Monument (to the Wild Imagination)
2014

The work searches for escape routes, exits, modes of creative address and engagement with the politics of creativity in today’s urban environment. This includes questioning how artists perform as part of the creative city, contributing to Berlin’s cultural image and social life, as well as processes of gentrification, precarious living, and the “westernization” of the former east.

The project is developed through a series of movement labs enacted in public by a group of four artists and that seek to embody the pressures placed upon the contemporary creative body. Strategies of appropriation, stillness, hesitation, mutuality and festivity are explored as means for locating a critical position to the instrumentalization of creative expression. Additionally, the actions are video-recorded and edited into an audio-visual work played back onto the city in the form of guerilla projections. Taking place over the course of a four-day period, the projections travel the city at night to interrupt particular sites with a phantasmic image – a body that appears and disappears.

Monument (to the Wild Imagination) is a meditation on the tensions between creative autonomy and arrest, production and proliferation. It is an ephemeral monument carried through the expressions of a creative body, amplifying and negotiating the project of the creative capital.

Curated by Berit Fischer. Developed for Part of the Game, NGBK, Berlin. In collaboration with Janine Eisenächer, Hana Lee Erdman, Omar Nicolas, Steffi Weismann. Thanks to Discoteca Flaming Star.

September 4 – 7th, 2014: nightly projections occurring throughout the city.
September 6th, 2014 – 7pm: artist talk and performance at Rotes Rathaus, Louise Schroeder Saal, 3rd floor. Plus a lecture by Janet Merkel on the creative city.