Protocol, after a meeting with Axel, Mai 20th

by SD - for the "COMPARATIVE STUDIES" group

Theme of the exhibition: cultural city-devellopment in Berlin in the 1990s and in NY in the 1980s

BUDGET

80.000 � are already available, but we calculated..
120.000 � as the the overall budget. Since real spendings tend to be higher..
160.000 � seems to be realistic. But that means that
80.000 � are still missing.

a guy called alex works on fundraising professionally. he will get 8% of what he shall raise. any other suggestions where money could come from... norske kulturrad, special firms that might originate from your background and/or experience??

DATES

installation starts mid of november

opening is beginning of december

ends in january

SPACE

We have all the kunstwerke for the project, which is 4 floors. There are floormaps on the swiki.

This is probably too much space and since we are underfunded we are thinking of "renting" out one of the floors to a project that might fit thematically into our project... call it outsourcing or whatever. another way of handling this would be that we put together a sub-show in a way that it gets its very own funding. do you have any ideas??

how could we tap into rich nations budgets, like austria or norway?
or compile a very special, thematic video-show
or ask trautmannsdorf to not only redo his 90s piece (see below) but more recent stuff as well
or let Roger Buergel do let his governmentality show travel into the kunstwerke as well (because the german government moved to berlin)
or to do something with http://www.republicart.org /thats were B�rgel&co are financed/
or do a reconstruction of one of those early shows featuring DDR-Underground (like Autoperforationsartisten)
or redo the first show in the kunstwerke
... what, actually does claudia hart do?

INSTALLATION

... a couple of ideas regarding the installation of the show and hopefully develloping a distinct attitude towards it. This tries to reflect the relatively big size ot the kunstwerke, its architecture and the "cultural history" of the kunstwerke. also i got kinda grumpy about the recent berlin biennale, which makes clear that these engaged goodwill shows, esp the general function of Kunstwerke, is the catering of whatever (political) to a pseudo-cultivated burgeois audience. an audience that does not want to be confronted with its past, that expects more entertaining, optimistic shows the more desolate the political climate becomes, and that expects easy reading of artpieces (without text, without theory)... see the press response to the berlin biennial.

Anyway, to make it short, I had the idea to leave the space raw empty desolate minimalistic and to do the show mostly behind the facades, in the hidden closets, inside of the exhibition-architecture that is often used. Or to build structures that resemble this kind of architecture.

This might also come close to the situation in berlin after the wall came down anyway, desolate streets, ruins and spaces empty - holes in the wall to climb into and eventually discover an improvised bar or gallery. an emptyness and desolateness that invided the cultural entrepreneurs to use it as a seeding bed.

To leave the space empty give us the advantage that we do not have to fill the rooms, that we underplay the expectations of the audience and critics.

the exhibition before our show might even fit to this proposal: under the title "shrinking cities" the show tries to investigate the phenomenon of shrinking cities( manchester, liverpool, halle-leipzig, ivanovo, detroit (kyong park monopolised that one forever)). each of those locations uses one floor of the kunstwerke. of course the show is highly desired and supported by governmentals. it reaches out to solve their problems. more info: http://www.shrinkingcities.com ... dates 4.9.-7.11. i hope, i guess that they will install a lot of walls and exhibition architecture (which would be of course formally against their topic of shrinking desolate cities) and that might be good for us to nist inside of the leftovers. either leave them as they are, demolish them or add to them.

CURATORIAL & COMMUNAL AFFAIRS

Some of the followings thoughts resulted from discussions with Antek and Bernadette after the Ex-Argentina show. The question was in how far so called "leftist" and "group oriented" organisation might reproduce/use capitalistic patterns as we know them:

hierarchy (CURATOR-artist),
exploitation (expect big idea/work for little money),
unequality (curator=lotsa dough, artist=peanuts).

Questions were raised if the curator should expect anything at all and if the budget should not be split amongst all participants evenly - so at least they could live a decent life for a couple of months and contribute to the show whatever they liked or nothing at all.

In case some of you want do the money for nothing thing I would find it quite helpful if you could tell me as soon as possible, you shall get the money and we'll call it social help. In any other case, I suggest that you see yourselves as fellow researchers who work on questions regarding the capitalistic system, its reproduction and ... as the title implies... your own work with culture in relation to this system and the (urban) structures it helps to generate.

That also implies that we should continue this discussion -on the swiki and in real meetings- in order to question and synchronise our ideas and devellop more a communal spirit towards the show.

But since the swiki seems to be too xxxxx for most of you i would like to use my curators-honorarium to invite the group to a former (failed) commune for a week. This should happen as soon as possible (early august or september), but realistically speaking this honorarium is not enough to provide extra flights for the overseas participants. I guess we have to wait until we are close enough to the date of installation so we use only one flight.

Then the plan would look roughly: commune 10-17 nov / installation 18-30 nov.

but please let me know what you think... it would be good if we could do it earlier.

INFORMATION ARCHIVE MATERIAL

CATALOG The catalog shall be printed inexpensively, just b&w and poor image quality, but above all we have to find an editing house, we shall try: walter k�nig? / christoph keller? / bussmann verlag wuppertal (new spec interdisc urban theory / lukas&sternberg?

However, we should start on the Catalogue immediately. What are your plans? What are you working on. Will you be writing something? Provide images? Suggest other texts and/or writers?

As you know there are also 3 pre-publications available. Suggested are:

B-Corp Novel
Josefs Research about steel sculptures
Documentation of Fetzer/Wieder contribution to the Berlin Biennale "HUB: urban conditions"

Any more suggestions? -Documents East village : faxsimile mappe mit zeitschriftenartikeln & material

MEDIA since it seems increasingly tedious to watch video and/or listen to sound within the context of art exhibitions we propose to put all of this stuff in one room, call it cinema, videoarchive or what. I also suggest that tapes should be available for sale, a handmade posters for each film could announce its availability. We could consider to make a sampler from all different material

THEORY There could be a room for written material, serves the function of a catalog, archive, eg the famous October text about gentrification in the East Village

RECONSTRUCTION Some shows that serve as a historical reference points to this one should be reconstructed -Friesenwall Exhibition of the East Village -Trautmannsdorf Exhibition in the space of Lukas & Hoffmann