[photo credits: Martin Maleschka, Dina Boswank, Markus Tauber]
Thanks to - Miodrag Kuc (project is commissioned by ZK/U Berlin), Martin Maleschka (project initiator of „Auf den Platz fertig los!“), Museum Utopia and the Everyday (plus Forum Kulturerbe der DDR e.V. and Kulturland Brandenburg gGmbH), Björn Wojtschewski (DRK Brandenburg, EAE - Refugee Reception Facility Eisenhüttenstadt), Miroslawa Lugowska-Schiemann and Anna Krischker with guests and refugees (creativity group, EAE - Refugee Reception Facility Eisenhüttenstadt), Pia Torwirth (project assistant „Auf den Platz fertig los!“), Theater Group TheEi e.V., Markus Tauber, all illustrators...
photo credits: Martin Maleschka, Dina Boswank, Markus Tauber]
sound works at Radio Aporee -
Kracht Picnic I – How long do you listen to a rocket? – 17:49 min
Kracht Picnic II – Could you write this for me? - 14:50 min
Kracht Picnic III – How come this is a pattern, or else? - 7:23 min
direct link:
https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=newkrachtpicnics
Alltogether we met four times. Every time with different people and constellations. At every „Picnic“, as I, the inviting artist called it, sound recordings were made. The technical setting so far was always the same: a 4-channel-recording with a Zoom H4n and a pair of OKM (binaural mics) loosely being placed admidst the setting.
In English I did call it „New Kracht Picnics“. Auf Deutsch nannten wir es einfach Picnic(k). A picnic, with pictures, with blankets, cakes, music and sound recordings. With many, many questions towards... – actually though in confrontation with the art work by artist Friedrich Kracht with the title “The development of human society” created in 1965 at the wall of a school named after Juri Gagarin and funded through a public commission within the state of GDR.
Conceptually the idea was to initiate a shared brainstorming with personal questions about the perseverance and delay of concrete symbols (rockets, doves, hammers, whips, clouds, prehistoric items, types) and design processes (ceramic tiles and raku firing) within the fields of Public Arts.
It is a new picnic, because the place is becoming a „lost place”, a space with educational and political inscriptions, which in its whole fell into oblivion. The newness contradicts the obvious experience of a ruin. Maybe, because the Arts otherwise rarely are a theme of open discussions, - I was asked. Mainly for pupils today or in former times?
[drawings made by participants]
„‚Were above all not signs, that stood for something else?‘ This semiotic purism is in no way inferior to Donald Judd‘s ‚A shape, a color, a surface is something in itself.‘“
The quote is taken out of a text, that was written by the artist Olaf Nicolai for the catalog “Systems in the Arts” about the works of another artist, namely Karl-Heinz Adler, representative for “concrete art”, which as a form of expression was refused and rejected in GDR.
Friedrich Kracht und Karl-Heinz Adler had been friends and worked together as artists within the unique production cooperative “Kunst am Bau”, that would best translate to “Art in Architecture”. It was registered in 1958 in Dresden and stayed at that location until the 1990s. The work, that evolved within the group mainly consisted of experimentation within the field of form(ed) stone systems related to construction, for which a number of patterns for pouring casted concrete were very much borrowed from the drawings of “Concrete/konkreter Art/Kunst”. This way of commonly working together as artists also very much solved the problem of too obviously being accessible through subjective authorship, that could easily be a problem within a totalitarian state and, therefore, one could argue, put a main aspect of political art at place.
[drawings made by participants]
The audio recordings being made during the picnics were assembled into three audio works, which are in terms of space pretty much focused onto the “Platz der Jugend” in Eisenhütttenstadt. They blend in the real-time conversations in the respective languages (English, Russian, Ukraine, German, Afrikaans) with the surrounding ambiance of the architectural setting.
As Eisenhüttenstadt isn’t as easy to reach, the audio pieces are available through the web-based audio project “Radio Aporee”, which means, that you can listen to it via the links below, basically from any place of the world, as well as while being on spot in Eisenhüttenstadt, simply through your GPS-location tracked on your mobile phone.
Sound works:
Kracht Picnic I –
How long do you listen to a rocket? – 17:49 min
Kracht Picnic II –
Could you write this for me? - 14:50 min
Kracht Picnic III –
How come this is a pattern, or else? - 7:23 min
direct link:
https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=newkrachtpicnics
[screenshot: the project on www.aporee.org]
[screenshots of the Social Media presence via the local Museum Utopie und Alltag: through those additional announcement some groups of parents and their children joinded for drawing sessions with stories about their daily visits to that now abandoned school.]