Making Mirrors

The art education workshop for Making Mirrors, run by Branka Pavlovic (AG Metanationale) along with Nezaket Ekici (performance artist) and Catriona Shaw (Kombiticket program), came to an end this weekend. In total there were 9 participants made short films following an empowerment workshop at the NGBK that dealt with the main topics of the exhibition. Photos will be posted here soon!

Another World in Sound and Light

At the beginning of June a workshop called 'Another World in Sound and Light' ran parallel to the exhibition 'Other Possible Worlds - Proposals on this Side of Utopia'. The workshop participants worked together in a group over two days to develop a soundtrack and animation depicting 'another possible world' stemming from their observations of the exhibition and answering the following questions:

What would I change (about my current world)?
What would I keep?
What do I desire?
How do I acheive it?
Would another world be good for everybody or only me?
What is my utopia?
What is my dystopia?
What role would the 'future' play in my other world?
What role would the 'past' play?
How would it sound?
How would it look?
How long would it last?

In the activity lab, which was a caravan-tent attached to the outside of the NGBK in the yard, we worked during the days (Whitsun holidays) and created a 6-minute experimental soundtrack using a combination of  found sounds, sampled sounds from the exhibition, voice and instrumentation. The following day we worked with Andreas Dzialocha from Tagtool on a live animation to accompany the soundtrack. This was filmed and is in the process of being edited - to be seen here soon!

Another World in Sound and Light

Today the first phase of the outreach workshop for the exhibition 'Other Possible Worlds' starts. The workshop will run over 2 days (1st and 2nd of June) and include sound production as well as tagtooling! Workshop places are now full but if you want to come by and check out what kind of other worlds are being produced, please do! We will be in the lab-tent in the back yard of the NGBK, also reachable via the exhibition!

Clubroom Phase#3 at Trajector Art Fair, Brussels

I headed for Brussels on the 29th April to work on the third and more contemplative phase of clubroom, along with Berlin based German/Costa-Rican archtitect Christian Sommer.
I wanted to bring a more professional, archtectural perspective into the project at this juncture, mainly in order to reflect upon what other facets are open to the project - perhaps the clubroom would not be as hard to imagine in a model form. Therefore I asked Christian to create two models of the clubroom, based on the layout and results of the NGBK version back in January 2011.

The first model depicts the section of the NGBK where 'clubroom' phase # 1 occurred and had a comprehensive, numbered inventory of all the elements and suggestions for the room placed exactly where they had been in January. The second model came about through conversations we had in Berlin about how the room could be 'imagined' further according to the written suggestions:

This model was more colourful and contained a selection of images and pictorial interpretations/selections for the room elements. We decided to display these models at the fair as depictive examples, as well as some documentary photos and original phase#1 elements and written suggestions.

We stayed in the room for the entire 2 days of the fair, talking to visitors about the project, asking them to participate and give us more suggestions/opinions. The fair was held in a hotel in the northern part of Brussels, a rather poor part of the city, and we were in one half of a conference room - the room had certain restrictions so we had to work intuitively most of the time and try our best. Some spontaneous workshops arose, such as creating faces for the housing block across the yard that we could see from the window.

And we even had a workshop on how to 'draw the Internet' which resulted in this large drawing on the back wall:

Someone from the radio interviewed us about the fair, the NGBK and our contribution...

we created some new inflatibiles - for example, a boot for dancing in

and even characters and movements for the 'tanzfläche'!

On the last day we packed everything back into our large suitcase and headed home for Berlin

Kid Congo Powers in the Reading Room - photos

On Monday evening the reading room was amass with guests wanting to listen to the wonderful and humorous 'road' tales of the marvellous Kid Congo Powers, which included fabulous anecdotes of tours, drive-in movie theatres and an especially memorable one about Jeffrey Lee Pierce's reaction to Stevie Nick's legs protruding from a car... RATS!

Kid was accompanied by Berlin-based musician Fred Bigot and the audience went on to enjoy a 45-minute exclusive story-telling session against the ever-moving backdrop of Snoring in the USA, the sound and video installation by Kristina Leko and David Smithson currently on show at the NGBK until April 13th 2011.

Michiel Brand kindly made video documentation of the event which can be viewed on his Vimeo site.

Here is a selection of photographs from the event:

Report about Eva Khachatryan, NGBK and Kombiticket in Deutsche Welle!

This article is in German

Kid Congo Powers in the Reading Room, Monday 28th March 2011