Bettina Wind :: Subjective Cartography :: Collective Mapping

Work Game

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:02:00 +0000

Work game deals with work conditions in the field of contemporary art, and the ambivalent position of artists as entrepreneurs of their own life. A set of questions is used to develop an associative field of connections and contradictions in response to desires, self-technologies, and (precarious) work settings. Tokens and visual structures help to transpose isolated thoughts into multilayered temporary maps. Results enter the game’s account as well as a “work game diary”. Basic idea of the game is to generate an intuitive, intimate knowledge about dynamics and desires in the work process; to visualize structures of thought that cannot be expressed in a linear way, but nevertheless play an important role for our way of dealing with the work conditions we set up or respond to.

an unfinished publication - by windferreira

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:04:00 +0000

My Business Card

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:57:00 +0000

Facing a new round of applications, I decided to upgrade my professional appearance in order to be able and surf on the rough waves of crisis and competition. If you feel like giving your own CV a kick to set off, just follow the reference in the bottom line and you will discover a whole new universe of self-presentation. Enjoy!

Business Card
Name: Wind
Target Group: Interested Colleagues
Region: Berlin / Elsewhere
Business Division: Global Culture Sphere
Job Title: Self-Entrepreneur
In the business since: 2004

My role

I work for Global Creative Ressources (GCR) covering predominantly public clients on special situations and event-driven festival opportunities. My area of expertise is risk taking, art production, performances, texts and counter strategies.

When I came to Berlin, I was placed in a former DDR apartment with just one other translocal team member. Thanks to our efforts and lots of good workflow, we have built the desk into a #1 European Relative Value operation. We have relationships with over 100 colleagues in the art world. The revenues speak for themselves and our team in Berlin has grown temporarily from two to three people. I personally manage some of the most valuable network relationships.

My background

Before completing my Master, I worked at Theatre festivals on their structured production desk. After having finished my Master program in Dramaturgy & Comparative Literature Studies at LMU Munich (LMU), I decided to gear my studies towards a career in the interdisciplinary field of art and culture, with the hope of changing my career, as nobody provided me with the opportunity to put into practice all that I had learned during my Master program.

The Master program was extremely useful to the extent that it gave me the opportunity to take some exotic courses and help me build up a network that unfortunately got lost in competition. Certainly, had it been for the master program and the limited recruitment opportunities, it would have been difficult for me to make the shift from what was essentially a career in dramaturgy to art and performance.

Day to day challenges

Finding viable creative ideas is the biggest challenge I face in my job. It requires a great deal of information, ingenuity, and insight. Tapping into research, and drawing upon multiple resources are the keys to success in my business. The writing of concepts and applications is the easy part. Getting the full project and seeing the big context is where the challenge lies. Managing time is the second biggest challenge.

Community & Work Environment

From senior artists to junior members of the community, every one is a competitive player. The network is extremely intelligent, creative, open minded and hierarchical. There is always a buzz on the biennials and openings, the energy is electrifying, the pressure is high, yet I can confidently say it is one of the few truly "fun" jobs I have had in my life.
Training Program

A four week theory training program in Eindhoven in 2007 was an excellent refresher course in the various aspects of art, theory & politics. The off-site team-building activities for participants provided a great forum to make connections and build networks in precarious conditions. One of the most rewarding parts of the program was the opportunity to understand the various stars within the art & theory world in Amsterdam, London and Istanbul. This allowed me to build relationships with the various critical colleagues who make up the translocal art projects.

Language skills
English, German, French, Portuguese, Finnish, and other European Dialects.

Corporate Culture

To understand the art culture, I would suggest that you visit websites and face book communities where you will read that our identity is based on five core values: Work focus; Creativity; Innovation; Performance and Trust. When I first joined the art world I heard the buzzwords but they didn't mean much to me. But having worked here for almost five years now, I can really see how true they are. Almost all my colleagues live by these values and not by a stable income. I am surrounded by a group of unassuming, yet highly motivated players, driven by a hunger for success. The entire network is focused on achieving market dominance while being convinced that they are maintaining integrity at all times. I have found that self-management fosters and encourages entrepreneurship at all levels of the organization. Come out with an intelligent idea, even if it is not very likely that you will be given the resources for implementation.

Application & Interview Processes

My first-round applications for potential projects were directed to London, Tel Aviv, Helsinki, Aomori and other places hosting art-in-residency programs. The negative reactions were fairly informal, but we did not discuss anything, neither my career aspirations nor prior work experience. I decided to continue applying, however, as the art world in general demonstrates to me how committed everybody is to his or her own career. I found that my temporary employers were not traditional or elitist. To the contrary, the team I met at museums and festivals was down-to-earth and focused on building a formidable franchise. The quality and professionalism of the translocal art world really was a major deciding factor for joining it. I am curious about what the future will bring.

Berlin, 15.6.09, Bettina Wind

This text is dedicated to my translocal colleagues struggling with applications and concepts at the moment; I also want to thank Mr. Kanak, whose generous gesture to publish his job description on the website of Deutsche Bank helped me to give my professional appearance a completely new tune.

THE BALCONY SACRIFICE

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:59:00 +0000

Last week I was witness to the so-called “Balcony Sacrifice”. I had heard of such occasions, yet it still took me by surprise. There were signs of it some months ago: an old man on his third floor balcony climbed onto a fruit box with a round set hammer in hand, in order to check if his neighbour’s balcony would serve for the next sacrifice. I was privy to this on my way to the studio in a backstreet of Wedding – a rather ordinary district of Berlin, where fake castles serve as courtyards, security men greet you when on your way shopping, coffee is served in electrical supply stores, older brothers beat up their younger brothers in the street, rush hour is at one (both over and underground), and a young Muslim in a wheelchair waits for passers-by to carry him upstairs. Like any other district in Berlin, Wedding is currently being “discovered” by artists. But as there are no picturesque canals and only a few run-down houses waiting to be renovated, the stimulation of an artistic avant-garde might not be the watertight solution to cheering up the atmosphere and boosting property prices…at least, as far as I was concerned. I had just been through a very strange month.

It had been a strange month and nothing indicated its end she thought / except her tiny pocket calendar and some houses / set on fire by an early summer or an all too late crowd of activists / let’s get out of it she thought / and rode her bicycle up north / following the former path of surveillance / that had crossed a dead-land territory once / a run-down supermarket / an African flea market (about to close) / some Soviets’ graves next to allotment gardens / the abandoned railway tracks ready for suburban Sunday promenades / that would lead her to the edge of town

My studio faces a short street, cut in half by the large factory building: a liminal space par excellence. I rarely see people in the opposite building, part of which is probably empty anyway. Its shabby grey-white surface serves as a screen for my imaginary projections.

It had been a strange month in total she thought / while remembering the stark tyranny of an everyday sun / that dried out soil and daydreams / and a “try harder” ethos / so she left for a left bookshop / consumed academic thoughts from bookshelves / over-heard the latest rumour about gallery assistants threaten post-doc students / in the quest for grant-based income // as the crisis will attack // and there won’t be any escaping into books she thought / so she bought one and she went on to the playground / children inside / vendors outside talking on their ear-plug-cell-phones / an old lady with her solid plastic picker that reaches out beneath the parked cars / picking up trash professionally sad

Wedding once had a strong identity, or at least a strong colour. Namely RED. It was in this district that workers had tried to demonstrate on May 1, 1929. 19 of them got shot by the police, in the so-called “Blood May of Wedding”. Over forty years later, the West-German Social Democrats moved their party’s headquarters here in order to show their affinity with the workers class. Today, Wedding is a workers’ district, where not only has work vanished (50% of industry closed down in Berlin after the Wall); even the district’s name disappeared when swept up by the central city district’s administrative machine. Its inhabitants did not go away though, they just started performing life outside beyond below without work and district distinction.

There we are John thought D. Jarman / made her wonder how far that we would reach / but her newly bought book told her to connect it all / the fenced playground and the vendor and the lady and the bookshop / and the social vulnerability / and the pseudo-open collaboration with a big subjectification machine / making work and non-work merge / in sweet self-exaggeration / exploitation / re-invention of a flexible biography / a nostalgic lack of continuity / and protection / and desire and submission / institutional co-option of her (oh) so dynamic work force / a power field disguised as game field / an experiment as commodity / while she’s dreaming of something else

If solidarity can only be organized in relation to systems of paid work, then my work in Wedding relates to a system without solidarity. I feel a certain distance, every time I walk out of the metro station. The pavement is broad enough to give way without forced encounters (sometimes objects are dropped from above, sometimes voices are snatched from interiors). Still, I register too many impressions during the five-minute walk and by the time I arrive at the studio I have already been elsewhere’s, losing some thoughts on the way. People here let you come too close; their traces and silences and gestures and angry conversations at the public telephone booth speak too clearly a language that enters my imagination and lingers there, unwilling to drop off and give way to what I brought with me from an early morning thought. I get contaminated with dull lives that make me dream of taking all these moods with me and simply escaping.

There she was on a hill top / right before her the last piece of territory / like a leisure park in a nutshell / like a national park without extension / but with an exploded view that would send out / shock waves of freedom // out there // children were chasing dogs in electric bobby cars / old couples were dancing to nostalgic melodies of forgotten bands / dogs, ducks, horses galloping across fields and fences / and some wannabe punks waiting for the last bus to take them back to their sullen sad skyscrapers / while the filled air of swamps and rotten tree trunks smelled like Finland / so she took a last breath of its infinity / and the local train back home

When I started copying this text to a postcard, I realized that on the balcony in front of my studio, a man was fixing a golden helmet to his head, while an old lady stared cautiously out of the apartment, wondering what will happen to the neighbour’s balcony. While we watched in silence, the man took out a rather large weapon and started attacking the ceiling in methodical pokes.

(Balcony Sacrifice: Yearly ritual performed without public announcement in a district of Berlin, believed to ward off misfortune in the future. Description: A balcony is partly destroyed by a performer carrying a halberd while wearing a golden helmet > reference to Saint Florian, whom believers address in their prayer as follows: “Saint Florian Dearest / From Fire and Damage protect my Home / Let others’ Homes drown in Extinguisher’s Foam.” The (usually dead-beat) balcony symbolizes an insecure future and inherent risks when stepping out the safety of home and tradition; its sacrifice is a substitution for the real sacrifices that might await those who take a step beyond and expose themselves to unknown forces that, through the ritual, are then wrought upon a lifeless object. Note: Popular sources relate the use of a balcony to Karl Liebknecht’s declaration of the Republic from the Berlin Castle’s balcony in 1918, as well as to his violent death shortly afterwards.)

Critics say that the “Balcony Sacrifice” is just a way to establish societal order, keeping transgressions temporary, under control. The real aim is to neutralize the potential of resistance against forces – neo liberal ones, they add - that threaten not only balconies, but the base of work and life as a whole.

Still, I enjoyed the ritual’s destructive beauty. Aesthetics are what artists aim at, in the end.

GALLERY DISCUSSION BERLIN

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:46:00 +0000

Pamphlet intervention on May 1st 2009 by Alexandra Ferreira and Bettina Wind

strange forms of life - slideshow

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:29:00 +0000

strange forms of life - extract

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:01:00 +0000

(...)
At about the same time another man runs for his life. His bare feet almost do not touch the icy ground as he tries to move faster than the huge ship behind him that is breaking the ice he had crossed just a moment before into big white islands. He is running towards us but he cannot come closer. We are out of reach.

(slide)

To be more precise, we are sitting in a dark room that is illuminated by one source of light pointing at a blank canvas. There are no other sources of light although we know that out there in this district of the city, lights are directed onto streets and shops and billboards and museums, but this is of no interest for us at the moment, as we are forming our own district by means of a source of light and some folded lines. In our district there are borderlines forming landscapes of extension and intension, enclosing points, expanding and limiting zones between us and our neighbours. Just like in the following image:

(slide)

Every fold produces a double-fold of interior and exterior, a folded landscape that blurs the boundaries of inside and outside vision. Does it matter if these images correspond with a materialized outside? Or do they rather describe an inside, an introspective, a projected ground upon which each single imagination draws its own district?

(blank)

In the inner district of imagination linger images that might have been taken in the outside, at a specific time of the year, in a specific light; still, if we look at them now, the outside is out of reach – we might as well take them as images of a dream about strange forms of life.

Slideshow in Berlin, April 2

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:00:00 +0000

PASS THIS ON

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 08:53:00 +0000

THIS TEXT OFFERS A PACT. Not the kind of pact that is made in the opera “Der Freischütz” (The Marksman) and that leads inevitably to death and destruction. More a kind of pact that keeps the audience watching the opera till the end, with the feeling that there is no escape from the cruel German legend, but that there is pleasure in assisting to it.

THIS IS A PACT ABOUT PLEASURE. What else could it be? There is no money or fame involved. Even a proofreader is missing to edit these words, written during a rainy evening in a Berlin apartment. There is just Word’s auto-correction program and I. And a strange voice in my head, telling me to

PASS THIS ON

MEMORIES OF A STORYTELLER

I don’t know if I passed on this link to you already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VLnLs_-Ez4

Don’t worry; it is not a virus, though it might become contagious. Let me explain to you: When I watched this video colleagues had passed on to me some time ago I felt a certain danger, a growing tension between the singer and the audience. I have been to Finland a couple of times and have experienced community centres in countryside that offer cultural divertissement at isolated places. I have seen a drag queen performing in a back street of Tampere, and I also got into trouble in another back street, when walking along with an Argentinean colleague who was wearing his hair long and black. The video’s constellation did not seem to predict a lucky ending at all. Even when the first man starts to dance, it looks more like a kind of provocation. “Is he willing? Will he play?” asks the singer, and then suddenly the scene takes off to another place, to an old fairy tale that goes like this: Two brothers follow the spell of a strange woman, and lead the whole village to her place in the forest, where young and old lose their caution when listening to the woman’s seductive songs. They follow her invitation and start to dance; they lose themselves in their movements and in their dreams. They become somebody else. The only one, who does not enter the dance, but watches from the margin, is the brothers’ sister, who gave her voice to the woman in exchange for the promise of fame and fortune for her family. Silently, unable to speak, for her tongue belongs to somebody else now, with her eyes wide open, she keeps watching.

MEMORIES OF A SORCERER

It is the fascination of a multiplicity inside us that draws us to the edge of a forest to witness the pack (of wolves, of witches, of witnesses of a ritual) and its shepherd, its leader or singer or sorcerer. Unnatural participation, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, a propagation by epidemic, by contagion. There is always someone on the edge inviting you to make and alliance, to enter a pact. Someone defined by the liminal position of being inside and outside the pack, of slipping into it (slipping into a tune, a costume, a voice, a gender) or standing outside as the exceptional individual, the “Outsider”. It is a dynamic position, a movement marking the borderline of the pack, into which the human passes or inn which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion (Deleuze&Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1730). In this sense, the singer does not only invite the brother to play or to dance, but also to bring along the human group he has a second alliance with, the audience watching the two dance, as the singer watched the two brothers dance before (Oh, what a dance), and along with it the next human group, the fascinated Self, the You Tube audience watching a dance that comes as a surprise; that involves a group most unlikely to spend time together in a community centre up north. What are they doing there? How did they come together, if not secretly and always on the fringe?

You can say that we are just watching a summer hit of Club music, produced by Karin and Olof Dreijer aka The Knife, who appear in the video as the dancing men and the young woman in the last shot. That Rickard Engfors who performs the playback version of the song “Pass this on”, simply marks the making of his/her drag performance by putting on the music and taking the fake microphone. A drag show, a fake song, a music video.

I say we are watching a becoming, and by watching it, we get invited to a pact, we might even get infected by an affinity to politics that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State.

This video might be contagious.

PASS IT ON

40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:55:00 +0000

The exhibition proposed different ways of telling (hi)stories of the interdisciplinary centre for performance and arts Mousonturm: moments of past and potential future were "stored" in boxes, ready to be explored by the visitors. The exhibition opened on February 5th 2009 and changed every week till the final intervention by Oliver Augst and Stefan Beck on February 28th who performed "Sprecheinsatz: Alle Künstler" at the last evening.

40 Jahre Mousonturm // Eine Retrospektive

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Exhibition with Alexandra Ferreira, in collaboration with Pedro Lagoa, for Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main

drawing a line

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:14:00 +0000

Slideshow in Oporto, November 8

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:10:00 +0000

DES HOMMES QU'ON APPELLE SAUVAGE

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:37:00 +0000

"Did the mask belong to Jean in the same way it belonged to the dancers in their village who received the sprits when turning around to the rhythmic sounds?

(SLIDE)

Jean used it during the day when he was close to the others, it was as if he needed their presence become another, to enter the ritual of his totem, his spirit. But which kind of spirit was it that Jean received when he put on his black mask that would cover half of his face while his lips were pressed onto each other in eager suspension?"
(Extract of Slideshow for Oporto, November 7)

Invitation to a Slideshow in Oporto

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:35:00 +0000

machine of desire for caldeira 213

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:01:00 +0000

A machine of desire dedicated to the collective project Caldeira 213 in Oporto, as part of a publication

Imaginary Snapshots meet "Wunschmaschine"

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:43:00 +0000

The slideshow about places and encounters in European "culturescape" turns into a (self-)experiment: What kind of "Wunschmaschine" (machine of desire) is needed to measure the optimal "cognitive distance" between image and memory, performer and public? How can I turn an ephemeral slideshow into the ultimate "knowledge spill-over"?

(Performed at Salonmarathon, Ballhaus Ost Berlin, on October 23, 2008)

Mountains are for Masochists

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:31:00 +0000

(Page of booklet that accompanies Alexandra Ferreira's exhibition)

Extract of my text:
No point of return. Every passage looks different when going backwards: the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end

that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale: a dimension that was not obvious, step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans. just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling. To be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still a valley a landscape. Where is the invisible border between down here and up there, between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created by animals, humans and cottages?

One summer I saw a shepherd (he told me that during winter he worked at a ski resort or as butcher in his home town in South Tyrol) jumping alongside the line of sheep that forms a white chain against the carved lines on the mountainside. He was running next to the sheep, jumping, leaving the tricky ground aside while using his stick as reliable leg. He also told me about the water places on top of the plateau, a spot the cows would find in their rhythm and way. No manipulation. Becoming-cow in learning about speed and slowness and herd: the whole system of paths and smells and triggers and hints to climb, settle, rest, move, find, drink, eat, digest and keep up a sane system of energy that would sustain also the unborn calf travelling with you.

Why monkeys do not make good pets

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:27:00 +0000

(Video Still, part of the exhibition by Mariana Viega)

Scroll down for English version...

"Landschaft ist Konstruktion. Sollte sie nicht künstlich angelegt sein (was hier natürlich der Fall ist), dann wird sie doch in unserem Blick entworfen, festgehalten und eingerahmt. Wir folgen einem sichtbaren oder unsichtbaren Horizont und halten die Reflektionsflächen, auf die das Sonnenlicht trifft, für echte Farben: den blauen See, die grauen Steine, den grünen Wald.

So zumindest wird Natur uns in der Fotografie präsentiert, die – ihrer eigenen imaginären Ideallandschaft auf der Spur – immer neue Variationen einer scheinbar ursprünglichen Umgebung produziert. Wir wissen ja, dass das Original nicht existiert, dass wir in jedem Bild, das wir aufnehmen oder betrachten, eine Vorstellung durch die nächste ersetzen und trotzdem in der Mitte eine Leerstelle zurückbleibt, die uns anzieht, uns antreibt zu weiteren Versuchen: Kopien, die ihre eigenen Irritationen und Inkommensurabeln hervorbringen. Was würde geschehen, wenn wir tatsächlich das Originalbild fänden, wenn wir uns in einer Umgebung befänden, die uns einschließt, uns umfasst und festhält? Eine Umgebung, in der wir weder Horizont noch Außen, weder Verweis noch Geschichte erkennen können, weil uns der distanzierte Blick nicht gelingen will, kurz: was würde passieren, wenn wir vor das zurückgehen könnten, was die Fotografie in unserem Blick entlarvt hat?

Säulen-Bäume öffnen die Vertikale, ohne das Blattwerk erreichen zu lassen. Schattenspender vielleicht, Finger-Stein-Einkerbungen, die ein Hochschwingen des Körpers ermöglichen, einen Sprung, ohne auf dem staubigen Boden aufzutreffen, ein Zusammenkauern hinter der trockenen, aufgerauten runden Fläche, die ein Loch in das grelle Tageslicht bohrt.

Tiergärten haben als Reste eines kolonialistischen Exotismus längst ihr Verfallsdatum erreicht, ohne dass man sie schließen könnte: die Affenhäuser wollen gefüllt werden. Endloser Kreislauf, Stillstand der Zeit.

Im ersten Moment scheint das Bild angehalten zu sein, doch dann ein verschobener Augenblick, eine schnelle Bewegung, ein Sprung gegen die Zeit…

Nur eine Katastrophe vermag die Zoomaschine zu unterbrechen: Bei einem Bombenangriff auf Sarajewo wurde ein Teil des Zauns beschädigt, so dass erschrockene Tiere durch die Stadt galoppierten, bevor es gelang, sie zu erschießen.

Nach der Bombadierung Berlins im 2. Weltkrieg warb man in allen Sektoren Arbeiter wie Freiwilligenverbände zur Beseitigung der Trümmer an. Eine der größten Trümmerdeponien lag auf dem Gebiet des 1954 neueröffneten Tierparks in Lichterfelde. Freiwillige des “Nationalen Aufbauwerks” halfen bei der Gestaltung des größten Landschaftstierpark Europas und integrierten wohl auch Teile der Ruinen Berlins, einer zerstörten Stadt, die sich jedoch bereits dem Wettstreit um das Sinnbild der modernen zweigeteilten Welt verschrieben hatte. Während das repräsentative Berlin im Osten und Westen vorausblickte, machte der Tierpark einen Doppelschritt zurück: über die Ruinen, einer romantisch verklärten Kopie hin zum imaginären Original der klassischen Antike, der sogenannten “Wiege der Kultur”.

Ein Vorausblick: Als das Bündnis griechischer Kleinstaaten nach dem Sieg über das persische Reich die regionale Vorherrschaft übernahm, verkörperte Aischylos in der ersten überlieferten Tragödie “Die Perser” den Anderen (ein erstes “becoming-other”). Aus Sicht der Besiegten schrieb er:.“Rettet alles, oder alles ist dahin”. Er wusste noch nicht, dass einige Affen später einen Sprung gegen die Zeit wagen würden…"

Oktober 2008, Bettina Wind

(Dieser Text ist für eine Ausstellung von Mariana Viegas in Berlin entstanden und Teil ihrer Installation)

Landscape is construction. If not artificially laid out (as is naturally the case here), then it is designed, retained, and framed within our gaze. We pursue a visible or invisible horizon and consider the reflective surfaces, upon which the sunlight strikes, to be true colours: a blue lake, grey stones, green forest.

This, at least, is the way nature is presented to us in photography, which – pursuing its own imaginary ideal landscape – produces ever new variations of a seemingly primordial environment. Although we realize the original we replace with an idea in every image that we record or observe does not exist, we are nonetheless still attracted by the fact that something central is still missing, driving us to further experiments: copies that produce their own irritations and moments of incommensurability. What would happen if we actually found the original image; if we found ourselves in an environment that enclosed us, enveloped us, and held us tight? What if we found ourselves in surroundings where we could make out no horizon or exterior, no reference or history, because we could not succeed in taking a distanced view? In short: what would happen if we could return to whatever existed before the view the photograph reveals to our sight?

Pillar trees open the vertical without reaching foliage. Shade providers perhaps, finger-stone indentations that allow one to swing one’ body upwards, to leap without landing on the dusty ground, to huddle behind the dry, roughened round surface that drills a hole in the glaring daylight.

As remnants of colonial exoticism, zoos have long since reached their ‘best before’ date, but no one has been able to close them: the monkey houses must be filled. An endless flow; time stands still.

In the first moment the image seems frozen, but then a moment’s hesitation, a quick movement, a leap out of time…

Only a catastrophe could interrupt the zoo machine. During a bombing raid on Sarajevo part of the fence was damaged, so that frightened animals galloped through the city until people managed to shoot them.

After the bombing of Berlin during the Second World War, workers and bands of volunteers were enlisted in all sectors to clear away the rubble. One of the largest repositories of rubble was on the grounds of the zoo in Lichterfelde, newly opened in 1954. Volunteers of the “Nationalen Aufbauwerk” (National Reconstruction Project) helped construct the largest landscaped zoo in Europe, thus also integrating parts of the ruins of Berlin, a destroyed city that itself was already devoted to the rivalry surrounding this epitome of the modern bipartite world. While representational Berlin looked forward in the East and West, the zoo took two steps backwards: across the ruins of a romantically exalted copy towards the imaginary original of classical antiquity, the so-called “cradle of culture”.

A look ahead: As the alliance of Greek city states assumed regional dominance after the victory over the Persian empire, Aeschylus, in the first surviving tragedy “The Persians”, personified the others (a first “becoming-other”). From the point of view of the vanquished he wrote: “Save everything, or all is lost”. He did not yet know that some apes would later venture a leap out of time…

October 2008, Bettina Wind
Translation by Sean Gallagher

Slideshow in Berlin, October 23

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:44:00 +0000

Upcoming performance on Oktober 23 in Ballhaus Ost Berlin, only three days to go...

That's what I am writing on right now:

Hier sind wir im Hafengebiet Antwerpens, das eigentlich nicht bewohnbar ist, wegen der chemischen Belastung. Trotzdem ist im Obergeschoss des großen Backsteinhauses Licht. Hier hat früher der Schleusenwärter gewohnt. Nun wird die Schleuse, über die im Bild eine Brücke führt, automatisch betrieben und so konnte das Haus in eine Künstlerresidency umgewandelt werden, denn Künstler sind ja mobil und dadurch temporär mit Giftstoffen belastbar. Eine Künstlerin, die im oberen Stockwerk wohnt, zeigt gerade, über welche Hindernisse sie geklettert ist, um eine gerade Linie zu beschreiben.
---
Dieses Studio gehört derselben Künstlerin, allerdings nur temporär, den sie nimmt an einem zweijährigen Programm der JanvanEyckakademie in Maastricht teil. An diesem Bild sind nicht so sehr die verstreuten Bücher auf dem Boden oder das rote Schlafsofa interessant, das den halben Raum einnimmt, als vielmehr die merkwürdigen Geräusche, die durch die rechte Seitenwand dringen. Es handelt sich, wie ich später erfahre, um Proben für einen Auftritt des Gemüseorchesters.
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Hier sieht man die vier Performer des Gemüseorchesters, mit einer angeschlossenen Kartoffel und einigen Mischpulten und Verstärkern. Auf dem langgezogenen Balkon im Hintergrund befinden sich Umkleidekabinen des ehemaligen Schwimmbads, in dem das Konzert stattfindet, die Kacheln hinter den Musikern gehören zum Schwimmbecken, die Atemwölkchen zeigen die ungefähre Temparatur des Innenraumes an einem Brüsseler Novemberabend an.

Wunschmaschinen - first adaptation

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:06:00 +0000

Wunschmaschinen - series in progress

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Voice-Over: Re-Translating Harun Farocki

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:08:00 +0000

The classical set of questions:
How much do you lose when translating a text, and how much do you win?
How much does a voice and its intonation change when another person speaks in another language?
How can you imagine an author if you are only able to hear his or her double?
How can he or she speak for him/herself if actually it is you speaking for them?

Translation as Voice-Over: Harun Farocki uses his own voice to speak “over” images; his critical analysis adds layers of contextual information to the selected images and movements, covers their edge with sub- and meta-titles. Or, putting it the other way around (not as addition, but as subtraction): “The uncovering of images from the many layers of their encoding”, says the translator, “Die Bilder von den Ablagerungen ihrer Kodierung zu befreien”, say the editors of Harun Farocki’s texts, “To liberate the images from sediments of their encoding”, say I, maybe not in correct English, but in admiration of the image the editors have chosen to describe Harun Farocki’s “archaeolo-analytical” device.

“Re-Translating Harun Farocki” is a simple operation (I will re-translate the English translation of some of his texts into German) but has rather complex implications: Farocki synchronizes moving images with his line of thought, rewinds them, holds them, comments them, synchronizes his voice with the movement of the images. “Winding back and forth” (“beim Hinundherfahren”) a third element emerges out of text/voice and image/movement. Edited in a book, the texts still hold a certain performative quality of synchronization; their translator needs to move “back and forth”, using his or her own voice to perceive the presence inherent in the printed words, like in a drama. But again: the imagination of images that move(d) along with these words is still present, like a visual echo that provoked itself a voice (the performative quality of Echo’s words, forcing Narcissus to react and to set into motion another series of echos…).

How to translate a visual echo that lingers in your memory in disguise?
If the way we remember images differs so much from how we saw them from how they are recorded from how they were revisited, then a translation (that loses of what is thought of what is written down of what is remembered) can only win if marking this embodied difference, this mental subtraction Deleuze praised as “minotarian memory”.

Let’s start with what an editing room is (“Was ein Schneideraum ist”, Harun Farocki, 1980).

Constructions of Home

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:54:00 +0000

Extract of a text written for "O Fascinio de Ulisses", Galeria Luís Serpa, Lisbon

(...)

First site: Praça Onze, Rio de Janeiro, around 1915. Entering Tia Ciata’s house in the evening, you might get immediately stuck in the ballroom, where musicians, politicians, neighbours and visionaries meet and listen to improvised songs. If you follow the long dark corridor, you will reach the kitchen, dinner hall, pantry, heart of conversations, rumours and specialities from Bahia. But wait: there is still the garden in the backyard, a fertile ground for jamming and dancing, for Samba and Candomblé, its ritual objects hidden in a small wooden shed in the very last corner of the territory .. The front side and back side, the entrance hall and garden lot – they belong to the same festivity, yet different events. Not that these aspects of concert, conversation, dance, dinner and ritual could be separated completely. Visitors might mix them up, if they knew how to read the house. Its architectural body serves more as a kind of bond for moving centres and rhythmic sound. Permissive membranes between different territories fold one into the other: the representative, the cultural, the ritual, the convivial, the excessive… Though none of them is directly attached to the house itself, they can only come into being (can only be territorialized) in the intense gatherings, the crowded corridor, the hidden garden.
House (1): construction site for a temporary present home based on a collective act and attitude.
House (2): architectural body transformed by certain rhythms and circles of sound.

Second site: Rue Fleurus, Paris, around the same time. First, some friends came to dinner at Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’s apartment. They looked at paintings by Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, they looked at walls covered with frames and messages and they brought more friends who brought more friends who drank a lot of tea and listened to Gertrude and Alice. A Saturday evening tea party, an intellectual jam session divided in two: (gay) men and (unmarried) women around Gertrude, (married) women around Alice.
“Her apartment was the most fascinating place in all Paris because everybody went there” said Janet Flanner , she was also from the Left Bank and she went there and Picasso and Fernande, they all went there and Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney and Pavel Tchelitchew and Allan Tanner and all the other writers and composers and painters and undiscovered talents who went there - their motive: the paintings; their real motive: the presence of thoughts evoked and articulated by its majestic centre Gertrude Stein, marked and objectified by the framed painting in all their abundance. If Gertrude and Alice gave the motive, the internal impulse, then the walls built the melodic landscape, the external circumstances, the counterpoint that attracts the listener even before the leading (and often laughing) voice can be heard.
Home (1): marking of inside and outside, intimately strange in the presence of thoughts.
Home (2): a counterpoint/melodic landscape that gives impulse to motives, attracts and turns one territorial assemblage into another.

Last Site: West 21st Street, New York, around seventy years later. A crowded ballroom with an improvised stage in the centre. The house of Extravaganza walks . To perform the real woman, the real soldier, the real beauty, the real drag. To belong to a “house” means to get a new name, a new mother, a new gang that walks with you in the streets half dancing, half cheating, half vogueing. Your house is a performance, an expression of proper qualities, of colours, gestures, steps that might cause you trouble in the straight white world but bring fame in the ballroom, the only home zone left after you leave your first family as teenager. “How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to draw an inflatable, portable territory. If need be, I’ll put my territory on my own body, I’ll territorialise myself”
House (3): a physical and mental performance of lived belonging
Home (3): a transcoding passage between different milieus, a deterritorialisation of your body by putting your territory on your body

And now? The sites might have had the potential to create a territory (by singing, thinking, vogueing), a home beyond individual landmarks. But how can we set up another route of deterritorialisation if we try it again on our own? We need one for the road, a refrain to be hummed (we don’t need another hero). Some cover version or fake translation, that’s what we need right now.

Bettina Wind, March 2008
(Written in the train from Vienna to Berlin, the Swiss café, at home in Berlin)

On Mountains

noreply@blogger.com (Bettina Wind) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:45:00 +0000

Twelve steps cuts, images, imaginations, carving out the rhizomes that are inherent in the mountains’ structure to reach a rhizome of the female techno body and the scattered surface of the rock, zigzagging through it, jumping, letting fall, using the sticks and bricks and metal picks like teeth and finger nails, using teeth and nails and fingers to dig into holes, to feel the bodies weight against the rock’s sediments, will they hold, will they turn into body mass or will they crush the body into stone mass? It is a question of speed and slowness, just the right ingredients for a becoming, a becoming stone goat bird machine, the endorphin danger fear oxygen drug exhilarating the speed till it becomes part of another sphere just like performing a musical piece without controlling the fingers’ movements anymore performing the whole act of climbing a performance that cannot be taken back no return point every passage looks different when going backwards the impossibility to take back going backwards in the mountains the dead end that makes you lean back against the mountain and feel about death when you look at the scale a dimension that was not obvious step by step breath by breath only focussing the stones and path and little area of attention incapable to perceive the whole, the ensemble without you without humans just two meters too high enough to break down into the ice when falling to be caught in the inside of a glacier a rock a river to be cut off what is still counted as valley as landscape as humanised. Where is the invisible border between up there and among others between the mountains on their own and the assemblage created with animals, humans, cottages?

(Extract from a text on recent works of Alexandra Ferreira)