My Business Card

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.

Mountains are for Masochists

(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

(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

Constructions of Home

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

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)

a little act of sabotage

When I lined up the little acts of sabotage I had committed during the last year, it soon got clear that they had been quite a failure: they had never attacked the heart of a project I had been invited to but then felt the urge to criticize. Instead, my little acts of sabotage appear as post scriptum, as last remark that goes against the grain, a gesture of final relief from a system or a rule I could not entirely identify with but got money from.
Did my acts have a destabilizing effect? And on whom: the system or myself? Will I continue this year without committing little acts of sabotage, and does this mean that I won’t earn money with projects I don’t agree with? Am I going to found a movement in order to perform collectively big acts of sabotage in a system or will we stay away from it anyway? And will you join us?

Sculpture under working conditions

A pistol of grey marble is lying on a wooden pallet that composes a rough, yet symmetrical background. A clear image, it seems at the first glance: Figure on Background. But as soon as we regard how the material has been used, a paradoxical twist starts to turn the image around: How to connect the heavy weight of the pistol’s material with its (imaginary) use? How to understand the rough materiality with the clean surface in mind that constitutes sublime sculptures of marble? How to decipher the hidden narrative every pistol is pointing to – a trace of the deed – when the traces of work on the pistol itself remain so dominant?

Maybe a look on the second photo can lead us further:
We see the pistol with books, the classical arrangement of a romantic writer’s desk. This time, the background tells more about the setting: a working place of sculptors, a blurred image of other works and pallets that are used to carry stones and sculptures. The photo focuses on the works but does not leave the working frame, the working chain apart. Read from that background the arrangement of book and pistol tells about a transformation: the material that still carries the traces of its process of making is taken out of its frame, is transformed into a small narrative, a metaphoric scenery that does not longer belong to the space of work, but the sphere of art. Just as a writer might have left his notes and lines inside the books, the sculptor has left traces on the hard but smooth looking surface carved of the books; an own texture, an own style realized on a writer’s book, the old symbol for creative expression. The objects still show traces of the industrial act of machines carving the stone, but also of the intimate choreography, the movement of hands forming the stones by holding the machine like a pencil. The sculptor as writer, the writer as worker. In that sense, the sculptures can be read as a double portrait of their maker, exposing their hard materiality that needs to be worked on and the soft line of thought immerging in the act of transformation.

Let’s come back to the pistol: By exposing its materiality in a clear, yet paradoxical way, the pistol lying on a pallet questions its own classical, yet hidden discourse of stone and crime. By being part of the work arrangement pistol and books leave their classical frame and get closer to the sculptor herself, charmingly, ironically pointing out how sculpture is made “under working conditions”.

Let’s see what image will follow next.

(Text about sculptures and photos made by Alexandra Ferreira)