Controversial’ and ‘Can I Play, Too?’ feature in a reprise of her 1987 piece ‘Seven Provocation Cards’. Extended for Berlin, Rosenthal has translated these slogans into German - although the online translation has thrown up some awkward interpretations and she is gratefully taking corrections and suggestions for improvement from Berliners who become embroiled in her show. These discussions about identity and meaning are pleasing to Rosenthal who is insistently direct in her communication and wants her slogan cards to do their job effectively wherever she is. Some of the interactions, existential or otherwise, that Rosenthal has with the public in Berlin appear minimal and consist of nothing more than a smile, or a shriek from ‘Monkey’, one of her long-standing stooge puppets. Or there simply may be a meeting of eyes as the provocation cards are handed over. Others are conversations that go on and deep, a couple last over several days and lead to email exchanges. All these interactions might be anticipated, scripted and choreographed even if the unsuspecting audience don’t feel it. The public can perform too, if we like, and afterwards we perhaps realise that we have done so without meaning to. “The reality is the performance” Rosenthal explains to me when I ask her what it is she is doing. Eventually Rosenthal finishes and we who have engaged with Existential Interact might leave clutching a card or two she has given us or a drawn caricature of ourselves. Parading somewhere between street theatre and eccentric evangelism, Existential Interact is all rather flummoxing and bewildering yet also utterly inspiring. We may well ponder our cards and drawings later on and wonder what it all meant but that is exactly what Rosenthal intends we should do. For Existential Interact is a direct interrogation of our beliefs and values about life and art and of our willingness not just to name them, but to act on them too. Hers are brazen guerrilla art tactics- a master class in them- and anyone who underestimates the skill and the refinement of Existential Interact is going to be left standing. The informed and courageous action we see on the street side is at the core of Barbara Rosenthal’s ethos for art making and living. It is her integrity that defines her almost obsessive demands of herself and of us for an individual, soul and psyche determining of what we do and why. The lack of a wider audience has been an issue within the New Life Berlin Festival’s agenda of participation, intervention and social engagement. Several Open Dialogues writers have tried to address this in their articles on this blog. Sure, all the projects in New Life Berlin have attempted to address ideas and strategies for participation, they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. Inevitably, some have done it better than others. But for me Rosenthal’s Existential Interact is one of only two projects in the festival that takes on the Berlin public face to face and asks what their involvement can be in art and what it can mean. Per Tresdalh’s Flash Job Campaign is the other, with its focus on interaction and location on the streets of Berlin. But 'participants' need to sign up to be in Flash Job Campaign and the work remains relatively hidden to a general public. In comparison, Existential Interact is more open and generous. Moreover, there is no signing up involved. Unmediated and wily in its slipping the curatorial leash, Rosenthal's is possibly the only work in the New Life Berlin Festival where the local audience outnumbers the other artists and writers who have in the main constituted this festival’s audience. Next time there may be very good reasons for making sure that Ms Rosenthal is on the inside. www.wooloo.org/barbararosenthal Clare Carswell Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

TUESDAY - JUNE 24, 2008 - 02:46:10 PM

NEW LIFE, NEW MAP, IMPRESSIONS FROM A NEW NATIVE As the New Life Berlin Festival is now at a close, one of the lasting impressions is the way that my city (yes, being a 4-year resident, I now lay claim!) has been used by participant artists, some of whom have never seen Berlin before, as a platform for their work. New Life Berlin is most certainly situated here and in no other city; almost every project is grounded in a social, physical, political or historical aspect of Berlin. For this reason, this city was subject to the projections placed on it by visitors and residents. In creating and using maps of Berlin as the basis of many of the projects, we did indeed create a new Berlin map built of impressions, memories, fantasies, dreams, and fragments. Some artists in New Life Berlin chose to physically engage with the Berlin streets. Gordon Sasaki’s ‘Movement,’ shown as part of Urban Space screenings, focused his camera only on the Berlin topography under his feet. And Marie Christine Katz (‘Road Kills and Other Casualties’ also of Urban Space) lay down in the street, waiting to see how Berliners’ reaction to her would reflect their experience of Berlin, how her unlikely act would be situated in this city. How would Berliners react differently to passersby’s in New York, or elsewhere? How would their reaction be situated in Berlin? ‘30 days of New Life Berlin’ looked at Berlin as a set of points of artistic attractions, hyper-linking points on an online map to descriptive writing based on a physical visit. The 30 days project called to mind that “art” might be in every cobblestone of a city, or, depending on your perspective, only housed in galleries. But the map was made by cartographers who came to Berlin from elsewhere—in other words, mapped by explorers and not natives—and so what we see is a map not fully integrated into the experience of living here in Berlin. In some sense, the foreignness of the 30 days cartographers gave a more objective view of what Berlin has to offer: a native’s sense of art in his/her own city may change vastly from year to year. A visitor, on the other hand, might not venture much further than the Auguststrasse or Brunnenstrasse gallery district, and never find the dilapidated building sites, the graffiti murals and other pieces of Berlin art that are off the beaten track—and likely to soon be destroyed. Per Traasdahl’s ‘Flash Job Campaign’ was also tied directly to the Berlin map. On the first day, participant “Catalysts” were given a physical section of the map of the Neukölln district of Berlin. Like the 30 Days cartographers, Flash Job Campaign catalysts pounded the streets of the very piece of map they held in their hand, but with the mission of finding one time or ‘flash’ jobs for teenagers. Going into the project rather blindly, many participants and onlookers wondered what would be the real life result of physically walking those green and blue street lines of the map? Who would the catalysts encounter and how would they communicate with – in some cases- no German language skills? Despite the difficulties of “dropping” catalysts into the mix of Berlin, several ‘flash job’ matches were made between teenagers and employers. Two of these jobs, however, were outside the borders of Neukölln. But the magical aspect of the project was that the borders of Flash Job Campaign were more fluid than the “rules of the game,” rules that were initially delineated not only in terms of the map, but in terms of how catalysts had to improvise to make the jobs happen. And by letting these rules soften, and improvisation move in, the catalysts learned that the process was the art. The final product, of making a match and fulfilling a flash job, was the icing on the cake. As one of the participants said, “it wasn’t until I stopped concentrating on the word “job” that I actually found one.” It wasn’t until they let the map fly away that they saw what lay within it. Ali&Cia’s “Eat the Wall” likewise wrestled with the physical borders of Berlin—though in this case, the choice of a wall reminds us of a relic that nevertheless still makes its mark. Using food as physical bricks, participants were invited to build a wall in between two rooms in the SCALA space on Friedrichstrasse. When visitors later arrived, we were forced to one side or the other based on our date of birth. Only by eating or dismantling the wall could we cross. Each room had a decidedly different energy—one was painted black and the lights were dimmed; in the other the walls were white and the light was almost oppressively bright. But we didn’t know the difference until some of us defected and came back to bring the news: “The other side … it’s much more communal, much more comfortable. Come over with me.” While the wall was an impressive architectural feat, and the process of eating it or taking the art away or ‘to-go’ was quite entertaining, I was struck with how Eat the Wall seemed to be the product of an outsider’s impression of Berlin. While the Berlin wall will be an idea permanently etched in collective memory, it lacks real meaning for those of us that live in Berlin today; those who cross freely from east to west on the U-bahn, and who see, in fact, that big development intends to take Berlin as a whole within the next ten years. The new digital O2 Loop billboard, for which a section of the “East Side Gallery” was dismantled, looms much higher than the wall ever did. Capitalism has indeed broken down borders. What may have brought an experimental project like the New Life Berlin festival to Berlin is the fact that the Berlin Wall was here, and when it was dismantled it left a chaos and a lack of organized capitalism that made way for a multitude of experimental arts and performances spaces. This history is what explains the dilapidated “East Berlin” texture of the New Life shop itself, the fading signature Berlin posters of Nathan Peter’s ‘Eminent Domain’; the worn “beautiful ugly” that so many of us appreciate about this city. And just two blocks down from the New Life shop we see an empty lot which will apparently be turned into exclusive loft apartments. Its new developer advertises itself as “The Fine Art of Living—Moved by Diamona & Harwisch.” I imagine that as artists we want somehow to hold on to the chaos of a freshly unified Berlin, because it gives us so much freedom. Yet, as the Art and Economics Group so clearly reminds us—we need someone to buy our art, we need festivals to raise our profile; we need people with money to recognize us. This is an endless struggle. We need the spaces- that are “not art” to be called art—something the 30 Days Cartographers make manifest- and for these spaces to stay bohemian, not simply turned into brand names and chain stores. Hopefully this “New Life Berlin” map that we have all created together will continue to hold in tender balance the imagined Berlin that brought us here in the first place. Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist currently making mischief in Berlin, Germany. www.alfabus.us Please only reproduce this writing with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

MONDAY - JUNE 23, 2008 - 10:50:56 AM

MY MOTHER ALWAYS TOLD ME NOT TO EAT STANDING UP ALI&CIA 'EAT THE WALL', PUBLIC CEREMONY June 15 Preparing the Wall. Photo (c) Mary Paterson When I’m away from my native country, three factors interlink as an altered sensory terrain to adjust to and dabble in; the language, the weather and food. Recently, and as a visitor to the city, I was offered the pleasure of joining a group of artists, bakers and members of the public to indulge in the demolition of a 2m high wall of food bisecting the exhibition space at Scala Gallery, Berlin. The project, Eat the Wall, is one of the smaller of a series of large scale edible works by Ali&Cia, which engage non-artists in the creation of a work of art through cooking; a common everyday skill that defines cultural identities and showcases individuals’ creativity. As Eat The Wall’s official Berlin baker says, there is a bread for every country, and bread has definitely been a staple in my time in Berlin. With delis on every street, freshly made sandwiches have been hard to avoid. And poppy seed pretzels, and loaves made with cheese or olives, and wraps filled with falafel. As a common cultural signifier, bread has a unifying quality, breaking bread being an ancient symbolic act of friendship. Appropriate then, that Ali&Cia sought a sponsor baker who specialises in traditional German loaves to provide sturdy crusty support for this edible icon. However, considering that the event largely caters for a guest list of international artists, injecting sense of local heritage seems a little superficial. Though Ali&Cia’s past works show an intention to involve the local community, here in Berlin this type of engagement has been relatively narrow - largely due to time and funding restrictions. Instead, Ali&Cia have placed more focus on the individual and the incitement of a convivial communal act of social exchange; the project activates individual participation so simply- all you have to do is like food and not have just finished a three course meal before coming! The project is hard to position in the contemporary art canon; the team excitedly uses the term ’Eat-Art’, which is seemingly a messy mixing bowl of social, relational and performance based practice. Perhaps it is significant that the team, coming from a range of academic backgrounds, only began referring to themselves as artists relatively recently, since they were invited to perform their work within an art context. With current art practices engaging in such a wide range of fields, it fits that specialists from other fields will cross the borders that define contemporary art practice, blurring them further and making them more difficult to define by us writers (if that’s what we really are). Relying on the participation of individuals to contribute material is a risk, which might explain the team’s need for a sponsor baker - just in case people don’t bring enough, or not enough people come. This detracts from the collaboration-centred act of building the wall and eating it together and questions how much participants can be expected to offer through short term engagement in fleeting projects. Happily though, the gallery hosted a large crowd, as is so often the case when free food, or free anything is available. Separating their guests into two groups according to odd and even birthdates, the team instilled a sense of ceremony and kept their guests’ focus on the wall that came between them. I arrived hungry, and stood with my fellow ‘odd numbered’ friends at the front of the crowd. Looking at the wall now, I was disappointed at the use of orderly arranged Tupperware tubs of food as the main structural component; I had wanted to see spoons gouging out chunks of the wall to reveal full mouthed participants on the other side, looking back through sponge cake window frames. Admittedly, I could not attend the building session and so I lacked a sense of pride at its completion that others had gained through this shared creative act, and I held back criticism, hoping that the ceremonious toppling of the wall would prove more interesting. As an unclear and anti-climactic start, traditional loaves were passed back to the table, followed by tubs of various nibbles. This was not the fun hands-on approach I had expected, and neither was it an attempt at civilised dining - the table was far too small and the room too dark. Instead, we lingered in the middle-ground, and memories of party buffets came flooding back; the anti-social experience of introducing yourself to another guest whilst keeping one eye on their hand, willing it not to pick up the last smoked salmon and cream cheese melba toast. Crisps next to carrot sticks and salsa dips and a dollop of the hot dish on the side - and not even that variety was available here; apart from the occasional interesting Turkish snack, for the most part the wall consisted of bread and biscuits. I clutched my dry crust and tub of olives, was offered a piece of cake, then ate an opportunist fork-full of potato salad. Perhaps my traditional side is showing through, but I found myself wanting to sit down with real cutlery and make conversation. The satisfaction of the wall as a meal may seem trivial, and the symbolic act of breaking its division in a convivial atmosphere more important. But Ali&Cia placed great significance on the actual act of eating, and for this to occur it’s important that the food is appetising. Had the wall not been dismantled by the team and placed on tables for the guests to eat, I doubt that the whole structure would have come down. (Especially considering the amount of leftovers there were - the kind that have been picked at. The guests were encouraged to take these morsels home, and I trust in good faith that the rest were given to homeless shelters.) A convivial atmosphere was also interrupted by the moody and at times imposing live music, presumably selected to add an obscure dramatic air to the event. Over the course of the evening my most genuine sense of performing a symbolic act came from breaking the rules and crossing the border to the other side of the wall (through the hallway, not through the wall) where I found the familiar faces of more of my peers, privileged to be in a much lighter space and paying less attention to the game of destruction than to their conversation. Being in a room with food, drink and good company can rarely be a bad thing, but bringing together a group of artists to knowingly demonstrate the unifying potential of social interaction and to light-heartedly role-play a significant political act, made for a confused and quite messy artistic experience. When the giddiness of the sugar intake subsided, I found myself stuffed, underwhelmed and laden with even more bread. Charlotte A Morgan Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 21, 2008 - 09:23:59 AM

INTERVIEW- NATHAN PETER US artist Nathan Peter was interviewed by Open Dialogues writer Clare Carswell, in Choriner Strasse, Berlin on Wednesday 11th June 2008. He was in the process of de-installing the large wall-based work ‘Eminent Domain’ that he had made for the New Life Berlin Festival. www.wooloo.org/eminentdomain Photo: Eminent Domain by Nathan Peter, photographer Andreas Bastiansen, courtesy Wooloo Productions. ................................................................................... Clare Carswell (CC) : What is your view of critical writing in relation to your artistic practice ? Nathan Peter (NP) : I want critical writing to be a true assessment of my work. If it only goes so far, and is mere description, that is not of interest to me. The descriptive tells people what is going on as opposed to offering a more theoretical text such as those in Art Forum. When I read critique I look for insights beyond the obvious and descriptive and surface interpretation. I hear a lot of artists say that they don’t read reviews and maybe the artist is not part of the audience that the writer has in mind. But there is a curiosity to read what is written about you – like going to a fortune teller – did they pick up on things? CC : You received a great deal of attention in the first week of the New Life Berlin festival from the Open Dialogues writers. A total of three exclusive reviews of Eminent Domain, as well as extensive mentions of it in three others have appeared on the Open Dialogues blog. Have you read them? NP : The response from the Open Dialogues writers has been impressive and I’ve never experienced that amount of attention to my work in such a short time. I have had good response from critics before, but it is often verbal and spread over a longer period, say of six weeks of exhibition or so. NP: It is rare, too, to get the opportunity to talk with a writer and influence the text that is to be written about you. I did meet several of the Open Dialogues writers at the opening party and in the days after it and I have read through their reviews. Some are a general summation of the opening of the New Life Berlin festival and descriptions of the visuals in Eminent Domain, these are of less interest to me. With the Open Dialogues writing the format being used is the blog. I wonder if reading critical writing on a blog is different to reading concrete text in a magazine ? I think that the informality of it does affect the style of the writing. I have a feeling too that the writers picked up the press release by Carson Chan that was available that night with my work, which was contextualising my work, and used this as a legitimised departure point for their writing. I wonder now if I should have put that text next to my work at all. The battle was how formal to make it. I wonder if that text hadn’t been there if the other writing would have been more of a discovery for me. Carson Chan has a lot of knowledge about my work, he knows the history of my ideas and of my time here in Berlin, so he has a more informed angle on my work. CC : Does this give Chan’s writing more weight and resonance for you ? NP : Yes, in some ways it does. Carson and I have spent a lot of time talking and this shows in his writing, whereas the Open Dialogues writing on the blog shows the difference between those I’ve spent time with and those I haven’t. CC : Which of the Open Dialogue pieces are you are referring to ? NP : The piece by Heiko Schmid is very good, he is living here in Berlin and it shows. I am also interested in the piece by Eliza Tan and how she took a personal approach to my work and to Berlin. She wrote about her initial response to my work and then how as she experienced Berlin, that she picked up on imagery in the city and this helped her interpret my work. So it was the experience of it she wrote about rather than relying on a more formal framework. Others fell short of going beyond description and of offering something insightful and critical. I am beyond having my feelings hurt, I am used to receiving criticism and welcome it. Heiko’s piece worked because he brought in his familiar relationship to Berlin and Eliza her personal experience of it too. So criticism doesn’t have to take a third party objective stance. Some of the writing was very bland. Equally, Carali McCall said of Eminent Domain, that it is like ‘a painters attempt at installation’ which was a negative but an interesting one. If my installation is seen as a failure it at least reflects the challenge to the painter in architecture that has existed since cave painting and through to ceiling painting. I am curious about this description as a painter and would like to know more of what she meant by that. CC : Would you contact the writer to ask her ? NP : Probably not. To have a dialogue the artist doesn’t always need to be an active participant. But there needs to be a theoretical to and fro. A little criticism is no bad thing. We have all been through art school so are used to legitimising our work. CC : What art journals do you read ? NP : I read Texte Zur Kunst. It’s a monthly written in German but three quarters of it is in English. The last issue decided to focus on critical writing. I used to read Tate Magazine and Modern Painters. Tate is now more of a fashion magazine. I like collections of writing such as the conversations of Hans Ulrich Olbrist. It is fascinating how he creates dialogue, is so familiar with the artist and their practice and asks really insightful questions. CC : How can critical writing best reflect your work back to you ? NP : There is a real opportunity for a writer to gain some intimacy with my work. They have to bring something different to the writing and to the work. For example you can take historical art criticism and put it in the forefront, take the perspective of a distanced glance and ask how it is contextualised in contemporary discourse. The art critics role is not to give a flattering description of the work. It is of course fantastic to read a flattering review but that is what catalogues and public relations are for. CC : What is it that you want writing on your work to tell you ? NP : I want to be told something I didn’t know. Both as a viewer of my work but mainly as artist. CC : Does that process go to substantiate your potential role as a more objective viewer of your work ? NP : Yes definitely. As an artist I am so wrapped up in the process that it feels impossible to step back and question. The best critic of my work is my wife, if that isn’t too obvious! CC : Do you visit exhibitions ? NP : I don’t feel I have to make the effort any more to see everything that is going on. I invest in my own studio practice. So I don’t go to all the art shows and biennales. To see my work in relation to a grander scheme though can be beneficial. For example when I came across Gordon Matta Clark’s work I hadn’t known of him before despite my formal art education. He is now a big influence for me. CC : Are there other artists who influence you ? NP : Sigmar Polke, Cy Twombly. I love 60s and 70s Polke but also recently, in 2007, I saw and loved his abstract paintings. CC : Do you know that a retrospective of Cy Twombly opens this month at Tate Modern? NP : That will be worth making a trip for ! ...................................................OFF THE RECORD........................................ At this point I have stopped documenting our conversation as Nathan and I began to talk more about his approach to painting and how this translated into his installed work Eminent Domain at Choriner Strasse. He spoke with such animation and passion about his painting and his studio practice, and the reasons why the outcome for New Life Berlin was not more painterly, that I realised that in order to make better sense of Eminent Domain it was essential that I saw his paintings. We arranged there and then for me to go visit him the next morning in his studio in Kreuzberg. That conversation is the basis for a longer profile piece that I am writing on Nathan Peter and his work for later publication. (Clare Carswell) Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 21, 2008 - 08:45:19 AM

FICTIVE DAYS REGAN’S 12TH BIRTHDAY PARTY BARBEQUE Sunday 08/06/08, 7pm Griefswalder Str 220, 10405 Berlin It was the strangest 12th birthday party I have ever been to (granted I haven’t been to one for a decade but I presume this cannot be what’s ‘in’ or the norm?!). A birthday barbeque: bunting in the trees with the birthday girl’s name - ‘REGAN’- made out of boxed cardboard covered in shiny silver tinfoil hung within it, birthday sweets and sugar mice. The birthday cake piled high with strawberries, chocolate and pink icing hearts took pride of place. I took part in water balloon games, it was all innocent fun. It was enjoyable and Regan was slightly moody but excitable. Everything felt normal with not many inklings of the next hour except for when she bit the head of a gelatine snake and placed it ever so neatly onto the cake. As the ‘happy birthday’ song developed louder and louder, Regan was brought her over to the lit candles. Suddenly all hell, quite literally, broke loose. She grabbed each flame lit candle one by one, ignoring the pain as they burnt her hands, and threw them on the floor.“My name is not Regan!” she screamed. Sinking her hands into the cake and hurling chunks at people, she fell to the floor and began to shake. Her arms were grabbed hold of and she was hugged her to protect her as she squirmed; her eyes wide open and body convulsing..... This disturbing birthday party is at once a real life event and a scene from Fictive Days. Fictive Days is a New Life Berlin Festival project set in a Berlin apartment, Griefswalder Str 220, where 8 performer/participants have been asked by lead artist Sergio Zevallos to take elements of a character from a mainstream film and act as them for 2 weeks. The Fictive Days characters are Regan McNeil, the possessed 12year old from The Exorcist , Alexis Zorbas from the film Zorba the Greek, Princess Aura from Flash Gordon, Queen Elizabeth from Elizabeth, Diane Arbus from Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Taeko Nasu from the film The Idiot (Hakuchi), Sergio Zevallos performing Fiona from the film Fiona and one performer playing both Elisabet Vogler and Sister Alma from the film Persona. All the participants are acting; the woman that plays Regan McNeil is not possessed nor is she 12, and the performer that plays Queen Elizabeth is not British and so on. Fictive Days is an experiment in how far the performer/ participants can bring these individual film ‘characters’ into their own lives for the two weeks they are living together. With certain performers, they feel it is to their advantage to act as their chosen character most of the time in order to understand them more fully. Myself and four other ‘non participant performers’ were invited ‘behind the scenes’ to join Fictive Days and their associated characters for Regan’s 12th Birthday party. This is how we found ourselves witness to the unusual episode mentioned above. At the party, the two young children from the family barbeque to the right of us got freaked out, and in all fairness, I was finding it hard to remember not to believe my eyes! Truly unnerved and on edge, I watched as Fiona and Zorba took hold of Regan and carried her up the stairs back up to their apartment. During Regan’s birthday antics Queen Elizabeth stood back from the scene completely unimpressed and Diane Arbus snapped away with her camera recording it all. At this point, I could not help but feel (perhaps cynically) that perhaps the participants in Fictive Days experiment were not just ‘becoming’ their characters, but that they were acting up for their specially invited public - the people who invited to the Birthday party - and providing footage for the film they were going to edit together. Fictive Days is a very interesting experiment even when seen from outside an art context ; to place a group of strangers together in a situation where they take on the actions and personalities of someone other than themselves and see how this effects them and how they form relationships. Playing even more on the Big Brother TV format, a public audience is invited to come visit the Fictive Days characters ‘at home’ in their apartment any time of day, to come play games, have a drink or just watch what is going on. However, in contrast to Big Brother, the Fictive Days performers are allowed to choose how much the public see of their character by being ‘off stage’ or not being in character whenever they choose. Despite this interesting layering of fiction- who is acting when and where is the ‘real’ person in all this acting? - I do keep wondering whether this project is truly worth it for the performer/participants? Fictive Days must be messing with their minds and personalities. I asked Sister Alma what it was like sleeping in the Griefswalder Str apartment. She said that at first it was difficult as Regan screams and has possessed fits in the middle of the night but now it doesn’t really bother her as she is getting used to it. Perhaps when they leave the house and return to their original homes, the Fictive Days cast will find it hard to sleep without the routine of screams in the night, listening out for them in their own beds. After time spent with the characters and the performers, I feel that Regan is the only one who is putting her all into it and fully acting her character. Perhaps this is because Regan has a more extreme personality and obvious qualities to portray and these extremes take over the atmosphere in the house. Two weeks: 336 hours worth of acting. When I go to the theatre it tends to be the method actors that give the most convincing performance as they have attempted to become their roles. They are the ones I talk about afterwards and who get the enthusiastic applause for the 2nd and 3rd bow. However, in Fictive Days the acting blurs with real life. The project is an attempt to reach inside the mind of a character and into their fictitious soul. But how can this be productive for art, or for the individuals? Perhaps for the performers, the real people who act as Queen Elizabeth and Diane Arbus may not need change too much, but once you move into the territory of Fiona, a drug addicted prostitute, the detrimental elements Fictive Days must begin to seep through into real life. Moreover, ‘becoming’ Princess Aura; a fictitious princess with a lust for life who wishes to take Zorba to the Pleasure Plethora once he has built her a rocket (to take her back to the her father on Planet Cithera which will lead her to meet her one true love(r) Flash Gordon) must be progressing this fictional mind alteration into the extreme. As The Princess flirts incredibly with Zorba - each professing that the other is just one of many lovers- I find myself questioning whether this is all an act or whether Zorba and The Princess will compromise their integrity to follow their characters through to a real life (emotional and sexual) end. Moreover, Regan has to wake up each night pretending to be possessed (possibly even with the aid of an alarm clock). Such behaviour must influence the performer’s emotions and could be damaging to anyone. As I left the Fictive Days apartment after the Regans birthday party, Zorba was helping Princess Aura to hang seductive red netting around her bed for her boudoir; Fiona and Regan were having a heart to heart as the latter continued to –ironically- accuse Fiona of ‘playing games’; and the others had cleaned their teeth and gone to their rooms preparing to attempt to sleep. Meanwhile, I stood bewildered, hoping that the humans behind this scene, behind the characters and behind the games they are playing, would not end up forfeiting part of their true selves for Fictive Days and that, if needs be, Wooloo.org would have counselling at hand. Alexandria Clark Alexandria Clark is a freelance writer and artist based in the UK, and is also a member of the Nottingham based artist group TETHER. Contact: mail@alexandriaclark.com website: www.alexandriaclark.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 21, 2008 - 07:39:25 AM

INTERVIEW – FLASH JOB CAMPAIGN Photo: Public Workshop Flash Job Campaign, courtesy Wooloo Productions Per Traasdahl of Flash Job Campaign, interviewed by Kathryn Fischer and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw. Berlin, 14th June, 2008. Flash Job Campaign is a participatory project initiated by Per Traasdahl, founder of ArtsSourceLab, an interdisciplinary network for the development and societal implementation of sustainable, social micro-models. Based on the ArtSourceLab project TeenKom, Flash Job Campaign has selected nine participants to act as “Catalysts” in the area of Neukölln (one of the most disadvantaged areas of Berlin), bringing together a representative of a local business (the Customer) and a teenager willing to work (the Maker) for a three-hour one-time “Flash Job”. .................................................................. Kathryn Fischer (KF): To me Flash Job Campaign seems all about creating a set of rules and working with it; it seems to be about the process rather than the outcome. Maybe it’s not about if the job gets set up, maybe it’s more about playing the game. Where does your focus lie? Per Traasdahl (PT): I can illustrate that from how the project proceeded. On Wednesday of the first week of the project Shelton [one of the Catalysts] managed to find a magical job, where everything went well despite all kinds of obstructions. She took the wrong train, ending up in the wrong neighbourhood, not in Neukölln. She found a flash job very quickly. Shelton didn’t seek out an opportunity somewhere else purposefully – it just happened by chance. That was the first job created on this particular occasion of Flash Job Campaign and it was a perfect success. Afterwards I thought, ‘okay’, this would be the perfect model of how to do it; jump in and play it by chance and everything might happen in the right way. But in this project we are, of course, interested in more things than just rules and realising the job. One thing is about the city and the inhabitants and what they are about, but equally it’s about the person intervening and if something is important to that person, that catalyst. For the Catalyst the issues are ‘How do you see yourself, what’s your dilemma? Do you see yourself as salesman, as missionary, as grass-roots activist, as artist, as politician?’ As a catalyst, you overlap into many different roles. The Catalyst is an undefined role; it’s not the same as the conventional role of an artist in a social intervention. KF: In what ways has Flash Job Campaign, Berlin, 2008 been different from the other different manifestations of the same project in the past? PT: I know if I’m ever going to do anything in the arts scene with these social intervention projects, it needs to be very structured around sustainability. That’s why, this time, Flash Job Campaign Berlin 2008 had another focus than just the job itself and the community building. The idea was to highlight the intervening force, the catalyst, and so get a multitude of different approaches and people from different places, educations and professions, so it isn’t just artists. I advertised the project outside the Wooloo website and outside the art scene. It means we have people who are not predominantly artists but they have this urge to experiment or to unfold or to document things or to talk about things in a more broad and open way than is possible in their own profession. One goal of Flash Job Campaign that has been really successful is to show that art can be a forum for a lot of different professions. Eleanor Hadley Kershaw (EHK): In that way Flash Job Campaign is sustainable for the Catalysts, but perhaps each particular Flash Job is much more ephemeral for the other two people involved: for the employer and the teenager? PT: That was a hard point to know how to deal with. Because doing this short term, just giving them a one time job, is exactly what we don’t want to do with TeenKom. When we give the teenagers a job we show them what is possible, then we close the door and walk away. How do we deal with that? This is an open question, and it’s a risk. We have talked a lot about this risk in the group. The Catalysts have this responsibility – how to set up a frame of association around their offer. If they manage to set it up like a playful thing, like a one time or ‘flash’ thing, maybe people will go with it. We can only hope that for the teenager it’s a little thing. For me, Flash Job Campaign is only justified because TeenKom is there doing longer term work with teenagers. In TeenKom we have a project frame of three years. Maybe in time we will find ways to launch Flash Job Campaign as part of TeenKom, to the tackle the issue of sustainability for the teenager and the employer. KF: What about doing Flash Job Campaign in other areas? Since it is so short-lived, what about taking it and trying it anywhere in Berlin, in Charlottenburg for example? PT: You suggested in your text [http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_545] doing Flash Job Campaign in the whole city. We actually ended up doing that! The two most magic moments of the project have happened outside Neukölln. KF: And in that case the target group goes out of the window. So I wonder: is the point that you try to reach out to disadvantaged kids or does it have nothing to do with that? PT: It really has nothing to do with that I think. And also TeenKom doesn’t. It really positions itself as a mentoring project. KF: Given the aims of the project [if it does not intend to reach out to disadvantaged children] why is the target area Neukölln specifically? PT: There’s one reason; you could say it’s a little populistic [sic], because Neukölln is always profiled in the press as a problem zone in Berlin. Running Flash Job Campaign in Neukölln could have the risk of just confirming that it is a problem zone...But it also could do the opposite. There are a few comments on the Flash Job Campaign blog that deal with that, from Catalysts who don’t see it like that. Fedele, from New York, says Neukölln is not a ghetto at all, it looks nice, feels good. We have a lot of maps from the statistic authorities of the senate of Berlin but also from the statistics of Berlin-Brandenburg, with social data. The reason for choosing this borough, you could say, is a political frame: Neukölln has a mayor, a Bezirck, and they have planning zones. I wanted to touch upon that because the development of a city really has to do with planning zones. That is where they pick up their justification for development – in statistics. There is no other way of proving a city’s needs. Politicians, social scientists, city planners have no other way to justify a political statement than statistics. So I wanted to incorporate that and I think very, very often artists don’t acknowledge this at all. Flash Job Campaign is one of the first projects to work with the new Berlin planning zones that came in 2006. This is the part of the project that hasn’t been dealt with very much but in the intention of the project it is quite an important thing because they had other planning zones before, but now they have created new ones. So what’s the value of the old statistics? No-one can reverse time, so do you start from scratch; what do you do? EHK: Do you think you will report back to these city authorities on Flash Job Campaign? PT: This hasn’t happened in Flash Job Campaign but it’s certainly something that we will do in TeenKom. We will have a long time to collect and monitor data; we are going to do that very conscientiously because with TeenKom we overlap into working life, into schools and into the family context of these kids… EHK: In her review of Flash Job Campaign, (http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_549], Ann Rapstoff mentions a project where the teenagers are empowered by being enabled to employ their own skills whilst teaching adults how to use mobile phones. Would you think about doing something similar where the teenager is put in the position of “leader”, or where they’re allowed to take control of the situation more? PT: We monitor what the teenagers say they can do: we have three categories – “expert”, “knowledgeable” and “ready to learn”. We try to all the time give them a feeling of independence- in the way they look and learn and see things and pick up things- and not set up an internship. This “ready to learn” position takes a lot of social skill for a teenager, you have to have a social background of learning capacity. And that unfortunately is a class thing, among other things. That’s also the reason why the ‘Flash Job’ is the ignition to give them a feeling of empowerment within a short time frame. The focus is also on learning because doing an ‘internship’ takes a lot more capacity, it’s a higher standard and perhaps more difficult to achieve. KF: Are you happy with Flash Job Campaign so far, are there things you’re not happy with this time? PT: The Catalysts are confronted with big pressure - some of them couldn’t take two weeks out of the calendar, they had to do other things. I wouldn’t say this meant there wasn’t enough intensity; there was already a lot of intensity. On the other hand, I imagined two weeks where people would go fully into the work and would be fully engaged in documenting, and the discussion about how to document, then take that discussion back into the field. Also for the Catalysts to go out onto the street, [some of them] not knowing German, can take a lot of energy, they have to be very open to what happens. What is admirable is how some of the Catalysts went out and did the project in their spare time, in the evening. And that they started to operate alone. In the first week Flash Job Campaign was very much about coming from “me” the lead artist, so to speak. A few Catalysts in the initial group felt very unpleasant about the whole structure and left the group. Those who stayed found their own life within the very imposed game structure of Flash Job Campaign. EHK: How do you feel Flash Job Campaign sits within the context of the rest of the New Life Berlin festival? PT: Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin is the festival project I think fits perfectly alongside Flash Job Campaign because both projects have an ongoing process of reconsideration. It’s very challenging for a project like yours, [Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin], because you are working with processes that are hard to grasp. For a complete outsider it would be hard to evaluate the output, people go in and have these strange experiences, but what’s the message? This, in a way, is the doubt, the risk, within Flash Job Campaign and Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin – the output. Read reviews about Flash Job Campaign here: http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_530 http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_545 http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_549 http://www.wooloo.org/flashjob Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist currently making mischief in Berlin, Germany. www.alfabus.us Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer and arts facilitator, currently based in Brussels delivering communications for IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 21, 2008 - 07:29:02 AM

A CURATORIAL COLLISION HACK.FEM.EAST KUNSTRAUM KREUZBERG/ BETHANIEN 10 MAY - 23 JUNE PRESENTED AS PART OF ARTS AND CONVERSATION, 9 JUNE Some days, following a breakfast of tea, toast and apples, I can remain staring at the computer screen until suppertime. Apart from a few breaks due to biological necessity, I remain linked into the tangle of online social networking sites which indulge my unhealthy nosiness and fuel my hunger for information. In anticipation of my involvement in the New Life Berlin festival as an Open Dialogues writer, I employed one of these online networks (Myspace) and landed myself a beautiful and tenantless flat in the centre of leafy Kreutzberg. In a large green park, the arts venue Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, is currently playing host to the exhibition Hack.Fem.East, as part of the New Life Berlin festival. Hack.Fem.East is an exhibition that involves female artists from Eastern Europe using the internet to express themselves or to facilitate their political activism. A public presentation by the exhibition curators, Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati, on 9th June gave visitors a comprehensive overview of the concepts of network theory they are working with and how this theory is employed curatorially to create another network, one that is manifested physically in the exhibition format. Often, the online social networks I have joined thanks to peer pressure or simply curiosity evolve into real human interaction. In particular, the virtual relationships with artists and writers that I cultivated through transatlantic email dialogues came to fruition at the New Life Berlin festival when I could finally locate my knowledge about a person in their face directly in front of me. Here in Berlin, my delicate online networks have now evolved into strong personal relationships built from shared experiences and personal exchanges. Hack.Fem.East is in a warren of an exhibition hall with 14 different rooms, involving 32 different female artists or independent activist groups lead by women. Each of the artists or groups bring with them their own networks and the curators see the whole project as a ‘network of networks’ situated each in their own separated spaces but linked through corridors and doorways. The presentation given by the Bazzichelli and Novati was a choreographed dance over a chalk drawn map of the exhibition, a dislocated performance to demonstrate physically the commonalities between the different artists, which justified it as a network and exposed the slippery role of a curator. Within the network paradigm, it is difficult to place the curators’ position as they do not stand alone as their own entity, rather they act as negotiators and brokers for relationships, all the while acting like grease on the networking wheels, to enable the machine to operate smoothly. Themes of prostitution and the trafficking of eastern European women as wives for western European men are recurrent around the exhibition, found in parodist photographs by Alla Georgieva’s project, ‘BG Souvenirs’ and Anna Krenz’s ‘Polish Wife’ interactive installation. Highlighting the relationships and networks between the different artists and groups in Hack.Fem.East also focuses in on shared topics such as open source and intellectual property rights, including Nada Prelja’s ‘Give to Take’ research project on the exploitation of artistically produced images, in which the visitor is given the opportunity to burn a copyright free music CD from the City of Women online platform. But sometimes, when networks hanging in the ether turn into real life confrontations, the meetings of nodes can be destructive and unpleasant. At a recent birthday party, I invited dozens of people, each from different periods in my life and from varied geographical locations. Acting as a broker between groups who had little common elements apart from a friendship with me, I attempted to find more links between the different people. I felt overwhelmed by this task at my own birthday party and learned only a few days later that a violent argument had erupted on the dance floor due to a simple misunderstanding between the different and self contained groups. And, I do feel that elements of Hack.Fem.East are much like a difficult birthday party with the two curators acting as brokers between these often extremely distant nodes who share very little apart from their gender and global situation. As a result, some of the best works become lost in the multitude of installations, which feel like they are positioned in competition with each other. ‘Kits’ by Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova is a reminder of the American, Christine Hill’s work is distinctly Slovakian. Boryana Rossa’s ‘A Garden of One’s Own’ is a beautiful installation questioning the current Bulgarian economic situation and its relationship with global economy through gardening. These projects - among a handful of others in Hack.Fem.East - should stand out, but lose their own identity because of the insistence of curatorial themes of networks and politics rather than the independent pieces of work. Exploring Hack.Fem.East alone, following the presentation by curators Bazzichelli and Novati, I consolidate my own knowledge of the exhibition from reading about it online, with the sensations of actually having been in the space. And in doing so, I come to realise that the new network the curators hope to achieve is enacted through my performance of the exhibition - my wandering from space to space, linking common threads between the artworks and my own personal references within an artistic context or a more personal one. I believe that the visitor’s enjoyment and engagement with the Hack.Fem.East exhibition is dependent on their willingness to search for these links in their own knowledge and history. However the curators have a two fold objective for the Hack.Fem.East networked exhibition, not only is the public’s consideration key to its success, perhaps more importantly, is that it ‘provides and develops’ a network platform in the present and into the future. The exhibition acts not as a physical representation of an existing network but rather creates one in real time and space with the ambition that this will continue indefinitely. As a curatorial project, Hack.Fem.East is a fascinating format with commonalities and collisions in equal measure but when the artworks come down and the doors close the success of the project will be achieved if the network can leap from the physical back into the virtual. Each evening, when I temporarily disengage myself from the multitude of online networks, I meet my friends or ‘nodes’ in real time. I move comfortably from one reality to another secure in the thought that my own links between on and off line are doubly strong. The representation of such links - either through a large and complicated birthday party or a maze-like exhibition- can be both exciting and problematic but it is here that virtual and physical networks can begin to unravel. The ultimate responsibility for success lies with the brokers, matchmakers, wheel greasers or, curators. By Claire Louise Staunton Hack.Fem.East is an exhibition and events programme curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Gaia Novati from the 10 May to 22 June at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien. A presentation by the curators was part of the New Life Berlin programme ‘Arts and Conversation’ www.hackfemeast.org www.wooloo.org/artsandconversation Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author. Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 20, 2008 - 10:35:59 AM

‘FLASH JOB CAMPAIGN: RESPONSIBILITY BORNE?’ ‘FLASH JOB’, EuroGida supermarket, Neukölln, 10.30am, Thursday 12th June ‘FLASH JOB CAMPAIGN PRESENTATION’, 220 Greifwalder Str., 2-4pm, Sunday 15th June Flash Job Campaign Presentation, 15 June. Photo (c) Nicola Koehne. Courtesy Wooloo Productions The Flash Job Campaign (FJC) began with a flurry of controversy as the project was held up to the light by Open Dialogues writers and FJC participants in search of ethical transparency. After this initial hype, the importance of following up this project seems dauntingly clear. Luckily for me – and anyone interested in reading about the project – the weight of responsibility is shared by the detailed blogs that the Catalysts have been writing, soon to be followed by further documentation on the FJC site (www.wooloo.org/flashjob). But have some sides of this story been overlooked? The basic premise of the project is that Catalysts – a range of artists and people working in community/social settings who have applied to participate – go out into Neukölln, known as Berlin’s “roughest area” and find an employer who needs a few hours’ casual work to be completed. To finalise the deal, the Catalyst must find a teenager who is willing to take on this one-off job in exchange for a small wage. Curious to see the embodiment of these ideas, something more tangible than the doubts I’ve been reading and the reports I’ve been hearing, I decided to go along to witness a Flash Job myself. Heading out to Neukölln early on Thursday morning, I meet Lucia Baruelli, one of the Catalysts, who has found a three-hour job stacking shelves at a Turkish supermarket for 16 year old Dragan. We wait for him outside the front of the shop, alongside the rows of shiny tomatoes and oranges. Fifteen minutes after the job was due to start, Dragan hasn’t arrived. One of the shop workers comes out to offer us some freshly cut watermelon and I gratefully take a slice. Fifteen more minutes and Lucia calls Dragan. His sister tells her that Dragan has had to go to his internship today, although he thought he would be able to take the morning off. Clearly disappointed, Lucia tells the shop-keeper that his worker won’t be coming. He shrugs and speaks a few words of German, then continues to stack packages on the shelf. As we walk away Lucia translates his response: “I could see it in his eyes that he wasn’t going to come; he was Yugoslavian. When Germans say yes, they mean yes. When Yugoslavs or Turks say yes, they mean no.” If “unsuccessful” Flash Jobs lead to the perpetuation of prejudices held about other nationalities, and even one’s own nationality, can this project be justified? And even if the jobs prove to be “successful”, does an action this brief really have the potential to challenge such attitudes and encourage more trusting relationships in the future? Many similar questions have already been raised by this project and as Kathryn Fischer (http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_545) points out, “Flash Jobs will not be able to offer firm answers to the controversial questions that it raises, but part of its power lies in its ability to raise them at all”. Still hoping for some solid answers, at least about how many jobs have taken place, I take a seat at the final project presentation on Sunday and listen to examples described by Per Traasdahl, the artist who initiated this project, and several of the Catalysts. Three Flash Jobs have been completed: one teenager helped to disassemble a market trader’s stall, and another two helped an elderly woman with some gardening. The third job was undertaken in Traasdahl’s neighbour’s studio. As each story is told, the personal journeys of each of the Catalysts make for some very interesting listening, and reflect the intensive thought and engagement that has been required of them during this project. Fedele, who travelled from New York to participate, having at first been particularly aware of the number of women wearing headscarves in Berlin in comparison to in his home city, later took an interest in the representation of these women in the media, and the levels of interaction between the Turkish community and other Berlin communities. He has even interviewed a local advertising agency about why the Turkish community was underrepresented in one of its campaigns. It’s clear that to all the Catalysts, the value of this project has been in the interactions they have undertaken. Fedele tells us, “You don’t need to solve people’s problems, just listen to them.” And although I still have my doubts about the repercussions of these interventions, I can see that they do create openings in cross-community, cross-cultural communication, through the “unusual” instigation of conversation, and through the ongoing documentation and discussion around the project. However, the voices that are noticeably absent during the presentation are those of the young people and the employers. Although we see them briefly in video clips, we don’t hear their thoughts on the Flash Job. Is this silence an indication that the project has been too firmly focused on the role of the artist and his/her processes? Of course, it is the artist’s prerogative to decide where the focus of his/her work will lie, but if that work so closely intervenes in the lives of others, incorporating and depending on their actions, surely their voices need to emerge before the discussion around this experiment progresses. Without this, isn’t there a danger that they might be seen as faceless “guinea pigs”, subjected to these artists’ experiments but uninvolved in the development of further stages of the enquiry? This criticism extends to the New Life Berlin festival as a whole. As Charlotte A. Morgan writes (http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_628), “the festival’s curators have outlined their intentions as being to create a more inward gaze towards the relations of the art world, rather than to engage in the locality of Berlin…However, the festival places participation at its core, a process with public engagement embedded in its ideals …Can we engage an international community without acknowledging localised publics, or presenting to them our ideals?” Whilst there is certainly merit in exploring trends within an international artistic community, when work so clearly – even riskily – impacts on a local community, its representatives should have a place in reflecting on the project. As the Flash Job presentation concludes, I can see how this project has addressed the festival themes, “Transnational Communities” and “Participation and Intervention”, but I am left wondering whether the potential implications and weight of “Artistic Social Responsibility” have been significantly overlooked. Read other reviews of Flash Job Campaign, and an interview with its initiator, Per Traasdahl, here: http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_549 http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_545 http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_530 http://www.wooloo.org/flashjob Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer and arts facilitator, currently based in Brussels delivering communications for IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. Contact ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 20, 2008 - 02:18:22 AM

OPEN DIALOGUES LIVE REVIEW CHORINER STRASSE 85, JUNE 7 2008 Now that New Life Berlin is over, I still find myself thinking back to June 7th’s Open Dialogues Live Review and wondering why such a heated debate broke out among the participants. Most of the other discussions I attended throughout the festival were more like presentations: the speakers talked about their area of specialty and the audience listened. The Open Dialogues Live Review turned into a heated exchange that went back and forth between the audience, the panel and (too rarely) the writers involved in the project. In fact, just as things seemed to reach a critical point, we ran out of time and the meeting came to a close. I still wonder why the Open Dialogues project caused some people to get so upset; none of the other projects in the New Life Berlin festival elicited such a vehement response as far as I can tell. As someone with a literary background whose art writing has appeared on blogs and in multiple print publications in the States, the opportunity to participate in Open Dialogues with an international group of writers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds immediately grabbed me. The project aimed to create a group of critical writers, who could explore the complex relationships between artists, writers and audiences together. It’s about time, I thought. Over the last several years, I’ve felt sometimes frustrated and sometimes elated as an arts writer, so I was curious to explore the relationship between critical writing and community through the Open Dialogues project. The art circles in Los Angeles are small despite the city’s huge size, and this has caused me to wrestle with the concept of objectivity and fairness considering that I can inevitably run into the artists concerned at parties, openings, the grocery store, etc. There’s also the dreaded tap on the shoulder by a desperate gallerist pleading for a review or the artist who immediately begins to list off his/her resume when introduced—these are just a few of the day-to-day perils involved in art writing. Can all this be traced back, yet again, to the power of the written word? At the Open Dialogues Live Review, one member of the audience, an art historian/critic who writes for a well respected UK publication, took particular offense at Open Dialogues and hurled questions at the group like “What are your qualifications? How many of you are paid writers?” Considering that much of the New Life Berlin festival was a kind of experiment and none of us claimed to be experts, these questions seemed inappropriate. Could you imagine asking the artists involved in other festival projects where they’d shown their work before or what kind of financial compensation they’d received for it? I’m not sure where this aggressive and angry stance came from, but it made any kind of constructive dialogue impossible by forcing many to take a defensive stance. This is purely speculative, but I wonder if this emotional, aggressive response can be traced back to the rift between bloggers and writers who work within more traditional editorial channels. Was this art historian/critic unleashing pent up frustration at the changing nature of the publishing world? Many writers and editors who operate within the traditional editorial chain of command lament the onslaught of blogs and equate them with a dumbing-down of public discourse. Gone are the days when a writer could only reach his/her audience through an editor, and without this filter firmly in place, anyone can contribute to the public debate in 2008. The Open Dialogues project is a testament to this fact, and as more traditional publishing institutions are slowly being eroded, an important question comes up: Who is qualified to write about art and contemporary culture? Personally, I think a wide range of voices can only enrich a discussion about art, which was one of the main goals of Open Dialogues. If art means many different things to many different people, isn’t there room for everyone? Based on the reaction we received at the Live Review, some seem to think that only art historians are qualified to write about art; however, I disagree. In fact, I think such a narrow focus can serve to alienate many potential readers, which is a shame because art raises important questions about what it means to be a human being in the world today. This is a conversation that everyone should be involved in and benefit from. Sometimes it seems that art critics intentionally hide behind a veil of terminology as a way to back up their opinions and prove their legitimacy—they use language to prove they’ve got those important art world credentials. Any writer knows it’s actually much more difficult to write about the ineffable, such as art, in simple, direct language. Is this why art writing is sometimes so opaque and self-reflexive? Or are there simply more bad writers than good ones? I’m not sure, but if someone is this angry about our project, then we must be doing something right with Open Dialogues. If anyone can write about art and contribute to the discussion, then where does that leave The Art Critics? If art is made accessible to everyone, then where does that leave those who rely on the exclusivity of the art world to make themselves feel important? I certainly don’t have all the answers, and I don’t feel like my experience as an Open Dialogues writer gave me a sense of closure on these issues, but it’s reassuring and encouraging to find a supportive community and know others share some of my concerns. I suppose all we can do is keep writing; the writing will have the last word. Valerie Palmer is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles. Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 18, 2008 - 06:20:51 AM

'LIVE REVIEW', OPEN DIALOGUES, CHORINER STR. 85, SATURDAY 7TH JUNE, 2008 Open Dialogues has been a factory of critical writing within the New Life Berlin (NLB) festival. Grouping together critical writers of various backgrounds to both review the artwork of NLB and commit to examining the role of criticism in participatory art contexts, Open Dialogues opened a dialogic floor for a critique of its own presence in the festival on Saturday 7th of June. And so it was that sandwiched between two weeks of critically reviewing the pieces and practices of the artists involved in NLB, the writers of Open Dialogues gingerly hosted the ‘Live Review’ of their own practice and pieces. I have had issues with the task of responding to the Open Dialogues Live Review, and although I would have preferred not to begin this writing in a confessional style, the concepts under scrutiny here hit far too close to home not to. In retrospect, I think the most problematic element of my week-long endeavour to write this has been an inconstant sense of what exactly it means to write a review of the Live Review. Technically, it is an effort to apply the judgmental lens of criticism to the Open Dialogues’ penultimate public presentation at New Life Berlin. The Live Review itself was intended as a review of the Open Dialogues model of criticism within New Life Berlin. This model demands that the artist and critic spend extensive time together as a result both of the participatory nature of the art being considered, and of the concern we Open Dialogues writers have returned to profusely during the festival: being ‘generous’ to the work. Generosity here has not meant blind flattery. On the contrary, it requires that a critical eye be invested in the very core of the artist’s intentions, the conception, process, and outcomes of the work; whether or not any outcome could be judged negative or positive, intentional or unforeseen, it should be treated as significant. Thus the Live Review could be seen as a generosity of focus towards Open Dialogues’ writing itself, as a multi-faceted outcome of New Life Berlin work. The effort seemed honourable: to submit our collective critical voice to its own medicine, and review our reviewing, critique our exploration of criticality. Art criticism is not a fixed formula. If one remotely conclusive thought pervaded the volatile controversies volleyed across the Live Review venue it was surely this. The discussion, as non-linear as the polemics of art criticism itself, hosted questions answered with more questions, convictions from object-based and participatory art practitioners, curatorial and administrative workers, and art writers across a plethora of disciplines. Participants addressed the reputation of the term ‘criticism’ itself, the relationship and differences between critic and artist, and how the mercurial institutional framework of criticism might be obsolete or indispensable. These issues have been addressed throughout art history, from James Elkins’ 2003 publication “What Happened to Art Criticism?” back to 1890 with Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” and further even to the 1700s through Denis Diderot’s “Salons.” The Live Review panelists attempted at times to rein in a focus on the Open Dialogues model and New Life Berlin, yet as the conversations stubbornly fluttered across the entire philosophical discipline of art criticism, they unsurprisingly came to no anchored conclusion and undoubtedly could have gone on for years. Such, it seems is the omnificent nature of art criticism, as of any generous criticality or any artistic practice, that it could never be absolutely reviewed to a dogmatic state of stagnation within two hours of talking, two pages of writing, or even centuries of history. I think in retrospect I volunteered to write about the Live Review because the idea of reviewing a review about reviewing seemed like an amusing concept. Yet I then found I had no idea how to appropriately ease my way into a discursive critical look at the heated mess of criticality hosted that Saturday. I tried to think laterally about this endeavour, and consider my own place in the event. As an invited critic in the NLB festival, the Live Review was concerned with my own practice, just as any other review issued in the festival has been concerned with the practice of an invited artist or group. My task here then was a strange one: on one hand I could attempt to carefully navigate my intimacy with Open Dialogues and review the Live Review as I would any other participatory event in New Life Berlin, with objective generosity; on the other hand, I am undoubtedly invested in the project being reviewed to such an extent that I can’t help but consider this an opportunity rarely afforded any other artist/author/creator at large. As a practising artist myself, I have no idea what kind of occasion would allow me to publicly express written criticism of a critique of my work. An artist’s statement allows for some vocalised expression of artistic intent, yet it is not so much a dialogic response as it is a monologue about inference. Perhaps this attempt of mine to write about the Live Review is a little of both. One heavy-footed issue raised at the discussion was the critic’s relationship to the artwork: does a critic maintain any sense of investment in the work beyond a cursory interest and perhaps a desire to get paid for expository and opinionated writing about it? I don’t completely recall what I answered to this at the time but I do hope it was more composed and professional than the screaming voice in my head that insisted I hadn’t flown standby for a week to spend fourteen unpaid days of constant writing, interviewing, participating, and discussing just out of mere interest. Clearly there is no pretending I have an objective critical voice here. It is my belief that an artist attempts to harness the optic of the viewer towards a conviction of some kind using a medium s/he feels invested in, and that a critic’s work follows the same process, employing a medium s/he also feels invested in. The medium here is not just critical language, but the artwork being addressed: the work of others, the expression of others, the philosophy of others. Whether pleasing to or at odds with the convictions of the critic, the artwork is always significant and indispensable to the art of criticism. The institutional artist/critic relationship often platforms the critic’s role as definitive of the artist’s career, of the artwork’s “success,” yet not as often acknowledged is the definitive role of the artwork in the critic’s career. This considered, it is undeniable that the ideological investment in the artwork’s existence is shared by artist and critic, and a review is never completely devoid of intimacy with its subject. The writers of Open Dialogues all traveled to Berlin to explore a model of writing that unapologetically feeds off this intimacy with the artwork in New Life Berlin, often with problematic implications. My intimacy with the subject of this review for instance dangerously toys with the critical boundaries that ward off subjectivity and perhaps nepotism, yet as the Live Review showed in even the first five minutes of its precarious progression, there is nothing enclosable about what criticism can and should do. By Anga’aefonu Bain-Vete Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete is a practising artist, collaborative curator and cross-disciplinary writer, currently completing a Master's in Visual Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. www.angaaefonu.com Please only reproduce this writing with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SUNDAY - JUNE 15, 2008 - 08:02:39 AM

BORDERLINE ENGAGED The windows being removed from the New Life Shop, May 2008. Photo (c) Viviana Druga. Courtesy Wooloo Productions. The large floor length windows of the New Life Shop have been re-installed and the gallery is once again an indoor space, separated efficiently from the street corner by its newly reinstated walls. Beginning to arrive for the opening of ‘Your Imaginary Country’, an installation in the space by Scott Townsend, guests take in an initial overview of the work whilst keeping one eye out for the beer. A series of wall-mounted papers catch my attention. Presented within the posters is a collection of visual and textual information surrounding the measures taken by the US government in preventing immigration from Mexican citizens, and the dangers faced by the South Americans in finding means of entry. The US authorities’ surveillance methods are centred around the presence of a 5 meter high wall, currently being built along the southern border. The act of building a wall is inherently performative; it impacts on the ways in which spaces can be used by their inhabitants and re-defines spatial relations. Walls create personal manageable spaces in which we may work, sleep and socialise, offering shelter, privacy and protection; they also have far-reaching political implications. Physically embodying the division of land, the presence of a wall can deny visibility, access and communication. It would be impossible for work detailing this structural insertion not to draw clear comparisons to the Berlin wall: an emblem of division still marked on the global imagination. The information presented draws a line between the two locations, intersecting political agendas, personal struggles and prejudices of otherness. I absorb these facts, and notice another division between the spaces depicted and this Choriner Strasse gallery, in addition to the physical and temporal comparisons the artist invites. I cannot understand the realities of the immigrants’ situation and the means of control they are subject to, and feel uneasy. I turn my attention self-consciously back into the room. My presence in the space is welcomed, along with the other internationally mobile writers, artists and cultural practitioners amassing for the event. We speak in terms of community engagement, of transnational exchange and political intervention; the New Life Berlin festival acts as a means towards critical questioning of social structures through collaboration and participation. Through intervention in existing communities or the creation of new ones, the fundamental concern of participatory practice is the potential for an altered social experience and a reappropriation of everyday space. The strong sociological roots of these art projects lie in critiquing the conditions of human relations as positioned within the system of capital. Grand claims, and unsettling for the post-modern stomach. These processes are also open to controversial use by some artists, who interpret them as ways towards pseudo-social work or the recruitment of free labour. But although we exist in an era where cynicism is an inbuilt attribute and social change a weary debate, these practices are intended as small offerings from the ground up, rather than reform en mass. The New Life Berlin festival is an exemplary ambassador for participation, collating and promoting diverse takes on the process and its social potentials, and allowing artists to work in a variety of fields. The concept of a model for new life infers the development of action and exchange; it encourages openness and re-evaluation within wide social contexts. But how have these contexts been addressed within this festival? The presence of an audience has come into question throughout the programme, and further, the significance of a local audience within its conceptual agenda. The projects within the festival offer variations on the notion of participation with equally varying levels of success, yet these participants have rarely been members of the public resident in Berlin, having mainly signed up from the Wooloo.org artists network . Had they been offered access to the projects, these willing publics may have brought significant contributions to some of the works, instigating a more mutual exchange between artist and public. And what of a secondary viewing audience? Is there room to observe and not to partake? It’s no new realisation that building public interest in contemporary art can be difficult, and who are we, as interested parties, to impose ourselves within people’s daily existences. Projects that pursue community engagement in the belief that art will benefit social groups, raise many problematic issues regarding ethics and integrity. It could be assumed that the audience for most art events is largely made up of those with vested interest, and even here I am addressing you, the culturally engaged individual, rather than the ‘faceless‘ mass public. In discussion, the festival’s curators have outlined their intentions as being to create a more inward gaze towards the relations of the art world, rather than to engage in the locality of Berlin. As a result, the fesitval focusses on a wider social situation than that of the immediate locality. However, the festival places participation at its core, a process with public engagement embedded in its ideals. The local must also be engaged with on some level to bring these social assertions out of the abstract. What social structures, if not engaging the localised publics who inhabit them, are we addressing? Can we engage an international community without acknowledging localised publics, or presenting to them our ideals? It pacifies my uncertainty that the second interactive computer-generated part of the exhibition is worded in German, my exclusion is somehow reassuring. Social practices outlines their functions as resisting homogeny and giving faces to the masses on whatever small a scale, instilling amongst wide publics the potentials of these subtly altered situations and, in the case of this festival, the model of new life. Again this seems idealistic, but the key is in enquiry, subtlety and suggestion. I move slowly around the gallery once more to look at Scott Townsend’s work, and make my way outside. Through the questions raised by the context of the festival in which it is presented, Townsend’s exhibition encloses in one room an intriguing, if unsettling meeting of division and access, of fluid and fixed communities. The crowd on the street is warm and social interactions take head; I am offered a beer and slide comfortably into my role as transnational community member, participant and new friend, feeling genuinely, yet troublingly privileged to be working within it. Perhaps through our interactions, answers as to how the socio-political implications of participation can translate to an artist-centred community context will be enacted over time. By Charlotte A. Morgan Your Imaginary Country by Scott Townsend is at the New Life Shop, Choriner Strasse 85, until June 15th. Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SUNDAY - JUNE 15, 2008 - 02:13:38 AM

30 Days of New Life Berlin Two male cartographers who wish to remain anonymous have arrived from the USA to participate in The New Life Berlin Festival. As the title of their work suggests, the cartographers, who like to be known as A and B are here for 30 days. Their purpose is to carry out an urban exploration to map the arts and culture of the city. Any visitor to Berlin cannot help but be struck by the cranes that silhouette the horizon. Germany’s capital is a building site, in which galleries and alternative spaces have flourished, even more since the Wall came down. A and B are aware of this shifting landscape. Whilst cartographers of the past sought to conquer the globe, these cultural nomads are using travel, observation, questioning and report-writing strategies to plot the galleries of Berlin. They work with performance, participatory actions and interventions to gather information, using spatial and cognitive decision making and engaging in dialogue with those they come into contact with. On a scorching hot day I found myself shadowing cartographers A and B while they mapped a number of galleries punctuating the area. The day began at Galerie Schuster, Heidestrasse 46, next door to The Haunch of Venison Gallery and not far from The Hamburger Bahnhof Gallery of Contemporary Art. Cartographers A and B were wearing t-shirts and shorts, their American accents and strolling demeanor creating a persona of visitor or tourist. The cartographers’ game-plan for 30 Days of New Life Berlin includes covert attention to the spatial and curatorial qualities of each gallery they map. They photograph the hanging of work and the architectural construction of the gallery, and can be seen surveying ceilings and the hidden surfaces and structures of art works. Attention is paid to lighting: I was surprised to be told that many of the city’s galleries use strip-lighting. Each gallery is evaluated for it’s openness to the cartographer’s questions and visitor information. A and B variously adopt roles as performer, detective, evaluator, researcher, and distributor of information. We continued to Infernoesque Projektraum, situated in an industrial building at Heidestrasse 46-52, and then on to Zern, a gallery where Andreas Gefeller’s show Supervisions investigates the layering of the unnoticed inner workings of buildings and urban landscapes, photographed from above. Then, nearby, a cobbled walkway and a row of six inter-connected, converted warehouses: Hallen am Wasser ("Halls on the Water"), a complex of galleries whose exteriors are cloaked in a grey fabric facade, which houses painting, sculpture and installations. As A and B continued their rituals of observing the spatial and curatorial qualities of each gallery, I felt a heightened engagement with my surroundings. As we returned to the massive Armadillo like glass shell of Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s Central Station made up of 9,000 interwoven sections, I was acutely aware of having been both participant and spectator in this work. A and B engaged in another mapping strategy later that day, giving what they said was a performance involving the audience and participants of New Life Berlin Festival at The New Life Berlin Shop in Choriner Strasse. Participants were asked to highlight their favourite cultural locations on a large walled map of Berlin. As they made their marks the purpose of the paper map was altered; from a tool for mapping routes from one place to another, it became an interactive, layered alternative urban and cultural narrative. The research outcomes accumulated by A and B can be seen on the Wooloo website http://www.wooloo.org/30days and includes three links leading to images, gallery listings and a Google locator map. Its topography can be seen as setting up interconnections between different gallery locations, looking beyond the surface, as if interrogating the gallery substratum of the city. Beyond this, the 30 Days link gauges the ease of cultural integration for the ‘outsider’ who might be a tourist, foreigner or stranger. These strategies raise an awareness of the limitations of cultural language,and question the notion of truth and the hierarchy of art speak,- the self-serving industry chatter that conforms to a system not made clear to outsiders. The cartographers’ construction of social and cultural maps creates an alternative dialogue and narrative, permitting visitors to the website (and Berlin) to position themselves both as outsiders looking in (and insiders looking out). But is the listing of gallery information and thumbnail images enough to actively engage an online audience? My own live participation enabled an entry point that most other visitors to the 30 Days of New Life Berlin could not have. At the same time, this online information invites its audience to undertake their own mapping and exploration of the galleries in Berlin, and has the potential to radically alter online cultural and social mapping. Ann Rapstoff Ann Rapstoff creates performances, interventions and events. She is co-curator of ArtWash. www.annrapstoff.co.uk, www.artwash.co.uk. Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SUNDAY - JUNE 15, 2008 - 01:29:32 AM

WEARING A BORROWED PONCHO IN BERLIN NEW BERLINERS OLD BERLINERS 08 JUNE Photo: New Berliners Old Berliners. Courtesy Laboratorio Berlin and Wooloo Productions Friendship, generosity and hospitality are essential human impulses and welcome aspects, hopefully, of all our lives. There is a lot of all three in the New Life Berlin festival. There needs to be, there isn’t much of anything else to make art with here. A cheery gift economy replaces finance and is used to construct the art works within it as well as the very event itself. The festival invites our generosity and in return gives us friendly support and a showcase for what we do as artists and writers. It is an open and fair trade, a form of alternative giving, and one that successfully refutes the commodification of art as product or business. This amiable exchange makes things happen and exists in place of materials where lack of budget does not allow for them. It makes for a committed and inventive approach to everything, and one where all participating feel on a level with each other. One of the projects that most embodies the exchange and reciprocity that drives the New Life Berlin festival, is Old Berliners to New Berliners. It is run by the Berlin collaboration, Laboratorio Berlin who are Silvina der Meguerditchian , Chus Lopez Vidal and Concha Argueso. All Spanish or Armenian Argentinian in origin, they settled in Berlin over a decade ago, which I expect would not seem long enough to be called an ‘old’ Berliner by those who are born here. When newly arrived they lived in poorer parts of the city, studying and jobbing to get by but now live in more settled homes in the leafy Charlottenberg district. Laboratorio Berlin haven’t forgotten their experience as migrants and their need to replace the emotionally supportive traditional family with a network of friends and colleagues. Ideas about the structure and value of this recycled family inform their project for the New Life Berlin festival. They are eager to extend the hand of friendship to other new arrivals, especially the new wave of artists and creatives who have been attracted to Berlin as a cultural centre, and who tend to live over in the shabbier and cheaper, districts of Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain and Mitte in former East Berlin. An open invitation was posted on the New Life Berlin festival website to come over to one of their apartments last Sunday evening. The door to the airy and elegant apartment, with spacious studios close by, was opened to welcome in the recently arrived population, other friends and some of the writers from Open Dialogues. We writer ‘tourists’ did seem to outnumber the New Berliners as not as many came as had been hoped for. Perhaps the EM game that night or the childrens’ bedtime kept some away, or maybe more targeted invitations were needed? Laboratorio Berlin worked closely together in planning this event which was creative and fun as well as very welcoming. Besides hosting and explaining their project to us, they invited their guests to contribute their thoughts or photos or objects to a growing tree on the apartment wall that represents the connections being made and the idea of “new family”. There are plans for an ongoing art collaboration between participants that uses the model of the traditional travelling Spanish wooden box, the Santa Familia. People are already signing up to have this in their homes and then will travel to meet with others as they hand it on. Lewis Hyde in his book ‘The Gift’ speaks of how the action of giving can develop a chain of offerings, passing on values from one person to the next. Laboratorio Berlin understand that it is through such exchanges that human bonds are created and enable social systems to function and thrive. There are so many positive aspects to this heartfelt and well-conceived project, so much to be gained, and it is a shame that more did not come to enjoy it. Despite having travelled from across the world to be in Berlin, it seems that the journey across the city from arrival into this affluent area was just a little too far, too soon, for some New Berliners. Perhaps this new artist population, the New Berliners, will remain disconnected from the old one a little longer. But if the Old Berliners of Laboratorio Berlin have anything to do with it, not for too much longer. Photo: the borrowed Poncho, photographer Clare Carswell 08 As addendum, a discreet but significant exchange took place this week within the embrace of this project. I met to interview Silvina a second time, to hear her thoughts on how the evening had gone. We sat and talked over coffee at a street café. The weather was changing and as the sun went in I became cold. I had no sweater with me and was more than an hour away from my lodgings to collect one. I was warmed by her generosity in taking me to her home and lending me a vibrant red and black poncho to wear. I do feel as though I am rather sailing under false colours, but for the remainder of my time in Berlin am enjoying wearing this exotic and snug token of hospitality. It was a small act of kindness to a stranger, and one that emanated from the same core of generosity and friendship that in this project were just the right materials for art production. Clare Carswell Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. Opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 14, 2008 - 04:56:52 AM

‘Eat the Wall’ Ali&Cia, ‘Eat the Wall’, Greifswalderstrasse 220, June 10, 2008 Photo: Eat the Wall, Ali&Cia, photographer Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions. Ali&Cia introduced their “Eat the Wall” project last night with an altogether Spanish welcoming, offering plenty of bread, wine, Manchego cheese, olives and chorizo. These were passed around with a communal warmth and spirit with which they appear to bring to their many “eat art” projects around the world. Whereas ‘food art’ projects might be about food, symbolize food, or involve food, eat art projects, we learned, mean the food is used as art but also made to be consumed. This fact is illustrative of the way that Ali&Cia bring to the forefront of their projects the spirit of eating together. The value of eating together was made evident in Ali&Cia’s extensive review of their previous projects. To give participants a sense of what the Eat the Wall in Berlin will be all about, they began the workshop by screening several moving videos documenting their Eat the City projects in London, the Canary Islands and Melbourne. In Eat the City, a map of the city gets divided into quadrants and each section is given to a group who will be responsible for creating a 3-dimentional map using food as the architectural materials. The representative groups, ranging anywhere from a Spanish cultural center to a battered woman’s shelter, to a group home for disabled persons, choose the area of the city they’d like to represent and then make a large scale cultural quilt out of food. Preparations for Eat the City involve a two day cooking spree, in which each community group prepares their section of the map, cooking and building together, creating skyscrapers out of spring rolls, bridges out of chicken satay. On the third day they present their creation, and the food city is made open to the public as they put the map together. As each edible quadrant of the city is unveiled, the cooks present their food, showing off with traditional music, costumes and dance. Once the map is put together, the public is invited to eat their own city, tasting for free the wide variety of foods enjoyed by many diverse communities. In the happy faces of hundreds of participants, one can see that cooking together and eating together is universal. It is a bridge beyond verbal communication and creates an opening for healing in the act of cooking. As Ali&Cia explain, giving and receiving food is one of the most common ways that humans express their love and longing for their homeland. Food has symbolic meaning even beyond the obvious. Cooking, Ali&Cia explain, is like the Socratic sense of dialogue: “You don’t know what you know; it is only through dialogue that you discover something of what you know.” Cooking, likewise is a process where a person can discover what food means as interlocutors to other people. This Sunday, Eat the Wall follows in the Ali&Cia eat art tradition, where once again the city will be challenged to cook and eat together. This time, however, participants will bring edible bricks to make a wall that will be built out of food and then devoured. Edible bricks can be made out of brick-shaped foods like a loaf of bread, or a less structured dish like lasagna, housed in a Tupperware box. What will set this project apart from past projects, however, is that participants are not representing various sections of Berlin and they will not be building the city itself. Rather, the construction of a wall reminds us of the Wall Berlin is so famous for, calling attention to borders, both in our heads and between nations and peoples. By eating the wall, perhaps we will go some way to breaking those borders down. For various reasons (lack of time, funds and local knowledge) local neighborhoods in Berlin have not been contacted to represent their community at the public eating ceremony of Eat the Wall on Sunday. Promotion of the project, and the ceremony, has lain largely on the shoulders of the New Life Berlin festival staff and the promotion that Ali&Cia have done since their recent arrival in Berlin; a city they are largely unfamiliar with. In failing to reach all the various cultural groups Berlin has to offer, one of the most moving aspects of previous Ali&Cia projects - community involvement- may be lost. The result in Eat the Wall on Sunday may be that those who make, bring and eat the food are for the most part New Life Berlin festival goers. Another possible oversight is that in focusing on the building and eating of a wall, rather than the city, Eat the Wall may run the risk of treating Berlin as a city united over the idea of division. But daily life in Berlin today, despite its traumatic and divided history, may in fact have little to do with the Berlin Wall. Berlin, like London or Paris, is a melting pot for many different immigrants and ethnically diverse communities. While the extent to which Sunday’s event will be diverse in terms of community remains to be seen, it is clear that Ali&Cia are marvelously warm hosts. The more the merrier; Eat the Wall will no doubt be moving and delicious for those who do choose to come. Spread the word. By Kathryn Fischer Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist currently making mischief in Berlin, Germany. www.alfabus.us Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. Opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 14, 2008 - 04:06:48 AM

WE WILL LOVE MARTHA SCISSORS - imaginings from a potential participant Marisa Olsen, 'Assisted Living'. Photo (c) Jonathon Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions What would life be without useful tips, what useful tips without life? You are right, today, as in the future a convenient life is the basic condition for progress in culture and society - and as we know, life comprises, of course, of every single activity you want and have to do at home. "We can be sure, that there will never be a paramount and elevating experience without inconspicuous skills and home comforts." (Homedegger) This quote by Homedegger, in part proves why Martha Scissors is immortal and why "Assisted Living" will never be outdated, but will get more and more important for your life. Futuristic devices will even allow Martha Scissors to come into your living room - she will be present as soon as you switch on your multidimensoinal - sensorial - monitory projection system, and you will be able to experience her lifestyle, testing all new products, smelling the food she is cooking for you and meeting other people. In the future, when you start to interact with Martha Scissors' daily show, you will get transferred into Life-TV - which is incredible, isn´t it? The interactive and multisensorial Martha Stewart TV show will up-grade your social life and give you useful advice. Like ever before it is going to introduce you to all the tiny, practical things that you could never discover on your own in the the infinite space of your digital supermarket. Through the new virtual dimensions used by Martha Scissors, you can be sure that all her advice is sound. You can test the products immediately! You will smell the food she prepared for you! You will even be able to taste it! Martha’s elegent and up to date style will perfectly complement the atmosphere and atractiveness of your private life. Once the invention of color TV introduced overwhelming sights into our homes, but in the future virtual multisensorial TV will become an all encompassing experience - color will increase to neon, which is beyond color, and will brighten your thoughts, your movements, your daily notes, improve your skin, prevent cancer, and much, much more. No description will ever come close to what the future is really like, so get out and test it all by yourself, get the future right know, get Assisted Living here in Berlin! Today's show is tonight at 6 at Karl-Liebknechtstr. 13A. Christin Niehoff Christin Niehoff is an arts student at Berlin Weißensee, ctinitc@gmx.de Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. Opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 14, 2008 - 03:08:55 AM

Interview with Scott Townsend June 9, 2008 Chorinerstr. 85 “Your Imaginary Country” VP: You often see an angry, very emotional response from people who don’t like borders being blurred or crossed. Whether that happens to be a nation or a discipline, it threatens people. ST: I’ve been doing these kinds of projects for six years now and it’s always struck a nerve, mostly in a positive sense, but it’s also been controversial. People have always been really threatened by a blurring of boundaries, but within that threat, you mix people together, so things are really broken open and some interesting discussions result. When crossing these lines, everyone is very conscious of talking to people that they normally would not. Whenever I do these projects, I always think, “Brace yourself,” because something’s going to come up from asking fairly innocent questions. VP: Like the chaos that erupted after the Berlin Wall came down. ST: “Your Imaginary Country” is really more about the United States than it is about Berlin. I couldn’t find an organization that would support it, so far, in the U.S. because it does deal with the Strategic Border Initiative (SBI), the fence or wall that is being constructed around the entire United States. VP: Can you talk a little bit about this fence? You don’t hear much about this topic in the States, and I’m not sure how much it coverage it gets here in Europe. ST: The New York Times is pretty good about following it, and it’s starting to get more airplay, but basically it’s a multi-billion dollar initiative starting in the Southwestern U. S. primarily around the border region near Tucson, Arizona. They’re constructing a wall that’s very similar to the Berlin Wall in terms of its physical characteristics. It utilizes anti-personal, anti-vehicle sensors and surveillance towers that are electronic and networked. It uses some of the same technology that’s being used in Iraq right now, like unmanned vehicles and surveillance planes. VP: How far along is the construction? ST: Quite a bit has been added to it this year in Arizona down towards Nogales and San Diego is famous for being the first place that serious fencing went up. Eventually, this fence is going to encircle everything in the United States. It’s going to run along the Canadian border, guarding Minnesota from the Canadians [laughs]. On one hand, the rationale for building this wall is that some of the immigrants die in the desert—and they do die in the desert—but I think there needs to be a closer look at why people need to immigrate in the first place. How can we be civil about treating them instead of just excluding them? It was the same situation with the Berlin Wall, which was built by the GDR to block the flow of people rushing into West Berlin. We have a similar situation now in the United States, but instead of guest worker programs and working with Central and South American countries, we tend to be unilateral and build a fortress. So a lot of the discussions in my work have been about that and different expressions of what it means to be an American. Much of the responses tend to be conservative in nature and they tend to be nostalgic for an America that is perceived by a lot of people as being Anglo and white. VP: So you see parallels between Berlin during the Cold War and this fence going up along the border of post-9/11 America? ST: Yes, but what informs Berlin is different from what informs the U.S. and Mexico and Central America, but I think my installation and the web site both look at the motivations behind people’s reactions to threats from the outside. In “Your Imaginary Country,” I talk about similar trends in terms of trying to control identity and the idea of shutting down dialogue when democracy is founded on dialogue. If you cross the line, you’re often called a traitor in the United States when you bring these issues up. VP: Can we talk specifically about what’s going to happen here in the New Life Shop? ST: One section of the exhibit documents the SBI in the United States and compares it to the Berlin Wall, while the other section presents more metaphorical questions that have to do with identity. The metaphor deals with the idea of split hemispheres. It takes this idea of east, west, north and south and relates it to the idea of split personality, for example emotion vs. reason. From this, individual identity can be used to discuss a larger collective identity. It also addresses how we think about the double personality that we humans have to deal with. Most people buy into the concept that there’s one side of our personality that has to be repressed: the conscious vs. the unconscious. It’s a real simple comparison, and visitors to the gallery can actually submit answers to these questions like they can online, so the space here is really connected to the rest of the world through the online pieces. VP: Have you done something similar to this in other cities? ST: I’ve done similar projects in Tokyo, Prague, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Canada, the United States and in a few places where it’s more about actual neighborhoods gentrifying, not unlike [Berlin, Mitte] from what I can tell. Usually, they’re places where some kind of split or a schism is an issue. For instance, Tijuana [Mexico] and San Diego [California] is a good example of that. VP: Is there any place where there’s not a split or schism in the year 2008? ST: I don’t think there is, but certainly there are places where it’s more intense or visually symbolic. I mean if you mention the Berlin Wall, it’s still a powerful symbol even today. VP: Where does this need for borders and the need to compartmentalize things come from? Is this just a basic human instinct? ST: Some people would say that. Some would say it’s part of cognition. We have to categorize things in order to understand them and comprehend them. I don’t know if I believe in that. It seems like we could do better. Those not in Berlin who would like to participate in this project can go to: http://www.imaginarycountry.org Valerie Palmer is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles. Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. Opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 13, 2008 - 11:20:07 AM

Ali&Cia ‘Eat The Wall’ Public Workshop 10 June Public Ceremony 15 June 20.00 Take Away Your Own Piece of the Wall! Photo: Eat the wall, Ali&Cia, photographer Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions In Tuesday’s workshop, before Sunday evening’s public ceremony, Ali&Cia brought their first recruits together over what ended in a preparatory feast of traditional German bread, cheese and wine. The workshop was an event in itself, designed to muster enthusiasm and inspire us to get others involved in Eat the Wall, a socially engaged food project by Ali&Cia for the New Life Berlin festival. Ali&Cia bring people together to build objects out of food and facilitate ceremonies where the public is invited to devour the work, afterwards leaving nothing but crumbs for the birds. Headed by the effervescent Alicia Rios, the group’s passion for food is positively overwhelming, and at times contagious. Coming from an academic background of philosophy and psychology Alicia explained how she has developed her passion for food as a common denominator between people. Meanwhile, whilst discussing the complex relations we humans have with our food, she transformed the common task of slicing bread into a spectacle. Flitting between philosophical and mythological musings about the traditional German loaves before us, Alicia held the loaves up and passed them around to heighten our awareness of their physicality. I found myself entranced by this woman’s energy and her genuine belief in the expressive qualities of food. On Sunday evening, 15 June, Ali&Cia and recruits will build a wall made of food and then eat it at Showroom Scala, Friedrichstr. 112. Eat the Wall is a new turn for Ali&Cia, whose past projects have involved local city residents in emotional, large-scale events, in which community groups are recruited to cook -and then eat -their own cities. Eat Melbourne, for example, was publicly funded as a part of the opening ceremony for a city square and took months to prepare. Detached from the communal excitement of eating a whole city, the smaller scale of Eat the Wall here in Berlin presents a platform for analysing the value of the human necessity of eating which, in the West, is commonly taken for granted. Photo: Eat the wall, Ali&Cia, photographer Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions Working with the idea of breaking down barriers, Eat the Wall was inspired by the previous East/West divide in Berlin, however the group insists that it stands for all walls – both physically and mentally – that divide us today. At 5pm on the 15th of June, the last day of New Life Berlin, the final call for ‘all artists’ will resound. Willing participants are called to bring their own food ‘bricks’ and to help in the construction of the edible wall. In conclusion, a feasting ceremony is set for 8pm where participants, divided into two sides, will eat their way through the wall, devouring the barriers that separate us. As participatory art, the question of success for this work is whether the group has mustered enough participation or if they will find themselves performing the sombre act of building their own two meter high, food wall and then having to eat their way through it alone. In addition, the time and budget restrictions offered by New Life Berlin represent a challenge for Ali&Cia in Eat the Wall. This challenge is compounded by the fact that Berlin is made up of an international creative community which is constantly in flux. Moreover, wooloo.org is an online artist community, from which the New Life Berlin participants have flown from across the globe. Such matters make forging solid connections with long-term Berlin residents harder to establish. With what little contacts they have, Ali&Cia are relying on advertising and word of mouth to wait-and-see their turn out on Sunday afternoon. This means the participation at the Eat the wall public ceremony on Sunday evening may be more a glimpse into the nature of local involvement in creative activity in Berlin. However, at the workshop Ali&Cia remained optimistic, preparing recruits with practical examples of how to make delicious edible bricks using waffles and discussing the imperative of building with food that lasts the duration of the wall construction (4 hours). Setting themselves apart from food art, Ali&Cia insist on the term ‘eat art’, where the final product must be not only consumable, but so tasty that it finally disappears, taken away from the site of the final performance in the bellies of participants. Although Ali&Cia were open to discussing the various issues that participants brought to the table, they were clear that the focus of Eat the Wall was based upon the concept of sharing. As we talked, food and drinks were passed around, producing a sense of communality, glued together by the enthusiasm of the artists. The politics of food was brought to the forefront of the discussion touching on a broad range of issues from health restrictions to waste, labour distribution, and even the authenticity of diets. Re-assuring their new team that they are aware of the issues that arise when considering the use of food to produce art, Ali&Cia maintained focus on the concept of how giving and receiving food effects human experience. Within the context of Ali&Cia’s artistic practice Eat the Wall marks development of a concept that began out of Alicia’s love of food and her appreciation of the relationships built through sharing it. Within New Life Berlin the project presents a more specific, conceptual approach to the act of sharing food and by intensifying this simple act into a spectacle event, Eat the Wall has the potential to form new ways of visioning the reality of the everyday. The work represents the opportunity to play with our food, to come together, bringing our own sense of ‘delicious’. I left Tuesday night’s workshop in anticipation for Sunday’s event. Cheree Mack is a Berlin based writer and co-founder/editor of The Art of Berlin www.theartofberlin.com. Contact cheree@theartofberlin.com. www.wooloo.org/eatthewall Eat the Wall public ceremony takes place at Showroom Scala, Friedrichstr. 112 10117 Berlin / Mitte: U-Oranienburger Tor. Come along and bring an edible brick and help build the wall from 5pm. Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 13, 2008 - 03:40:40 AM

30 DAYS, New Life Berlin By Anonymous 15 May – 15 June SO WHERE IS THE ART IN BERLIN? JUST POINT ME IN THE DIRECTION… '30 Days' is a project by two anonymous North American cartographers in the New Life Berlin Festival who are on a mission to map the artistic and cultural landscape of Berlin by simply asking the local art enthusiasts, “where is the art in Berlin?” During the 30 days of 1 May to 15 June Mr. and Mr. Anonymous will visit and experience art in Berlin for the first time. They will collect and link art in the places they happen to stumble-upon or are directed to by strangers on the street, tourists or fellow artists to the New Life Berlin festival and relay their findings employing a unique mapping system in conjunction with a Google-map (MAP 1), a physical map (MAP 2), and photographic images. What results is the 30 days 'mission impossible'; a 30-day scavenger hunt for art around Berlin with no predetermined route, navigating their way through Berlin by relying on local recommendation and discovery. This process of mapping, or cartography, has a long history dating from about 2300 B.C. Mr. and Mr. Anonymous have this history in mind and are using proven mapping methods , employing a sophisticated means to illustrate the accessibility of the art community in Berlin. I am unsure how scientific Mr. and Mr. Anonymous are about the actual mapping, but the concept is undeniably appealing. Moreover, there is a definite new development in the way they are mapping the art of the city. Within these developments, they rely on trusted methods, and like any great expedition they are depending on local people 'in the know' to foster this map. In so doing, they are exploiting 'word-of mouth' and making the most of Berlin's artistic network and associations. Mr. and Mr. Anonymous made their first appearance at a public network meeting in the New Life Shop on June 4th. It was a casual gathering of artists and writers who were interested in the concept of mapping the artistic culture in Berlin. This event gave Mr. Mr. Anonymous the opportunity to introduce their project whilst remaining individually unnamed. It also gave the public an opportunity to participate in mapping the 30 days project. At the meeting, Mr. and Mr. Anonymous asked everyone to mark on a large map of Berlin where art can be found. This collection of dots started the process of drawing MAP 2 and would lead Mr. and Mr. Anonymous to some suitable Berlin art destinations. I was intending to contribute to MAP 2 by marking where I thought art was to be found in the German capital, but never did. I was stumped from the get-go. Firstly, what is the definition of art? Art is not an object, a place or a space. It's a philosophy, is it not? And secondly, all the notable museums and galleries were already taken, and there were lots of dots covering the areas I knew. Eventually, I figured a tourist like myself had little to contribute. With a population of 3.4 million in its city limits, Berlin has a young, thriving artistic community and is growing rapidly. Artists flock here from everywhere; it's somewhere artists can live cheaply and can find great studio space with relative ease. But how approachable are the arts without having specialist information or an artist-friend as tour guide? Mr. and Mr. Anonymous are attempting to find out by identifying all the communities of cultural expression that form the layers of Berlin's art. They have immersed themselves in Berlin's artistic realm. They've seen a lot of art spaces and met a lot of the people who make those places special. In this sense, 30 Days is a project about overcoming barriers of language and knowledge in order to gain access an art and culture within a large city area. It will be interesting to see if the documentation reveals what the 30 days perceptions of art in Berlin are. The duo have set themselves no small task in trying to articulate what art represents, where art could exist, and survey a multicultural artistic community by just being here for 30 days. A cartographical approach to such questions is unique and very welcome. The 30 days maps are online at http://www.wooloo.org/30days/ Carali McCall Carali McCall is an artist living in London. caralimccall@gmail.com www.art-yo.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 12, 2008 - 04:56:46 AM

ON BEHALF: IS INVITED CRITICISM STILL CRITICAL? A comment on the role of Open Dialogues as a showcase for the New Life Berlin Festival Open Dialogues Live Review 7th June 2008. Photo - Christina Irrgang One of the central questions Open Dialogues posed during the Live Review on June 7th is the consideration of whether invited criticism is still critical, and further the thought, if criticism can acknowledge its relationship to its object as well as its independence from it. As these are crucial concerns in general, this comment deals with the position of a critic in an environment populated by artists – from a critic’s point of view. With the project „Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin“, the UK based initiative Open Dialogues ‚tries to create new models of critical discourse in relation to the participatory art projects’, which are the nucleus of the New Life Berlin Festival. The experiment OD:NLB affords writers the possibility to work very closely with a variety of participating artists on location for the two-week duration of the festival. About twenty international critical writers were invited to observe the festival over its duration. This special situation allows the critics to get in personal contact with the artists. They not only gain an idea of what the artists are working on, they also start a long term conversation, which enables the writers to follow up the ongoing process of the particular artworks. To attain a close relationship to the artpiece by „escorting“ it (far in excess of the time critics are usually able to invest) does not necessarily imply writers examine with less criticality. Experiencing a close working-relationship with an individual does not mean adopting his or her thoughts – this is an essential duty of professional engagement. In relation to art criticism, this is a fundamental task and the responsibility of each writer. Critique can work as a re-enactment of the artist’s thought by means of language. It is the critic’s quest to express this thought which the artist transfigured into an object or an ongoing performative process. But for the critic it is more a re-location of this thought into a common or more elaborated language. In terms of a renaissance, s/he re-inhabits an artistic expression by linguistic means to explain and re-transform this embodied thought. For the critic, language works as a tool which allows the transfiguration from a physical object back into an immaterial thought – the „location“ where the artpiece once was born. Certainly the process of observation and judgement occurs in a personal manner. Further – I allege that this is the essence of being a critic. The process of critical engagement works in a series of approaches, moving from the external aspect of the work to a personal position. This is followed by a democratic short term relationship between object (the artwork) and subject (the critic). Combined with knowledge of context and emotional response, this draws out a critical conclusion which is never absolute. On that score critique is always a (playful) argument about art and within art. In this game, the critic takes the part of the referee who is allowed to argue with the thought of the artist. That the critic acts also as referee for the art is important in order to understand, that it is actually possible that criticism acknowledges a relationship to its subject as well as its independence from it. The critic volunteers to dispute with the object or situation s/he looks at; and even further: the critic is keen to defend her or his personal perception with respect to the specific context s/he’s confronted with. So – can invited criticism still be critical? I proclaim: of course it can! An invitation is a symbolic gesture and even if you follow an invite it doesn’t imply any familiarity with the one who invited you or the place you’re going to. Imagine being at a party: you might enjoy the people, the music as well as the surrounding, or you might even just be the observer of everything that’s happening there. In the end, you’ll act on your own behalf. You may – just even – leave the party. From my point of view, the critic is more a hunter than a collector, even if s/he is invited to assemble thoughts. In terms of the New Life Berlin Festival, this may at first, seem to be easy prey. However, it’s still a challenge for the critic, especially the defence of a personal valuation which dominates this exercise of mind. In consideration of this, the invited criticism of Open Dialogues is not only a showcase for New Life Berlin, but also a showcase for critique itself. Christina Irrgang Christina Irrgang is the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Associate and studies Theory of Art and Aesthetics at the State University of Media, Arts and Design in Karlsruhe/G and works as a freelance art critic. Contact: irrgang@iwprojekte.de www.iwprojekte.de Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 12, 2008 - 04:31:07 AM

ART AND CONVERSATION: MARIANA VIEGAS 5TH JUNE 2008 Choriner Str, 85, Berlin Mariana Viegas, 'Paths' (2001) Mariana Viegas is an artist from Lisbon, Portugal, who works mainly with photography. Her work explores links between landscape, images, language, cultural and individual monuments. It questions how we understand these concepts, and what part photography and documentation have to play in their construction. As a contribution to the New Life Berlin Festival Viegas introduced some of her works, one of them evolved in the context of the "Lisbon Capital of Nothingness", an interdisciplinary festival which, in contrast to commercial events like the "Lisbon Capital of Design", intended to make visible that which is not there, because it has not yet been recorded. Her documentation of the vegetable gardens of Marvila, on the outskirts of Lisbon, demonstrates to what extent culture and living space are constituted not just by architecture but also by the necessity or just the habit of growing food – in this case not commercially but privately. These vegetable gardens are built by people who have moved from rural areas to Marvila, where they develop their own structure on the urban site, which then becomes a myth to sustain the memory of their traditional way of life, and manifests their individuality through the organization of their surroundings. Following up this investigation of subsistance autonomy and its social nuances Mariana Viegas’s project "Paths" (2001) went deeper into the array of social interconnections within the area of Marvila. Against the background of the festival "Lisbon Capital of Nothingness", “Paths” draws attention to the many paths which emerged inbetween the gardens, living areas and schools of Marvila as a marginal system which is neither mapped nor has ever been planned. Showing the photos she made of these paths to pupils of Marvila’s schools, who could sometimes recognize their colleagues walking down the path, she raised interest for her project and asked pupils to draw maps according to the paths they used. Within the scope of the festival, Viegas exhibited the photographs in collaborating schools, each map underneath and corresponding to one of the photographs. As a counterpart to these two projects on Marvila, a third project was initiated in Lisbon responding to the opposite - the planned and controlled approach of urban development, for which the interventions into urbanism by authoritarian regimes are the most sustained examples. In 1944 pine trees were planted in Lisbon by the state, to project Portugal’s everlasting vitality, as pine trees are always green, whereas the deciduous trees growing naturally in Lisbon like olive and cork trees, lose their leaves during the Portugese summer. A small forest of pine trees was planted in the eastern part of the town as a recreation area, and several pine trees were dispensed to sites of historical importance, for example the Torré Belem, the statue of Camoês (Portugal’s most important epic poet) the castle of Lisbon and many other places, which are popular in the summer. These places and the pine trees themselves, which are not native to Portugal but are imported by overseas travelers, are all associated with Portugese braveness and success as voyagers especially in respect of colonialism. This makes the trees monuments to Portugal’s history. While the paths of Marvila are first of all just a means to an end and meant neither to state nor to document something, the pine trees of Lisbon manifest a historical moment, still contributing to the cultural memory of the nation, and literally growing into the history to follow.. The paths of Marvila represent incidental traces of civilisation in nature, while the pine trees represent nature civilized and domesticated for political reasons. Which leads to the basic questions of Viegas’ work: to what extent do we construct landscape, images and language, and the relationships between them, and what can be considered a monument imposed by culture? Playing around with a formal understanding of monumentality, one of Viegas’ works declares a stick of wood to be an individual monument. All it takes for the stick to be transformed in this way is for one person to attach arbitrary significance to it. In fact, photographing this object – as Viegas does – seems to be a way of attaching significance. The photograph supports monumentality as a platform for memory, through the act of documentation. Christin Niehoff Christin Niehoff is an arts student at Berlin Weißensee, ctinitc@gmx.de Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 12, 2008 - 03:29:32 AM

‘REHEARSING THE FUTURE’ MARISA OLSON, ‘ASSISTED LIVING’, KARL-LIEBKNECHT STRASSE 13A, JUNE 3-15, 2008 8th June, 6pm Photo: Maria Olson 'Assisted Living' photographer Jonathan Groeger, Courtesy Wooloo Productions As the late afternoon sun blazes in through the glass frontage of the ‘Assisted Living studio’ and our host, ‘Martha Scissors’ takes her place on set, four audience members and four crew members wriggle uncomfortably in the oppressive heat. In this suffocating still air, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine we’re in a Berlin of the near future; a world where global warming has reached its height and ‘vitamin D-blocker’ pills are widely used to prevent overdose in the sun’s unshielded rays. This is my third time in the “live studio audience” of the futuristic show Assisted Living and I’m curious to see how the work has developed since the first two episodes on the 3 and 4 June. As Joanna Loveday highlights in her introduction to this project, this work “has the potential to raise diverse and fascinating topics…This could be a collective documentation and presentation of just what our fears, hopes and concerns are for the future”, and perhaps also an interesting critique of how we live now… In the stifling heat we sit and listen to the sickly sweet cooing of our all-American lifestyle show host. To my surprise, four out of the seven features on today’s Assisted Living programme (8th June) are items that I’ve seen before, repeated almost word for word, including the futuristic recipes and home DIY furnishing ideas. In this sense, the exciting opportunity to experiment with this daily TV show format has, in the most part, been passed over. However, the aspects of the piece that have developed since last week – notably those that involve the voluntary ‘crew’ members who have signed up to participate in the project via the New Life Berlin website – are relatively fresh and introduce a new dimension to the show. One of the crew participants is invited onto the set as ‘expert in genetically modified pets’, and an earlier skit about protective sunglasses has now expanded to include ‘swimsuit model’ Carlo, whose playful posing adds a welcome comic lightness as he shows off (paper cut-out) full body swimsuits with daringly skimpy Speedo and bikini prints. It’s clear the participants take pleasure in performing a parody of our current overvalued preoccupation with physical appearance and the lengths to which our exploitation of animals might extend. Hopefully, as the performance develops over the next few days, more of these chances will be taken to showcase ideas about future social standards. Today’s episode of Assisted Living also includes more nods in the direction of television production: one crew member sporadically holds up an ‘applause’ sign, and each scene is counted in and ‘cut’ by the cameraman. However, the relationship between the crew, Martha Scissors herself, and the studio audience, and in turn the relationship between those present today and the ‘home viewer’, does not seem to be employed to its full potential. We are implicitly invited to take on a role within this parody, but the level of actual engagement with us as audience is minimal, leading to an uncertainty on our part about why we’re really there. Although there is some interaction between crew and audience, Martha Scissors herself doesn’t engage with us ‘off-camera’ between her sketches. We haven’t been eased into our audience role as far as, perhaps, a brief ‘warm-up’ sketch, of the sort used on an actual TV set, might allow. The ambiguity of the audience’s position and lack of informal relationship with our host, along with the almost unbearable heat, result in a less receptive atmosphere. We are uncertain whether we are being addressed as the (unacknowledged) live studio audience of the future, the home viewer of the future, the live audience of Marisa Olson’s performance today, or just a bunch of people who happen to be in the room while this show is rolling. Rather than creating an interesting discussion point about different levels of spectatorship and an interaction between our past and future selves, this uncertainty jars our response and leaves us wondering if we’ve missed something significant. Whilst waiting for the show to start we were asked to write down a prediction for the future. Predictions from previous performances are still pinned to the wall and they reveal a wealth of imagination (albeit heavily weighted towards the effects of global-warming), ranging from the sombre (“We will all die sooner or later”) to the comical (“Big rock candy BOOM!”). These predictions aren’t referred to later or incorporated into the episode, so whilst the show continues to rely on the audience’s imagination to read detail into what they see (cf. Joanna Loveday) and their ability to place themselves within the work, it doesn’t open the discussion up to them intellectually as it unfolds. This apparent reluctance to try different ideas for each episode, and the failure to fully engage with the audience makes Assisted Living feel like a rehearsal for something else later on down the line: maybe the final show on Saturday 15th, which is listed in the festival’s printed publicity, or perhaps a showcase for when the project returns to the US. The context and potential of the piece don’t seem to have been fully thought through, from the oversight that Martha Stewart, the subject of the parody, is not as well-known in Europe as she is in America, to the unacknowledged levels of spectatorship at play. Perhaps this lack of preparation and the repetition of material is due to the small audience numbers and an attitude that only a large audience ‘counts’ (one of the participants tells me there have been between 3 and 6 viewers each day since the 30 odd at the opening night). Maybe Olsen chooses not to try a whole new set of scenes for each episode because she is wary of demanding too much of the voluntary Assisted Living crew participants, who are already giving several hours every day to prepare and perform the show. Or perhaps the unfinished nature of the work is an intentional statement, allowing us to focus on how we might see the present as a rehearsal for the future, our current behaviour impacting on how the world will be in 30 years, and therefore take responsibility for our actions today? Whatever the reason for it, the treatment of the show as a ‘warm-up’ rather than as an experiment in its own right denies a full exploration of the implications of the concept and abruptly halts our imaginings of the overheated future Berlin that might exist temporarily beyond the confines of this room, or somewhere in our collective imagination. Assisted Living is heating up, but in contrast to the rest of the planet, perhaps a little too slowly. To compare this text with other reviews of the performance go to http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_597 http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_559 http://www.wooloo.org/assisted/ Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer and arts facilitator, currently based in Brussels delivering communications for IETM - International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts. Contact ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 12, 2008 - 03:27:50 AM

THE NEW LIFE BERLIN FESTIVAL: A POINT OF VIEW NEW LIFE BERLIN 1ST - 15TH JUNE 2008, BERLIN The culturally engaged individual walks around Berlin with her hands outstretched, wanting art, seeking participation and demanding service. And she will receive what she asks for, either in the grand buildings and parks housing the fifth Berlin Biennale or in the soon to be demolished office blocks, out of the way apartments and open air spaces hosting New Life Berlin. But confusion and combustion occurs when actions in the name of art are thrust upon the individual without her asking. New Life Berlin, a city wide festival branded with the notion of ‘participation’ aims to explore cultural mobility, and presents art to those both concerned with the contemporary arts and those who would never think to ask. It is here at the juncture of engagement and production – reached through varying forms of involvement with the public – that questions around receivership arise. Amongst the projects hosted by New Life Berlin, there are traditional models of receivership offered by Nathan Peters’ Eminent Domain installation, Arts and Conversation curated salons with practicing artists, and Marisa Olsen’s live TV performance Assisted Living to name just a few. The roles of artists and visitor are clearly defined; the artist creates and the public appreciate. While it is true that there are participants in the production of the projects, such as the case for Franck Leibovici’s Powell Opera, ultimately they become part of the artist machine churning out a spectacle for the spectators. Other artists thrust their work upon the public, uninvited. Flash Job Campaign, headed by artist Per Traasdahl uses artists as ‘catalysts’ to inspire youths in disadvantaged neighbourhoods through 3 hour work placements, ‘flash-jobs’. With one unsteady foot in social work and the other in art work, these small interventions disrupt the established understanding of the role of an art producer and willing receiver. Similarly, 30 Day of New Life Berlin, presented by two anonymous artists, has begun mapping spaces of cultural interest through information gathered from the festival’s participants, but more interestingly though the interrogation of the proprietors and residents of various cultural establishments. Ask a little and ye shall receive a lot. There is a danger however, that projects like Traasdahl’s Flash Job and Barbara Rosenthal’s Existential Interact where she approaches passers-by and gives an impromptu performance and small tokens, is perhaps blinded by a mis-placed belief that art is ‘good for us’. It is exciting and progressive to reshuffle the rigid modes of artistic production and receivership, however it is potentially offensive and presumptuous to force certain art projects upon the unsuspecting public, under the guise of positive benevolent actions. New Life Berlin is a dynamic festival, bringing together and testing multiple approaches to participating, interacting and receiving. It is a site for experimentation but we must address the risks involved when dealing with such issues. At least one participant in the works discussed above has removed themselves from the project and we know little about the reactions of the public on the receiving end. An important but seemingly absent project at New Life Berlin is a survey of its audiences' interpretations, attitudes and criticisms of the festival, gathered from those who ask and receive, and those who don’t ask but still receive. By Claire Louise Staunton Claire Louise Staunton is a writer and practicing curator currently based in London with particular interest in sonic and performance interventions www.inheritanceprojects.org Please only reproduce with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

THURSDAY - JUNE 12, 2008 - 02:09:26 AM

OPEN DIALOGUES UPDATE The New Life Berlin festival is more than half way through its run and as one of the participant projects, Open Dialogues is into its second week of shadowing projects, interviewing artists, writing for the flash publications we are producing and distributing here in Berlin, and uploading our work to the blog. www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog. We are a slightly smaller group now as some of our colleagues have returned home. There are twelve of us or so left in Berlin and we are acting as copy buddies for each other, generally remotely via email. This for me is one of the best aspects of our project. We have academics, art historians, journalists, curators, as well as artist-writers like myself on the Open Dialogues project. That is one of its strengths. It feels progressive to my development as a writer to be showing my drafts to such a diverse selection of writers and taking advice from them. As well as learning more about our craft, what are we aiming to do here ? We are shaping a model that is infiltrating the network of artists and sharing their experiences with them. Our writing aims to reflect this aspect of being so embedded. It is a unique opportunity to focus and produce a lot of writing in a festival as it happens, as the issues roll out. We can respond immediately and if we need to go back to the source and probe further we can do. We are trying to address questions such as how can critical writing relate to open source work ? Is invited criticism still critical ? Can we be objective when we are so close to the production and the thinking behind it ? We are offering ourselves as a case study of critical writing in relation to artistic practice. How successful we are being is hard to gauge right now and it may only be later on that we will be able to evaluate this better. To review our project we held a live public forum session last week-end which did provoke some heated debate between the festival organisers, writers, artists and the resident Berlin arts community about out role here as writers in the festival. Tough questions were asked as to exactly what value the model that we are proposing can have. Surprisingly to us, there were too, some accusations that we are jumping on the Berlin bandwagon of hype, that we are supremacist in our very nationality and language that we write in. Most of us are from the US or UK. I asked the Open Dialogues project leaders about this and they said those were the countries that most of the applications came from and so they selected from what they got. We do have several German writers on the project and although they are required to write in English their work is being translated. Admittedly though most of us are from abroad, so it is perhaps not so surprising that there is some local resentment to us. These are big issues to debate for sure. It was passionate, and it was good to see such determination to define better how and what we can do as writers, and the role that critical writing can play in the support and expansion of art dialogue and production. What a lot it says about the power of the written word that the project on the festival programme that receives the most vehement criticism is the critical writing project! As well as talking amongst ourselves, we are endeavouring to find out whether the artists feel that they benefit from the dialogues that we are having with them, and from any critical writing produced by us on their work. This is not always easy to do. Artists are in the main pleased to talk to us and to tell us about their projects but seem subsequently reticent about giving us feedback on our writings about them. Maybe we need to look at building in strategies to illicit response from them that they feel more comfortable with ? Email interviews or questionnaires come to mind. We are getting little direct response to our blog and so there is a slightly giddy sense of there being little, if any readership for our writing. We hope that the Wooloo online community and other readers globally are connecting with it. We are assured by the festival directors that we have a big readership in Taiwan ! Meanwhile, the sun is still blazing and the artwork is hotting up too. Projects are progressing and interacting with the art, and non-art, audiences in many differing ways. Some with more success than others inevitably, but that is an important aspect of this process-based work. Outcomes may not be realised or understood until later on. It seems that issues about the artistic or aesthetic quality of the work produced are difficult to address in this "anything goes" atmosphere and some of us are concerned about that. I suspect that there will be more discussion on this as the festival concludes. There is certainly a great appetite for dialogue everywhere in this city. People talk a lot and they read so much too. I am very aware of how many people on the S-Bahn and U-Bahn spend their journey to and from work engrossed in novels. What does this say about the place ? Perhaps that as well as re-building their city, people here seem open to learning and re-shaping themselves and their culture, by using every opportunity to engage with it. We visitors can really only observe and admire that, and we do. We are all here unpaid and are as committed as the artists to testing and enquiring our practice and how we connect with audience and readers. It feels relevant and enlightening to be a part of. Oh, and very enjoyable too ! Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 11, 2008 - 04:40:55 AM

CYBER-OPS: THE COMMUNAL AVANT-GARDE? As the cyber-universe extends our corporeal notions of community, identity and self, our generation strives to establish a balance between the visceral persuasion of this reality and the simulated stimulus of the other. Online vs. offline, exterior vs. interior, individual vs. collective – these dichotomies define and reflect the contemporary culture within which we live. It is inside these intermediary domains that art is made, viewed, critiqued and sold, and this has also become the space in which we may encounter our most human moments and interactions – or has it? Poised between opposing factions, we find ourselves at a cross-road. If art truly does imitate life, this life (or so the adage goes), then the concepts surrounding the New Life Berlin Festival, a combinatory exploration of online/offline artistic experiments, social projects and public installations, speaks directly to the equivocal situation of the present-day. Derrida states that difference is the formation of form, that opposing facets can only exist as concurrent expressions of the same language. If this language is art, then perhaps the difference inherent in the exchange between online and offline communities as well as between transnational boundaries can serve as the platform for the next phase in artistic experience. In New York, these kinds of online communities are abundant, their cybernetic status making them readily accessible to an international audience: White Columns, Artists Space, the Drawing Center and Neoimages all possess curated image archives, frequently curating exhibitions from their stores of digital artwork. But this technologically based platform simultaneously begets the question of the cyborg: can a mechanically mediated art world accurately reflect artistic intent(ion) and experience, or can it only reference a similarly mediated self? To find the answers, we have to look at the new developments of inhabitable space created within the realm of Virtual Reality systems. According to Allucquere Rosanne Stone, the VR environment has created new social space for the habitation of individuals and images– a new and progressively ramified division of social space from a predominantly public sphere to a miscellaneous assemblage of spaces, increasingly privatized in both psychological and symbolic terms (i). This has far reaching consequences for the notion of ‘self’ as we know it. Inside environments where physical identity is no longer a prerequisite for social interaction, image is the self. In VR experience, “reality” is impregnated with digital overlay - seamlessly weaving simulated with genuine, cyborg with human. The artist, no longer defined by who she is but rather, by what she produces, exhibits a startling contrast to the functionary cadre of the offline artist communities of both New York and Berlin, communities in which physical interaction and the exchange of ideas in real-time are essential for the production of art. The ramification of such complex social systems in the alternative space of communications technologies suggests a war between simplification and multiplicity…an explosion of actors that includes the almost-living, the not-living and the never-living, arising in the boundaries between technology, society and “nature,” in the architectures of multiple embodiments and multiple selves (ii). In this multiplication of identity, the idea of an independent self whose location can be fixed within the physical body is dissolving into the horizon. Also dissolving is the idea of the traditional exhibition and, by extension, the boundaries surrounding artistic community. On the one hand this indicates an imaginative freedom, as it allows for a space in which ideas can exist in “purer” form, separate from a physical host. On the other hand, however, the corporeal body can never be completely separated from the ideas it bore, and disembodiment is ultimately and always an illusion. In light of these realizations, where can the online model take us - except into the expanse of oblivion? The answer is two-fold: the new communal paradigm must occur within the simultaneous actions of physical experience and virtual systems – in the real time of the expanded self. Perhaps if these exchanges are experienced not only perceptually but corporeally as well, as in the New Life Berlin experiment, the possibility for belief may open up again. Perhaps it will not. The expanse of this alter reality may prove to be immeasurable, but unless we follow the concept into the abyss, we will never know its potential for transformation. i. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology At The Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 19. ii. Stone, 44. Kara Rooney Kara Rooney is an artist and writer based in New York City, currently pursuing an M.F.A in Art Criticism from the School of Visual Arts. kararooney@hotmail.com www.kararooney.30art.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 11, 2008 - 04:21:40 AM

MAGIC FEET GORDON SASAKI'S 'MOVEMENT' AS PART OF URBAN SPACE BRUNNENSTRASSE 10, JUNE 4, 2008 URBAN SPACE SCREENING Gordon Sasaki : Movement Marie Christine Katz : Road Kills and Other Casualties Miles Supico Norberto Lobo: Démarche figée sur Lottumstr. Photo: Urban Space 3 June by Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions Gordon Sasaki’s ‘Movement’, a film shown last Wednesday as part of the Urban Space screening at the New Life Berlin Festival, documents the day-in-a-life of a pair of feet as they navigate the streets of Berlin. From the moment these feet awake until, presumably, the moment they arrive at this very New Life Berlin Festival event, the camera focuses only on them. What the viewer is left to conclude is based on the audio sounds we hear and the topography of the terrain underneath the feet—sidewalk, linoleum, cobblestone. With these limits we guess at where the feet are located, where they are going, and whom they belong to. But these are no ordinary feet. In fact, these feet don’t walk through their routine; they float, magically, just above the ground. A few frames give us a clue as to why. We see the shadow of a wheel, glimpses at a metal bar, and the clatter of metal on the sidewalk. If Gordon hadn’t introduced the film, the viewer might not ever realize that these feet belong to someone in a wheelchair. We might not realize that these feet belong to the artist himself, who broke his back in his late twenties in a car accident and has been living with a “disability” every since. We might not realize these feet belong to an artist in a wheelchair in part because daily routine, from the point of view of someone differently-abled, is so rarely portrayed in film that we aren’t used to looking at a new kind of movement, even over familiar terrain. At moments the feet play tricks on the eye, as though we were watching a bird sweep dizzily over the city. These feet look so magical as they float that they appear to defy the very notion of disability. These feet are exceptional-- exceptional as gifted, not as limited. They need not walk when they can fly. As the feet move, they encounter other feet, also disconnected from their owner. They too are navigating the same terrain, hearing the sounds from above, using the sounds as clues. We find commonality with the special feet – we hear the same sounds everyday; in the bathroom, crossing the street, in crowded waiting rooms. In this sense we discover that bodies are different, and differently abled, but similar in their basic experiences, their mundane routines. “We are all basically the same creatures,” Gordon says, “even though we are housed in different bodies.” Meanwhile, the wheels of the chair, which we hear in the film only distantly, are forced to contend with the ground; the urban landscape of tilted sidewalk and cobblestone that are altogether inaccessible—especially Berlin. And yet the city, any city, is much more accessible for someone in a wheelchair than the natural world. Thus, these wheels keep these feet urban. For Gordon, who is a native of Hawaii and a lover of hiking and exploring the natural world, this is difficult to accept. Yet his work makes it clear that, for better or worse, these feet belong to him. “This is who I am,” he says, “this is all part of me.” Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist currently making mischief in Berlin, Germany. www.alfabus.us Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 11, 2008 - 03:51:15 AM

'MARTHA STEWART, MARTHA ROSLER, MARISA OLSEN- MARISA WHO?' ASSISTED LIVING 03 June, KARL-LIEBKNECHT-STR 13A Photo: Marisa Olsen's Assisted Living, photographer Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Woloo Productions Marisa Olsen is a New York based performance artist whose work has also extended into video and installation. In her most recent work she plays the role of a ‘future Martha Stewart’. On a theatrical level, she plays the domestic media tycoon very well. I am convinced she could play Martha Stewart’s co-host on her US daytime series (or perhaps even replace her if Ms. Stewart finds herself back in prison anytime soon). But regardless of her performance style, and given the context (New Life Berlin, Contemporary Art Festival) this project revealed a very simple and predictable look into new modes of living and existing. Admittedly, I was hoping for an act more along the lines of Martha Rosler’s 'Semiotics of the Kitchen,’ a critical and more ambitious idea of the future, explored through a discussion of the domestic arts. The first performance of ‘Assisted Living’ took place in a shop-front space in Alexander Platz on 3 June. Anticipation of the event was obvious by the large crowd, waiting eagerly despite the heat. Everyone wanted to see what this American artist had to say about the future. It began, as we were shuffled into the space to share our ‘predictions’ of the future. We wrote our thoughts on bits of paper and stuck them to the wall. Some concerned the immediate future while others were more philosophical and looked to the distant future. Nothing came about from these ‘predictions’ in this program, but I presume they are a collection for Marisa, a helpful brainstorming session for future episodes of Assisted Living. We then were instructed by a ‘crew member’ (one of the recruited helpers in a neon t-shit) to take a seat and applaud and cheer when we hear the host say ‘It’s a good thing!’ This type of participatory is a protocol for any ‘live studio audience’. It plays on the idea of audience vs performer and emphasizes the typical role we have as an audience member -to be polite and supportive, clap and play along. In a studio set with colourful construction paper cut outs, a small crew worked to organise and enthuse the audience. Amidst beer, a camera, and bright lights, Marcia took to the stage performing a future Martha Stewart segment. In welcoming her, the well-behaved audience duly applauded. Photo: Marisa Olsen's Assisted Living, photographer Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Woloo Productions Marisa spoke with a strong ‘Valley Girl’ American accent and presented ‘delightful and fantastic dishes of food’ alongside a futuristic exercise program and a craft demonstration. The show was filled with a dedicated time-slot for “a word from our sponsors.” These commercials were presented on a laptop whilst she ducked behind the table. For those of us who do not feel that Martha Stewart and her brand of homemaking serenity is the pinnacle of western civilization, the atmosphere was ripe for cringing. However this is not to suggest that it wasn’t entertaining. Olsen’s clearly adept at bringing out the humour in her subject and her parody of Stewart was spot-on. It was firmly rooted in the American cultural experience. Marisa must be given credit for her enthusiastic attitude and carefree Americana performance. She’s proven that it is a challenge to mimic American’s favourite homemaking advocate while producing a critical debate about our future’s environmental and health problems. If Marcia decided to launch her own Martha Stewart Show in 30 years time, I fear she would succeed with high ratings. But let’s hope that is a future we avoid together. To compare this text with anther review of this performance go to http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/s3Blog.php#ANC_559 Carali McCall Carali McCall is an artist living in London. caralimccall@gmail.com www.art-yo.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

WEDNESDAY - JUNE 11, 2008 - 02:27:04 AM

'THE BUILDING OF A ONE NIGHT HOUSE...' NO FIXED ABODE, 'CABAN UNNOS', ALEXANDER PLATZ, JUNE 7, 2008 Photographer Andres Bastiansen, courtesy the artist and wooloo productions As the gritty city heat of midsummer lapsed into stale dusk last eve, the inhabitants of Berlin magnetically grouped into tight groups at pavement cafes. With the fixed stares of guinea pigs in fiendish sensory experiments, they appeared first motionless, then enraged, then consumed with an ardour that threatened to burst from within their cool summer garb and claw impeccable continental manners to impassioned shreds; this ladies and gentlemen was the Euro 2008 kick off…Somewhere amid the frenzy, with residents and law enforcers alike hypnotised by the great pacifier that is European football, a mottled band of artists and others gathered in central Berlin to receive orders and rough wooden pallets, and to embark on the nocturnal journey that was to be Caban Unnos, the build of a one night house by the artists No Fixed Abode. I confess that whilst I had found that afternoon’s public debate on Caban Unnos interesting, it perhaps fell a little disappointingly short of revelatory. The twin pitfalls of intense summer heat and the inevitable oneness of vision of the assembled group made for a convivial, but at times surface, chat. I willed for a few pagans amid the converted but few raised their argumentative heads. Thus issues pertaining to the core ethos of the project- and the fateful question ‘Is it art or object?!’- blurted out by one agent provocateur hung torturously in the air, awaiting an answer that never came. I made my way to Alexander Platz with a fellow writer at 11pm, musing on the chances of the Caban Unnos one night house successfully reaching completion without falling victim to either police or football hooligans. Having searched unsuccessfully the open expanses, which were filled with raucous revellers, we picked our way through the wooded area of the platz. Finally, peering through the gloom, we were rewarded with the exciting vision of a mini- building site swarming with workers who hammered, toiled and spurred the skeleton of an unorthodox dwelling skyward. Photo: Jonathan Groeger, courtesy Wooloo Productions Tall enough to stand in and with a roof ready to be lifted into place, the building seemed already near completion. Water cooler bottles were stacked from the ground up to form one wall and lashed into place with white chord. A nifty architectural feature this, as the wall of water and plastic will be warmed by the sun by day, and retaining its warmth, provide a heating system by night. This detail did seem, Tony Broomhead the architect now admits, more relevant in the chilly surroundings of Sheffield where he first developed the design! Once the roof had been placed atop the walls, there was the final task of building a fire oven. With the aid of bricks, cement and a long metal encasement for a chimney, a bricked hearth in which to burn wood was crafted, and a metal tray suspended above it upon which to bake. Simple. Effective. It was soon after this triumph however, that rays of yellow torchlight wielded by two uniformed policeman pierced the surrounding darkness and severed activity. A hush fell. Horatio and Terry, their official reflective waistcoats glowing a subversive pink in the light halo, conversed politely with the policemen. Activity was resumed in a self consciously official and assured manner. A New Life Berlin pamphlet was produced. Smiles all round, the policemen retreated into the dark, with a promise to return and inspect the good work when they were off duty. And so it was back to the business of the fire and the chimney and the smoke. In my slim contribution to the night’s labours, I scrunched up newspaper into sticks which Horatio placed alongside gathered twigs in the fireplace. A lighter was produced, and soon after, a triumphant cheer rang out as the first curlews of smoke made their tentative passage through the night air. It was official – the ancient tradition of Welsh one night house building, contemporary landscape of Alexander Platz and artistic endeavour of Caban Unnos had mingled successfully together in this makeshift house-warming at 3.20am, central Berlin. Standing in the quirky cosiness of the structure, as a shy speech was delivered by the artists, I was given to musing upon the questions which had, in this afternoon’s discussion, remained so frustratingly unanswered. Art or Object? Product or Process? Certainly some interesting social dynamics had been laid bare in this artistic social experiment. I for example, had displayed a marked reluctance to ‘muck in’ and a penchant for hanging back from the fray – a stark contrast to the dynamism and hard graft displayed by some of my compatriots in Caban Unnos. Yet despite my pitiful physical contribution, I felt a swell of pride to have been involved in this test-tube community. The Caban Unnos house was aesthetic, homely and created by collective toil. This product did not spring forth from the ether fully formed, but instead evolved before us, and because of us. It surprised me, teased questions from me and deftly illuminated the power of community and vision. I left Alexander Platz at 3.30am, with the first streaks of dawn staking claim on a dark sky, and evocative wafts of wood smoke drifting past the neon signs and flashy window displays. When I awoke a precious four hours later, I had the giddy desire to run straight back there as the child who wakes bleary eyed on Christmas morning must check that the stocking which glinted in the dead of night was not a dream…. Postscript: Christmas comes but once a year…at 6am on the 8th of June, the Caban Unnos structure was dismantled on the orders of a longer arm of the law than had previously been tousled with…it was truly, a one-night house. By Mary Kate Connolly No Fixed Abode: http://www.nofixedabode.org.uk/ Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer and movement practitioner based in London with a particular interest in Dance and Live Art. Contact: mary11378@yahoo.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

TUESDAY - JUNE 10, 2008 - 04:14:11 AM

INTERVIEW WITH SIXTEN KAI NEILSEN, ARTISTIC CO-DIRECTOR OF WOOLOO PRODUCTIONS Wednesday 4th June, 4pm, New Life Berlin Shop, Choriner Str 85. Founded in 2002, the mission of Wooloo.org is to ‘serve as a free and independent space for the presentation, production and discussion of contemporary art in a globalized world.’ Today, more than 8,000 artists from over 100 different countries are using the Wooloo.org website to show their work and ‘New Life Berlin’ festival 1st -15th June 2008, is the first festival programmed by Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard the co-artistic directors of Wooloo Productions. The ‘Call All Artists’ slogan is still splashed on billboards across the city, way in to the festival – because although the call for projects is now been closed, the call for participants is ongoing. Participation is a key aspect in all the programmed projects, asking questions about artistic social responsibility, how online and transnational communities operate and how social intervention and participation work in an artistic context. Joanna Loveday: How did the idea and the concept of New Life Berlin come about? Sixten Kai Neilsen: I think it’s a combination of two things. One, that we wanted to experiment with the community that we have been running since 2002 - the Wooloo.org community - and really try to find out what binds the community, what governs it, how strong it is and what it is about. With all these online experiences and online people existing, we wanted to bring everyone together. The second part is the interest we have after living and working in Berlin for two and half years; we wanted to explore the city and investigate the city before our time here is up. We really wanted to engage with the city. I think the festival came about because those two things came together. Our general interest is often movement and immigration; this is a big part of our work. We have dealt before with these areas in our work such as in 2005 we developed the first communication platform for asylum seekers, ‘AsylumHOME’. Here we really wanted to focus on a different kind of immigration – this flux of artists and ‘privileged immigrants’ lets say and how they are fortifying and creating new networks and what that can say about today. JL: Why is it important to focus on ‘participatory projects’ in 2008 in Berlin? SKN: We don’t really define our roles as curators, directors or artists; we are not really interested in these definitions, what we are really interested in is people and humans. If lets say a painter works with paint and canvas and an installation artist works with sculptural objects, then we work with frameworks and humans. Been interested in this kind of work automatically creates a participatory element – it is creating frameworks for human participation and in this way we try to create situations that can result in alternative modes of existing. They tell something different about our lives today, about society. JL: Do you think it would be possible to curate this festival in another city? SKN: I think today there is quite a unique thing going on in Berlin. It’s not a new thing that artists are relocating here - this has been happening for ten or fifteen years. But the amount of artists that are here now is quite incredible. There are so many of these ‘new Berliners’. They are fortifying new networks, they are talking to each other. In a way this festival is also saying something about a different kind of citizenship, a different kind of national identity, because there are so many people here from so many different countries talking to each other. In this way we are talking about a ‘transnational community’ - this is an investigation of this transnational community in Berlin. I don’t think there are really a lot of other places on earth right now that has this significant degree of foreign artists’ networks. New York, Paris and London also have networks – but they are established and I think for this kind of work there are not really any other places that are quite like this. You could do the festival elsewhere, but maybe with a different angle. JL: How does your own artistic practice interlink with or differ from the aims and objectives of Wooloo productions? SKN: We have to go back to national identity and the nation state versus this global network of artists. We have been quite interested in the nation state and the [dissolution] of the nation state and we have done a lot of investigation in this area. New Life Berlin is totally in line with what we have been researching before and experimenting with in our previous practice. It fits well into our overall interests and approach. JL: Like your previous projects, the festival has a level of risk and can be seen as ‘controversial’ to some. Is that important to you as an artist/curator? SKN: There are a lot of projects in this festival. And when you are dealing with 20 or so projects – all of which are experiments that are going on during the two weeks - that creates risky experimental work. But this is a situation that happens under a global body that exercises them. There is risk built in that they could fail, or there could be no participation or extreme differences of opinion within projects. But it is the nature of what we are doing and so we can’t really say anything yet of the result, the individual projects have to now show themselves for their individual angles and together hopefully form the kind of social sculpture we were envisaging when we put them together. We have done a lot of work trying to interlink them and put these projects together. One of the big aims of the festival was to create an intimate interlinked artist structure. For example, the artists are living in the same buildings, they interlink with each other, they have the same workspace and workshop space and so forth. In this way the artists and projects are really coming in to contact with each other. Also the Open Dialogues project means that we are incorporating the writers inside the projects, which also creates a tension and ‘danger’. We want to blur the boundaries of these normal ‘groups’ of professionals and individuals who traditionally make up a festival and biennial. We are really trying to work on an intimate level as well within this wider framework. JL: In the programme introduction Wooloo states: “In contrast to traditional art festivals and biennials, our aim is not to represent a set of cultural conclusions, but to create a model for a fluid cultural landscape.” How do you think this fluid cultural landscape will continue or manifest itself after the festival? SKN: We want to continue creating frameworks after this and continue our work in this area. I am very interested in the idea of ‘nursing’ and helping out with individual executions and projects. It is hard for me to look beyond the festival right now as I don’t know the outcome of the festival. But hopefully the festival will say something both on a sociological level but also about how a certain group of people are living today. Hopefully we can learn things about new immigration and tell the different stories about immigration. The kind of immigration talked about in the country I come from, Denmark, is very one sided. We are always trying to tell different stories. How it will continue after the festival? I really don’t know. JL: Do you have any aspirations for the festival to have an impact on how we see art and how festivals can take place? Do you have a wider aspiration to change how people think about the art world and festivals? SKN: This is not an anti-festival or anti-biennial, but we are trying to take a different track here. Using this new style of curation through a fixed framework, taking its outset from an online community, we don’t have all the usual ‘stars’ that most biennials have. So in this way we set up a lot of rules or dogma that doesn’t exist in other biennials from our starting point. I am a little bit afraid of taking a standing point against others, I am more focused on our own practice and developing that to the best we can. JL: Regarding the funding of New Life Berlin, did you have to secure alternative funding as well as using the ongoing Wooloo Project Fund? SKN: We had to find public funding as well sponsorship funding from companies. We are not afraid of touching business at all. We have a cross-disciplinary attitude to partnerships. We have a very critical attitude to certain companies, for example those in the tobacco, weapons and alcohol industry. But then again, what is clean money? For us it is very interesting how you go about incorporating a corporate interest in a festival like this. It’s definitely an area that we interested in exploring and experimenting with. In this case we have Deutsche Bahn and the Danish equivalent, Stadtbahn who produced half the money we generated. They just opened a connection from Copenhagen to Berlin, so it was quite fitting, as it was concerning a transportation of people over this border. I think this festival is a very good example of a good partnership with a corporate partner. JL: Was there any funding from arts funding bodies? SKN: Yes, half came from private companies and the other half came from public funding. And then, the next half came from our own pockets. In comparison to other cities, how straightforward was it to secure the funding in Berlin? The situation is a bit different here as we have been running the space in Berlin for two and a half years and this is a conclusion to our time here. We are now using up a lot of the contacts and networks that have been created. Normally we look at taking over a space for a few months and then we go there. It has been fascinating to generate the community here first and then do the festival. JL: If this is a conclusion to your time here in Berlin, then what’s next for you and Wooloo? SKN: We have three or four projects already lined up that we have been invited to. One of those is quite intimate, it will only be me and Martin, although we will be using some of the online community, it will definitely be a more intimate body of work. We like to go from big productions and organisations to smaller projects and smaller intimate situations, with ourselves as performers. And then we will go back and perhaps become even bigger in the producer role. So we will now shift mode for the next four months, or even[for the] rest of the year. We will also be working on a whole new version of the website and a similar festival in Copenhagen in 2009, called 'New Life Copenhagen 2099'. So we want to go to the future. It will correspond with the UN Copenhagen conference for climate change in late 2009. We want to become an alternative dynamic to the more formal political meetings that will be taking place. Joanna Loveday Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

TUESDAY - JUNE 10, 2008 - 03:55:43 AM

INTERVIEW - CABAN UNNOS No Fixed Abode, Tony Broomhead and Dan McTiernan of the project Caban Unnos, interviewed by and Anga’aefonu Bain-Vete and Charlotte A. Morgan, Berlin 5th June 2008. Caban Unnos. Photo (c) Jonathon Groeger. Courtesy Wooloo Productions Caban Unnos is a collaborative project between Sheffield (UK) based artist collective No Fixed Abode (Horatio Eastwood and Terry Slater), Tony Broomhead, architect and partner in Amenity Space, and Dan McTiernan, project manager of free online waste exchange whywaste.org.uk. The project is centred around the design and construction of a one night house in Alexanderplatz; Berlin, and is taking place as part the New Life Berlin festival, organised and facilitated by Wooloo.org. Assistance from participants and volunteers has been initially brought together through the Wooloo.org network. This interview takes place two days prior to the build, which is scheduled for 07.06.08. Charlotte A. Morgan (CAM): Can I start by asking you to introduce the initial concept of the project and talk more about the folk tradition of the one night house? Horatio Eastwood (HE): Well the reason that we say belief and not law, is that the one night house tradition doesn’t have any founding in law anywhere in the world though it is a worldwide phenomenon. It is believed that if you can construct a house between sunset and sunrise without being disturbed, you then obtain free copyhold of that land. Different countries upholding this belief stipulate different conditions, for example in Wales the house has to have smoke coming from the chimney by sunrise, and in turkey you just need to have a roof. Anga’aefonu Bain-Vete (AB-V): Is there a specifically German one? HE: Probably, we haven’t found one; it is all over Europe… Terry Slater (TS): A lot of people seem to know about the Turkish one over here as there’s such a massive Turkish community, but we’re bringing it from a UK perspective I suppose, so it’s a contribution to what’s already circulating really. AB-V: How do you see this project as being specifically relevant to the location of Berlin; having a one night house in the city? I’m thinking in terms of local people, beyond the actual build and inviting people to participate that way. How did you come to choose the location? TS: I suppose there are a couple of things there. Initially we’d obviously been invited to do it here, and the relevance to Berlin came quite late through our research. We found books by certain people that were working in similar ways in Berlin just because of the nature of the city and how much disused space there is. The space is so contested and you don’t really get that anywhere else to the extent that you do here. HE: One of the key things we’ve found, though we didn’t specifically intend to do the project in Berlin, is that there are a lot of spaces that are produced in a similar way through a community of interested parties, and they will claim land or buildings through various means. Something that’s happening in Berlin is that it’s starting to receive serious money and be developed because of interest in the art community, and the socially produced spaces or free open spaces are beginning to disappear. It’s completely by coincidence that we’ve come at a point, but then again you could argue that maybe it isn’t, and that this is the reason that the festival’s happening. TS: This is one of the things, when you ask, ‘could it be done anywhere else?’ Well yes, it probably could… CAM: …but it would have taken on other issues? TS: It took route with us in Sheffield through long term research and we refined it into a project for Berlin. Sheffield has had major investment and all of a sudden is becoming a completely different place, and in many cities you may encounter similar issues. Even in terms of materials used, we’re looking for this urban vernacular material and they’re probably quite similar in many places. Caban Unnos. Photo (c) Andreas Bastiansen. Courtesy Wooloo Productions Tony Broomhead (TB): I think architecturally, the fact that the build is in Berlin was a big draw for me. It’s one of the few cities that have been split down the middle for decades and architecturally the two sides to the city are very different. In the last fifteen years or so that has begun to change; this new wave of development and gentrification, and of unifying of the two halves architecturally and in terms of city planning, have completely changed the nature of the city. Projects like this help people reassess what’s happening to their city, and by creating something that’s essentially made of scrap, rubbish or a material that everyone can identify with, quite interesting questions start to be posed as to what we’re building cities out of and how much control we have over that development. Plonking something in the middle of a main city square is quite provocative. CAM: Tony and Dan, as you both come to this project as architectural or environmental practitioners, I’m wondering how this kind of project might open up possibilities for your own professional exploration that maybe wouldn’t be possible within your own practices. The notion of functionality is quite prominent within a lot of current discourse surrounding the relationship between art and architecture, and perhaps this project allows a certain amount of freedom from the legal and functional elements of your work that have real implications in what you can produce. AB-V: You’re also moving more into the realm of what I would consider to be art that architecture, because of the paradox of constructing a space of shelter and yet this space then being impermanent. TB: I’d argue that this project is more relevant architecturally than most architecture projects are as it's driven by artistic desire and a sense of social responsibility. Also, the design has grown out of the materials that are being used, where it can be placed and how long it takes to be built. It’s taking on a lot of architectural issues; the difference is that normally there’s someone paying the bills, making demands that affect architectural creativity, and the social implications of placing a building permanently are far greater. CAM: So this kind of project opens up a space for criticality in your work that goes beyond the structure itself? Dan McTiernan (DMc): I think that architecture should do that anyway. Maybe the problem is that it doesn’t always, and this work is kind of pure architecture – it’s about what a building means in a space and how people interact with it. CAM: When you speak of the networks or communities that you want to build or insert yourself into, what interests me is the mode of participation that you used and how important this element is within the work. Originally your call out through Wooloo.org and other networks seemed to intend to create a group of participants that would all influence the project in different ways, and this process would build some kind of shared experience. Perhaps the fact that Tony and Dan were personally invited makes them collaborators rather than participants. TS: Definitely, yes. Caban Unnos. Photo (c) Andreas Bastiensen. Courtesy Wooloo Productions AB-V: How much of the participatory element is based on keeping the ball rolling and egging each other on throughout the night, and how much is conceptually based and focused on collective activity? TB: Well it needs a lot of people to get it done. DMc: The reality is that it has to be collaborative and it has to be organised. AB-V: So if it was manageable with one or two people to do it alone? DMc: But that’s the whole point; it isn’t, building never is. AB-V: Conceptually though, how much weight does this have in the project; the participatory act? TB: That’s the key thing; it’s literally the weight of the materials. CAM: So they are just helpers then. DMc: Of course they’re not because it is a collective endeavour, and building used to be a social endeavour as well and that’s what we’re generating. Even if it’s an imported Sheffield community I don’t think that matters. TB: If you’re building a house for someone, everyone has input and that’s what’s important, even if it isn’t artistic input. They still take pride in the work. DMc: That’s quite in-keeping with the notion of the one night house anyway isn’t it; it’s friends and family that would have pitched in. CAM: A limitation of the Wooloo.org context may be that it wasn’t possible for you to put the call out to people from non-art backgrounds who may have been interested in helping. HE: Martin [Rosengaard, co-curator of New life Berlin] did suggest that the community on Wooloo.org was not strictly art based; I can’t possibly comment on that really. We have tried to do a lot of participatory things and get people involved before, but we’ve learned to question why these people would want to be involved if they don’t necessarily have a vested interest or get any obvious benefit from it. We have worried what we are actually offering this group of helpers, but the majority really do just want to help; they don’t need artistic input. CAM: It can mainly be other artists interested in the experience or the project. We’ve discussed many aspects of the project in its present sense now - how do you expect the build and the finished house will be represented in the future? There’s been some debate surrounding how the Wooloo.org site will be carried on - will the work receive any publicity outside of this context and how important is that to you? Caban Unnos. Photo (c) Jonathan Groeger. Courtsey Wooloo Productions AB-V: You’re going to start a revolution… HE: It’s difficult to say as it is in the future… This is the first project we’ve done that we feel we could do again in another context where techniques can be refined or explored. We will archive it on our website and these guys [TB and DMc] might too, I haven’t really thought about it. TB: When you’ve done something physical, it will lead onto other things. Even if the house falls down or whatever, we’ll have learned something from that, and the reason that everyone is sat around this table today is the desire to ‘build a thing in Berlin’. That’s incredibly credible by itself, but no doubt more will come from it. Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer, currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete is a practising artist, collaborative curator and cross-disciplinary writer, currently completing a Master's in Visual Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. www.angaaefonu.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

MONDAY - JUNE 9, 2008 - 03:46:19 AM

URBAN SPACE, KiM, BRUNNENSTRASSE 10 JUNE 4, 2008 Gordon Sasaki : Movement Marie Christine Katz : Road Kills and Other Casualties Miles Supico + Norberto Lobo: Démarche figée sur Lottumstr. Urban Space event. (c) Andreas Bastiansen. Courtesy Wooloo Productions The Urban Space screening proved to be a mixed bag as most group shows are; there were moments of beauty and insight combined with awkward moments of misunderstanding for me personally, but overall the three videos and the slide show summed up the visceral sights and sounds of urban life. The first video dealt with Gordon Sasaki’s experience in Berlin as a man in a wheelchair. An American artist living in New York, this short film was shot entirely from his vantage point: he begins his day putting on shoes and socks and the viewer is right there with him. From there, the video presents a collage of urban textures from his point of view. Train platforms, metal ramps and sidewalks are spliced together effectively. This focus on the ground or at least Sasaki’s eye-level makes the viewer feel the constraint involved in his position. The city looks different from this vantage point, and someone like Sasaki doesn’t always fit neatly into the urban space. Most cities are geared toward walkers. Marie-Christine Katz was asked to replicate her “Roadkills & Other Casualties” here in Berlin. This project began several years ago in New York City, where she wanted to see what would happen if she laid down on the street as a well-dressed person and as an unwashed “homeless” person dressed in rags. In New York, where homelessness is much more of an issue than here in Berlin, no one stopped to inquire about her well being or offer help when she appeared to be a homeless person. However, when she dressed as a “normal” person, people called the police and the ambulance and many strangers stopped to ask if she was okay. Clearly, the homeless have become part of the urban landscape in New York and other U.S. cities, where people walk right by another human being laying on the street. Perhaps homelessness is so overwhelming in the States that part of this reaction, or lack of reaction, is simply compassion fatigue. The problem is vast, and its causes are deeply entrenched in American culture. In any case, the piece Katz filmed here in Berlin takes on a different significance, because it’s been removed from the social issues and politics of the U.S. The piece is no longer about the issue of homelessness, as much as it is about well-being and concern for your fellow citizen in the public sphere. In most cities, people sit side by side on the subway or bus and jostle each other while navigating busy sidewalks and yet never speak a word to the strangers around them. Katz’s piece asks when it is appropriate to pierce the protective bubble that surrounds us all as we walk around the city. One needs to wear a certain amount of armor in order to get through the day with the self intact; but on the other hand, when does one break through this barrier and engage with a stranger on the street? In a city where everyone is free to more or less do as they please, why shouldn’t a woman be able to lie down on Alexanderplatz in the middle of the afternoon if that’s what she wants to do? At what point is it appropriate to intervene? Is this her own freedom of expression or movement within an urban space or, is she distraught or physically unwell? At what point does one turn off the iPod or take a detour from the daily routine to talk to a stranger? Perhaps this project will bring up new issues in each new city in which it takes place - Katz plans to take ‘Roadkills’ to other urban spaces across the world. Each city has its own culture and unwritten rules about how to behave in the public sphere, and each city also has varying levels of poverty and issues of homelessness. The photo slideshow that followed the video screenings contained some striking and beautiful images as well as some that I found a bit mundane, but so it goes with group shows. There were a few photos that appeared more rural than urban, and I wondered why they had been included in a photo show about urban space. Perhaps these images were taken on the outskirts of cities? I also had trouble with the soundtrack that accompanied this slide show. These found sounds felt disjointed and separate from the images we were seeing. Traditional urban sounds like a train pulling into the station, traffic roaring by or announcements made in the subway fitted the theme, but some other sounds were difficult to pin down and at times clashed with the imagery. Otherwise, the thirty or so photographers chosen for the show contributed images from all corners of the globe: South America, Japan, Australia and Europe (as far as I could tell). I couldn’t decide if it was good or bad that the exact location or “urban space” of each slide wasn’t projected along with the image. The result was a stream of urban landscapes and people that began to blend into each other after a while, but perhaps this was the point. As much as the images varied, they presented a common theme: the human experience in the city. Valerie Palmer is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles (valeriepalmer@sbcglobal.net). Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

MONDAY - JUNE 9, 2008 - 03:19:08 AM

OLD BERLINERS TO NEW BERLINERS Laborotorio Berlin, Sunday 8 June 2008, Charlottenberg, Berlin Photo (c) Laborotorio Berlin On Wednesday, I sat down with Silvina Der-Meguerditchian and Chus López Vidal to discuss their project “Old Berliners to New Berliners” for the New Life Berlin Festival. Silvina and Chus are two-thirds of the collaborative group Laboratorio Berlin (the third member is Concha Argüeso) who have been creating art projects together for the last four years. The three women came to Berlin from places like Spain and Argentina close to twenty years ago. During the Eighties, while the wall was still up, young men could avoid military service if they lived in Berlin and because the city was so cut off from the Western world, the government gave Berliners generous subsidies just to live here. I think this generation laid the cultural foundation for the Berlin that we see today. Laborotorio Berlin’s project “Old Berliners to New Berliners” intends to open up a dialogue between an older generation of artists living in Charlottenburg, the “Old Berliners”, and the newer influx of artists living in places like Mitte and Prenzlauerberg, the “New Berliners”. Often newer immigrants live in communities that are closed off from the rest of the city, and often a language barrier can compound feelings of isolation. Laboratorio Berlin invites these New Berliners into their home on Sunday, June 8th, to open up a discussion, find common ground and maybe begin to see today’s Berlin within a historical context. In most cities, the neighborhood you live in says so much about you. For instance, in Los Angeles, where I live, one of the first questions asked when meeting a person for the first time is: “What neighborhood do you live in?” Their response says much about their income level, their priorities, perhaps their ethnic background, their personal tastes, etc. I think this is the same case here in Berlin, where each section of the city has its own atmosphere. A neighborhood says much about how one chooses to experience life in a city, but is it a bit prejudiced to jump to conclusions or sum someone up based on a neighborhood? “Old Berliners to New Berliners” is very much a project about human relationships and community. Most of the artists who come to Berlin from elsewhere leave their families far behind, so how does one go about building a “family” and a support network here in Berlin? What roles do different relationships play in this new urban family? Obviously this issue applies to many who move to the city from elsewhere, not just artists, but the artistic community can serve as a microcosm for 21st century globalism. I think it raises some interesting questions about the new global economy and the nomadic lifestyles (one must go where the work is) on a very basic, human level. What about the need to feel connected despite this constant mobility? How does the fast pace of modern life affect artists? Can the natural rhythms of human creativity keep up with this frantic pace? One of the projects Laborotorio Berlin will use to address the idea of relationships and community is based on a Catholic tradition in Spain. A small box containing images of the Holy Family was passed around Spanish villages based on a list of all the families that lived there. This box opened up as an altar but also served as a collection box for the church. This box would spend a few days in each family’s house and then the family would deliver it to the next one on the list. This box traveling from home to home helped to keep the community connected through these neighborly visits. Laborotorio Berlin has created a box, but the “Holy Family” is an image of Silvina, Chus and Concha with Berlin’s TV tower in the background. They would like to pass this box back and forth between the “Old Berliners” and the “New Berliners” here in Berlin, and instead of a donation, they would like participants to document the box in their home. Photo (c) Laborotorio Berlin Those attending the event on Sunday evening are asked to bring a small object that signifies or embodies an important relationship or an experience in a relationship. You’ll also have the chance to add your name to the list in order to participate in the traveling box project. This initial meeting hopes to spark a dialogue between these two generations, something that can only enrich each one’s experience here in Berlin. Perhaps, it will help the Old Berliners and the New Berliners to see how similar they really are. After all, both have come to live and work in this laboratory called Berlin. For more on this project, please see www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/ Valerie Palmer Valerie Palmer is a writer and photographer living in Los Angeles (Valeriepalmer@sbcglobal.net). Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SUNDAY - JUNE 8, 2008 - 08:09:54 AM

INTERVENTION, YES. PARTICIPATION, MAYBE 1. From the point of view of an Open Dialogues distant participant, and reading the blog hosting this article, New Life Berlin crystallizes around an exhibition. The format exhibition, so to speak, is the point of entry. Ironically - as I'm co-responsible for the exhibitions programme of an institution - I used to be sceptical about the format exhibition. I thought that a book, for instance, would be a more efficient and practical tool to both spread and host knowledge. After years of arguments and experience, I’d say exhibitions can be a precious host of knowledge. But a lot depends of the way they are delivered. An artistic event, in its ideal form, would allow the reader to make her/his own story out of the material offered. This rarely happens, and I include my work in this critique. It’s far more common to have a certain line of exposing things; alternative types of information if the producers’ purpose is political, different aesthetic approaches if they’re pursuing other goals (commercial or institutional). We, producers of art (and festivals) have agendas too, and there’s no way around it. We do one thing, to get another one. I might work on counter-information, or viable ways to deliver knowledge, or on expanding conventional artistic methods. In any case, my exhibitions would aim to read things differently to mainstream sensibility, inviting the viewer to read along, making my ideas circulate. I’d argue that this sort of approach is not the same thing as offering the possibility to read things in a certain way. What needs to happen, for an exhibition (festival) to work in that sense? One thing would be not to pass on to the visitor, or reader, something we consider important as statement. It’s true we’re all here because there are things we want to say, and that we want to make public. But to transfer knowledge to someone seen as not-acknowledged might ultimately result in a sort of inverse propaganda. Can we call this intervention? 2. Jacques Rancière, darling of the political artist of the last decade, says we need to be aware, since we’re not. Aware about what? I’ll put it very bluntly: there is no gap between producer and audience, since each part knows something the other doesn't know. This is what he writes, and that’s nothing new. (Umberto Eco in 1962 based his ‘open work’ essay on the same argument.) What’s important, in my view, is that awareness is the essence of participation. A festival centred on this idea needs to prove, if any, one thing: there is no need to fill a gap, since the gap in knowledge is the normal condition, and not something to correct. I wonder at this point, what is the aim of a participatory art event? Does it mean that it allows participants (artists and audience) to read each other knowledge at the same level? With the same weight? I admit the difficulty of putting into practice the awareness mentioned above. To reach a point in which everyone is on stage and ready to perform, might take more than art and literature are capable of. It might take time, a lot of time. To get each other’s knowledge, we need to get access. To get access, we need to generate points to enter and participate in culture. We need to find the key to enter, and possibly more than one. Passion is one key. Irit Rogoff speaks about passion as a principal means to get access. Passion for something is what unlocks the potential in the spectator and producer alike. What else? Necessity, maybe. It can be a powerful drive to enter culture. Perhaps physical necessity, more likely social necessity. The push to go beyond the values of the environment we grew up within. But hey, here again books rule. The question of access cannot be separated by that of the gates, and of the gatekeepers. James Rifkin wrote – guess – an entire book on that; perhaps not surprisingly, he also fell short of his own predicament. Rifkin gives the examples of precisely the book as a metaphor for the gatekeeping policy: anyone can write a book (provided s/he has access to the means), but will stumble upon the first gatekeeper: the publishing house/Internet bookseller that can distribute the book. Once past the first, there's the second gatekeeper: the editor/marketing person. S/he might never grant access to the book, for whatever reason (economical or ideological), therefore blocking access. If even the second level were to be passed, our author will come across a third level: the reviewer/critic (in print or online), who might never review the book, therefore denying the book to a potential audience. This is how it works, in publishing. Interestingly, these considerations are published in a book. So it goes. For Rifkin the metaphor doesn’t really work. What about New Life Berlin? Is it a gatekeeper or a point of access? An opportunity or a limitation? The book is an efficient image for cultural production and participation in general, and especially for the notion of being on stage and performing: like in a festival. It gives the idea of the work behind; it discloses on one hand, the difficulty of making us all ‘aware’ (since one only is writing and many are waiting to see the book on sale). On the other hand, it shows the very possibility that exists for anyone to read something, and possibly, something that wasn’t planned by the author. The possibility of an island. I wonder, in our case of the festival, which role can harness passion to push that gate. And which one harnesses necessity. Meanwhile, I will keep reading/writing/making exhibitions ;-) Alfredo Cramerotti Alfredo Cramerotti is an author and curator based in the UK and fellow of Art Theory and Criticism at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Innsbruck (Austria). He currently works as Exhibitions Officer of QUAD, the new visual arts, media and film institute in Derby, UK.alfredoc@derbyquad.co.uk/ www.coachupdate.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SUNDAY - JUNE 8, 2008 - 06:28:36 AM

‘DREAMING OF A ONE NIGHT HOUSE...’ HORATIO EASTWOOD AND TERENCE SLATER 'CABON UNNOS- PUBLIC WORKSHOP' NEW LIFE BERLIN SHOP JUNE 6 2008. Caban Unnos Pre-Build Discussion, 7 June (c) Viviana Druga. Courtesy Wooloo Productions How many artists does it take to build a house? Answer: as many as show up at secret location in Berlin’s city centre at 10pm tonight! A Welsh tradition borne out of rural poverty, necessity and an ancient legal loophole forms the inspiration behind ‘Caban Unnos’, Horatio Eastwood’s and Terence Slater’s aka ‘No Fixed Abode’s’ contribution to the New Life Berlin festival. Yesterday they held an informal introduction to their project at Chloriner Strasse, outlining to the assembled gathering, their team, aims and objectives. Whilst traditions of ‘one night’ dwellings have existed throughout Europe, No Fixed Abode have drawn directly from the Welsh incarnation of this phenomenon which saw people constructing houses overnight in order to stake an otherwise unattainable claim on a dwelling and its surrounding land. The crucial factor (or certainly one which seems to resonate with Horatio and Terry) being that smoke must have risen from the chimney by dawn to render the house safe from the laws and claws of demolition. There are so many elements of this project which excite me. Alongside the wholesome ingredients of community and team work, there is the childlike pleasure to be derived from secret construction of a ‘house’….memories of huts, hideouts and gangs, and the telltale purple punctures of ensnared splinters in grimy, sunburnt hands hover somewhere near. As a means of introduction to the one night dwelling concept, we are shown a documentary in which the inhabitants of a small Welsh village resurrected not only the physical traditions but also the spiritual ones of community and cohesion in their building of a one night house. Their modern clothing covered by rough rags and topped with flat caps and gentrified top hats in a nod to the garb worn by their forefathers, they toiled through a September night equipped with JCBs, mud, sticks, and above all, a unified singular purpose. Despite the documentary eliciting mirth over the Welsh native tongue and eccentric garb of its prominent characters, it provided a very tangible illustration of the inspirational roots of Caban Unnos. From this, No Fixed Abode led the audience further down their visionary path – how all of this translates into the here and now of sunny Berlin for these two artists. Enter Tony Broomhead and Dan Mc Tiernan, an architect and project manager respectively, both of whom have been previously involved in similar projects; the audio link up of two garden sheds, one located in the Yorkshire sculpture park and one in Portobello Market London, and the design and construction of a house made solely of waste materials. Alongside Horatio and Terry, Tony and Dan described the logistical process that has formed what is to be No Fixed Abode’s creative take on a one night build. Firstly the raw materials were discussed. In the case of the Welsh documentary it was striking to see the necessity of utilising the surrounding environment and attuning to the rhythms and limitations provided by nature. Thus a delicate balance was reached – weighing up the implications of the brief span of darkness afforded by a midsummer night countered with the pliable wetness of twigs and grass of Autumn in the UK. Watching this, the potentially unfertile nature of our present environment in Berlin’s city centre was all at once keenly visible, made all the more so by the rough wall fashioned by a wooden frame and black bin liners which leaned against the naked window frames of 89 Choriner Strasse; a crude attempt at shutting out the sunlight which bleached the video projection on the back wall to indistinguishable sepia flickerings. Every once in a while our makeshift screen would with a whoosh of wind, crash backwards onto the pavement reminding us all of the potential ineptitude of our building acumen and the temporality of our setting. But Horatio and Terry’s solution to this lack of natural materials will be to harvest the year round bountiful crop of the city…waste. In never-ending supply, waste provides a variety of raw materials to be manipulated however one might choose. And so the Caban Unnos house will be built using wooden packing crates and water coolers. Rather than the rural idyll evoked by the thatched cottage creation in the Welsh documentary, the Berlin house- as depicted by Tony’s architectural plans- will portray a vision of urban cool; a structure that would be at home among the minimalist and light infused glamour of a contemporary art space. And the build itself? Tonight (7th June) under cover of darkness, without permission and in a very central location…. The prospect of the one night build is undeniably exciting, and the combination of the geographical location and its situation within an art festival all infuse this project with an infectious element of risk and collective fun. There are however further implications to be considered given the project’s position within a canon of art practice. Is this art? Does the fact that Horatio and Terry have actually had to buy some of the waste materials involved encroach on the ethos of their project? Will the build in fact happen or will authorities intervene to send artists and crates packing? This afternoon (7th June) No Fixed Abode will hold a panel discussion to tease out some of these broader issues. They anticipate there will be productive dialogue between project organisers and participants. Brass tacks - presumably reused ones - will be got down to, and the thorny debate of process vs. product might even rear its artistic head. Then it’s to work…‘Pob Iwc’ (good luck in Welsh) or should one say ‘Viel Glück’? By Mary Kate Connolly No Fixed Abode: http://www.nofixedabode.org.uk/ Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer and movement practitioner based in London with a particular interest in Dance and Live Art. Contact: mary11378@yahoo.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 7, 2008 - 04:51:23 AM

MARISA OLSON, ASSISTED LIVING Karl –Liebknecht-Str, Berlin, 6pm, 3rd June 2008 Marisa Olson 'Assisted Living', 3 June. (c) Jonathan Groeger. Courtesy Wooloo Productions In Assisted Living, you are invited to travel 30 years into the future and become the studio audience for a daily live recording of Marisa Olson’s futuristic American TV lifestyle show. Welcomed into the derelict Berlin shop-front at Karl–Liebknecht-Str by ‘crew’ in neon t-shirts, the audience are invited to take their positions in ‘the future’, which first involves ‘whooping’ and walking through paper-chain curtains before the camera starts to roll. Promised an insight in to the practicalities of ‘coping with the health and environmental challenges of living a life prolonged by technology’ I take a front row seat expecting some hefty action. Little comes. Olsen rolls out the US daytime TV formula with humorous futuristic anecdotes in a slick American accent, and then cut; my experience in this ‘time machine’ is over. Back home, I do a frantic and eye opening ‘googling’ of Martha Stewart. And inside the crystal ball of modern online ‘reality’- amid the bizarre arts, crafts and recipe tropes of US Daytime TV - the parody of Assisted Living comes flooding at me like a perfumed paper bouquet with Martha Stewart cookie sprinklings on top. I wonder if the gags would have gone down easier for a US audience, as I myself only managed a wry smile in the actual performance. Marisa Olson 'Assisted Living', 3 June. (c) Jonathan Groeger. Courtesy Wooloo Productions Placing the daytime TV phenomenon in front of a different live studio audience throughout the festival has the potential to raise diverse and fascinating topics about both the future and our understanding of how it will effect every day life. This could be a collective documentation and presentation of just what our fears, hopes and concerns are for the future. Contextualised in the New Life Berlin festival, Assisted Living strongly fulfils the festival theme of New Modes of Moving and Existing. And last nights’ performance - the second of 14 – was reflective of our own personal lack of capacity to keep up with the world in the present day, never mind the future. In this shell of a shop front with chairs, two staging lights and a paper cut out backdrop of a TV set, the work is billed as a look into the near future. However, Olsen’s ideas of just what this future holds are relatively straight forward. Instead, it is the audience’s imagination concerning the implications of that future that is most heavily called upon in Assisted Living. The work highlights our inefficiencies as humans in forecasting our future, and the paper chains and plastic food left me more with a wartime ‘make do and mend’ ethos, than a futuristic vision of 2038. Joanna Loveday Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing for performance and live art. www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com. Contact: joannaloveday@hotmail.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 7, 2008 - 04:14:09 AM

ROME WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY, BUT LIVE ART ... NO FIXED ABODE, CABAN UNNOS: IT'S NOW-OR-NEVER BERLIN, JUNE 2008 Pre-building Panel Discussion 7 June, Berlin Mitte 85, 2pm Caban Unnos Pre-Build Discussion, 7 June (c) Viviana Druga. Courtesy Wooloo Productions We live in a world of perpetual impermanence. Especially with regards to our home spaces. Increased international mobility, gentrification, immigration, and escalating real estate costs make the idea of an urban fixed abode a rarity. In our unfixed world of economic and political instability, a house is an asset. An asset. How crazy is that? How is it that the house, a foundation of shelter and comfort – two commonly pronounced human necessities – has become capital to such an extent that not everyone is necessarily entitled to house themselves? Next thing you know they’ll be charging for water. Welsh folk law (as well as variations of this from Turkey to France and the Americas) once entitled a person to bypass the hierarchical distribution of land space by constructing a ‘one-night house’, within the following guidelines: the house was to be built between sundown and sunrise without disturbance, within designated communal space or waste land, and have smoke through its chimney by morning. If these criteria were met, they would entitle the person to ownership of the house and a small plot of land around it. ‘No Fixed Abode’ (Terry Slater and Horatio Eastwood) in participation with Tony Broomhead of ‘Amenity Space’ and Dan McTiernan of ‘Why Waste’ and in further crucial participation with whoever thinks this is a great idea (my vote is cast) will be building a one-night house in Berlin on Saturday June 7th (today) from 10pm until sunrise. The realisation of a one-night house in a central urban location obviously implies more than one conceptual adaptation from the Welsh folk context. Where a Welshman might recruit his neighbours to help with materials and the build itself in order to raise the structure in such a short period of time, ‘Caban Unnos’ invites the public, you, to contribute to the house’s construction and its immersion into the city. Its function is also collaboratively defined and communally accessible, so, once it is built, the house could shelter Art and Life in any which way you see fit. This writing, in all its self-assured enunciation, is really only one way of constructing meaning for the house, only one participatory claim to what the house may end up achieving. Just as constructing a sense of home is absolutely multi-directional and contextually defined, so will Caban Unnos be both a physical and conceptual collaboration that even the artists may not foresee. Such is the ambitious conviction of Live Art; and of the intentions of New Life Berlin. Where the Welsh one-night house was constructed from collectively pooled and profusely accessible resources (often branches, baled hay/straw, and mud) the ‘Caban Unnos’ one-night house will be made from urban resources, equally profuse in their accessibility: commercial waste products. Where the Welsh one-night house was to be a designated living space for one person, the ‘Caban Unnos’ one-night house beckons a community reclamation of urban space, in Berlin just as symbolically as any other cultural mecca of our contemporary designation. Thus the house will be communally occupied in one artistic form or another, being collectively proprietary and better serving our current urban equivalent of folk communion. Don’t be deceived by our compartmentalised living and communication structures: our need for communal intimacy is the same as in the folk context, though the currency for it may not be. ‘Caban Unnos’ will provide a platform for such a need, as well as addressing the significant impermanence of our contemporary sense of home or house, architecturally, artistically, and politically. Because of the clandestine nature of the build, I would hate to think that somehow this writing might contribute to potential ‘disturbances’ of the process (ie. increasing the likelihood of being found and told to leave,) therefore I won’t disclose the intended location of the build. If you’re interested in participating, however, there is a pre-building panel discussion scheduled for 2pm at the New Life Berlin shop, Choriner Str 85 (Mitte) during which the ideological questions of what a one-night house implies in the urban and cultural/artistic context of Berlin and the world will be addressed. You can find out the location of the build there if you don’t already know it, and get a couple more hours to absorb the enthusiasm of a group of people eager to build some kind of collectively intimate Rome in a day, or a night. The one-night house: http://www.coedcymru.org.uk/tyunnos.htm No Fixed Abode: http://www.nofixedabode.org.uk/ Why Waste: http://www.whywaste.org.uk/ Amenity Space: http://www.amenityspace.co.uk/ By Anga’aefonu Bain-Vete Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete is a practising artist, collaborative curator and cross-disciplinary writer, currently completing a Master's in Visual Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. www.angaaefonu.com Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

SATURDAY - JUNE 7, 2008 - 03:58:35 AM

DISTANCE PARTICIPATION: THE 'FEMALE' BODY AND THE DISTRIBUTED 'CONSCIENCE' SYSTEM OF DESIRE AND FANTASY ON THE WEB Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how virtual, biological, performed, and implied sexuality are overlaid and mutually informed in digital cultures through avatars. In cyberspace, we live simultaneously with our avatars; they are “who” sends our emails and plays online games. Avatars are also how we’ve chosen to represent ourselves on the web through images, videos, stand-ins. For example, your avatar right now is your “self” mediating between your body and this virtual forum. Berlin is an unusual place to start this conversation for me because I don’t know much about its local culture. But I can assume that people in Berlin form just as much a part of the online sex industry as anywhere and that we all have a stake in this conversation as users of networks worldwide. Our avatars may be located on different servers but we’re all out there together mixing it up. Avatars are also “prosthetics,” noted transgender virtual systems theorist Allucquere Rosanne Stone, writing in the early 1990s. They “negotiate the tensions between individual subjects’ virtual collectivities, and the physical bodies in which they may or may not be grounded”. But in the age of biotech we have avatars-of-the-flesh, people that are making themselves over through media which includes but isn’t exclusive to the web. The malleability of identity in the context of social networking is only one step removed from people who literalize identity modifications on their bodies through boob jobs, botox, vaginoplasty, posterior enhancement, etc. It behooves cyberfeminists and others to consider what these “feminizations” are ultimately pretending toward: class mobility. Avatars are another mode of representing social hierarchies. It is not disputed that race and gender are the most common customization options for avatars on the web. Thinking about the common profile of the internet-user, affluent white males, the dominant fantasy images present issues we can think through with these questions from Booth and Flanagan: “Who has access, who is represented by and within technology and how, and [what are] the ways in which the technologies are used?” They ask, “Has feminism changed how technologies are created, and for whom?” This is one of the first places we need to respond as artists attempting to study, affect, or intervene in the topologies of the network. In N. Katherine Hayles’ introduction to one of my favorite books on cybernetics, How We Became Post-Human (1999), she notes that in cybernetic systems, machine-bodies are coupled through “mutating and flexible” interfaces, “splicing” together will and desire into a distributed network. It is perhaps intuitive to us ten years later that the body and the electronic communicating body are in dialog on the Internet not only through avatars, but also video uploads on YouTube, blogs, profiles, multi-user role-playing games, dating sites and social networking. But the extent to which we normalize this paradigm, incorporating the “splice” as a natural phenomenon, is part of the problem. On the web the body and its desires work in collaboration with algorithms, search engines, bandwidths, and the intrinsic values generated by people communicating with or “hitting” the site/s of the virtual body. A degree of human agency is lost here to the automated function, with sexuality itself being highly affected. The impacts on person-to-person relationships won’t be fully understood I think until more time has passed. Supported by imagery circulated primarily through porn, but also other media like advertising, breast implants are an important category of image construction that challenges artists and cyberfeminists alike. Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s concept of avatars as prosthetics becomes complicated when sexual signifiers are literalized upon real bodies. In terms of breast enlargements alone, Freud might concur that we are dizzy with the possibilities. One bumper sticker I saw recently exclaimed “I {heart} Huge Fake Tits!” I appreciated the candor and thought—who doesn’t, really? But I do not {heart} what big fake tits mean for women—transgender and biological both. Deflating the idea of the “female” body as actor with its own agency, the breasts become remote locations of an erotic machine—like avatars they perform for an absent driving desire located in the one who manipulates them or gazes upon them, online or in the flesh. Unlike online avatars the huge fake tits recommend and even demand a reading that collapses signifier and signified. Fantasy and desire trip up the potentially progressive and liberating system of multiple identities realized through avatars in cyberspace when implants start to dominate the system. When breast enlargements are re-loaded so frequently now into the cyber system, frankly I’m suspicious about what they do for all the “readers” of them. Do they function like the jennybot, the AI program that has fooled so many eager online flirts? Or do they represent an assurance to the viewer that they are not in fact being tricked, that there is no machine here “only” body? Compare the truly amazing “conversations” of jenny18 at http://virt.vgmix.com/jenny18/logs/ to your favorite local porn site and think about it. Breasts are the next booming web enterprise but they demand the belief that a “real” person is communicating directly to the viewer. Women are capitalizing on this in astonishing ways. Nikki Jay, Cherry Lipz, Hell on Hells and hundreds of other women have raised 5-10K for the “body of their dreams” by offering shows and chats for “gents” contributing to their online fund on http://myfreeimplants.com/. Part E-bay, part chat room, part nerve, “ladies” can also win breasts and in the case of one artist I know, actually meet people. Most of these women say they want to be “models” or enhance some other related career. Women complicit in this system buy into the idea that they are gaining more economic power. Everyone is upping the ante. But the “recommended surgeons” also advertising on the site are of course winning too. I’m not sure who’s losing yet, but huge fake tits are far from a zero-sum game. Next we will see if flesh-avatars are influencing modes of representation to the extent that biotech industries start making it easier to achieve these invisible alterations and women have to sacrifice even more of their dignity just to catch up. i. Thomas Foster “The Postproduction of the Human Heart,” qtd. in Reload: rethinking women + cuberculture, ed. by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 470 ii. Ibid., “Introduction” 15 iii. Ibid., 12 Carrie Paterson Carrie Paterson is a distance participant in Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. She is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. She is showing at Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles in July, and her article “Feminism in the Age of Biotechnologies and Bioinformatics” will be featured in X-tra Magazine at the end of the year. Contact carriep@rof.net for other articles or to see her work. Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and opendialogues@gmail.com Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 6, 2008 - 01:11:21 PM

NEW PICTURED HOMELANDS NATHAN PETER, 'EMINENT DOMAIN', CHORINER STR. 85, 30 MAY - 15 JUNE Our western capitals are dynamic entities. In only a few cities is this as apparent as it is in Berlin. Here history is present in disruptions or unmarked changeovers. Between the former eastern Berlin buildings of the Karl-Marx-Allee and the western Berlin shopping malls around the Kurfürstendamm, the city is full of houses and buildings from different eras and political systems. It is not only the well known history of the city, but also those private tales of the inhabitants that are stamped on the cityscape by means of graffiti, commerical billboards and posters. Parallel to this, independent exhibition spaces and galleries, temporary bars and clubs appear for a short period of time; and sporadic stages for installations or (dance and theatre) performances give Berlin a face that is subject to constant change. Here, history is an ongoing, visible process which is produced right now – this is what the city promises. Thousands of creatives from all over the world respond to this promise, and have come to Berlin to change the city in dramatic ways. The installation ‚Eminent Domain’ by the Berlin based and US born artist Nathan Peter, which opened the New Life Berlin festival, can be seen as a programmatic statement for the entire festival. It is an analysis of new developments in life and art, activated by international artists in a paradigmatic way. Peter does not use the exhibition space - Wooloo’s showroom in Berlin Mitte, as well as the gallery space in general – in an ordinary way. Instead, all the windows and doors of the Wooloo.org base, the New Life Shop, have been removed. Peter’s installation has to be reconsidered as an enlargement of the showroom into the public space outside the gallery. Nathan Peter 'Eminent Domain' (c) Andreas Bastiansen. Courtesy Wooloo Productions In this way, the installation also refers to the surrounding city. The artist searched through Berlin Mitte for surfaces pasted up with posters, so that he could arrange these multi-layered discoveries on top of and beneath each other, across a wooden-wall construction at the backwall of the gallery. These discovereries are subdued in Peter’s installation by an imprinting: in order to not only reflect the daily reality of the city, but also to highlight in shadows and light the changes around the gallery, Peters covers the surface of this poster-wall with silver-foil. He then perforates the whole ensemble with drill holes. The artist is digging like an archaeologist through this wall, built out of posters and foil; he penetrates the layers of his found objects like sedimented soil. In a paradoxical strategy that simultaneously hides and reveals, he generates a structure which is both inside and outside, manifest and latent. Like the plastics of Joseph Beuys, Peter creates a dynamic texture rooted in a generative context, which stands in relation to the social environment of the New Life Berlin festival, to the city of Berlin, and to the house that the gallery is sheltered in. Nathan Peter 'Eminent Domain' (c) Andreas Bastiansen. Courtesy Wooloo Productions In this context, the hole-pattern which the artist uses to codify the installation becomes clear. The model for this pattern is, Peter explains, a computer collage, sampling elements from the American romantic painter Thomas Cole and the German painter Caspar David Freidrich. The drill holes represent each pixel, which Peter made by saving his computer collage in low quality. In this way, Peter overlays the found-objects of his installation with another montage, which can be understood as a kind of contemporary image of a homeland – or even a declaration of love. The artist’s mental topologies no longer belong to locally defined national templates. He has already found the land of his aspiration – or perhaps he invented it. Peter’s images point out that this ‚new life’ belongs to a city in central Germay, but the centre has nothing to do with being the lynchpin of a traditional nation. Eminent Domain is an attempt to mirror the daily reality of city life, which develops in cross-cultural ways. It also describes the dynamic and creative frameworks of artists who work in this system. In a building which carries the material ‚body’ of the city (inside), Peter aims to manifest fugitive processes of alteration as well as to depict cultural trends that result from phenomena like migration, and which are deeply rooted in our present. The artist understands identity as a product of collective processes, which can neither be defined by the placebos of global commerce, nor by old national boundaries. In his work, history has to be connected to experience, to people’s daily lives. Contemporary art, Peter’s installation claims, is basically bonded to human beings and their power to configure reality – and within reality, to configure home. Heiko Schmid translated by Heiko Schmid, Christina Irrgang and Mary Paterson Heiko Schmid, b. 1978 in Constance. Bachelors Degree in Art Sciences and Media-Theorie (Technical University Berlin), Masters Degree from the University for Arts and Design (ZKM) Karlsruhe. Currently PHD Student at the University for Media Arts (KHM) Cologne. Conception of expositions, publications and lectures on contemporary (media) art, the history of technology and science fiction. Direct Link to this Post:

FRIDAY - JUNE 6, 2008 - 11:10:46 AM