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

Putting up Poetic Puzzles while sweepin the Streets with Joy

Gaby Bila Günther's creative writing and spoken word performance workshop went very well the last couple of days. 6 very concentrated participants joined in over the 3 hours per day sitting in the reading room.

Amy went out on the street with Gaby and put her poems up on the wall

whilst other participants practiced performing their pieces in the space against the backdrop of snoring sounds

Kombicar, Sunday 20th March

Sunday was a stunningly beautiful day, really indicated the start of Spring. And of course the perfect day for a run in the Kombicar. Along with the artists David Smithson and Kristina Leko, Katja Jedermann from the AG Ausstellungsübernahme as a kind of Berliner ExpertIn and myself as chauffeur, a total of 20 inquisitive guests waited at their designated posts to take a ride in the car. David and Kristina had devised a kind of reenactment of their work on show at the NGBK and new passengers were handed a script on entry into the vehicle.

 David greeted guests with a script

 each guest was allocated a part in the script

whilst another one was handed a camera by Kristina to film the proceedings

Needless to say, the dulcet sounds of SNORING were also to be heard, this time coming from the car radio itself! Each stretch would pass by a relic of American occupancy in the city - we went past the obvious ones including Tempelhof Airport, Checkpoint Charlie and Haus der Kulturen der Welt but also past a few anomalies such as a drive in Burger King in Charlottenburg that 'occupies' an important piece of 1960s architecture and the Amerikahaus which during its inception was intended as an information centre about the USA but quickly became a hub for demos in the late 60s.

On returning to the NGBK, David and Kristina gave an hour long artists's talk, explaining the premise behind the work, discussing the activities in the car, and talking about finding out who snores the loudest, amongst other things.