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Abstract
Tours - Berlin 1997
It
would be better to disclose the confinement
rather than make illusions of freedom |
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For a month, I operated a ‘tour agency’ from a Portakabin
placed in Schlossplatz, next to the Stadtforum, where projects
for the corporate reshaping of the German capital were exhibited
to the public.
These tours took their form from random geometric figures
that participants were invited to draw on a map of Berlin
with the help of Perspex stencils. Those embarking on a tour
tried to “stick to the line” as far as possible,
which often entailed jumping over fences, trespassing, climbing
over walls, crossing railway lines etc.
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The gesture of drawing a geometrical pattern on the map mimicked
the conceptual abstractions that inform the configuration of
spatial practices, such as architecture and city planning, the
design of routes, the schematic grid of property lines and ultimately,
the construction of the Berlin Wall.
Gordon Matta-Clark's work can be regarded as the closest reference
for Abstract Tours - his cuts through buildings revealed the
constructional imposition, one could actually penetrate the
facades and read general schematic structures. My project evolved
around the question of whether it was possible to socialize
that practice by inviting people to cut through their city and
read how physical and spatial contexts, socially-constructed
boundaries, and architectural representations intervene in processes
of production and reproduction.
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By following the lines traced on paper, rather than realizing
them on the ground with a wrecking ball and reinforced concrete,
abstract tourism aimed to expose the code, rather than imitate
it, an inverse, rather than a symmetrical practice.
The closing exhibition, held in the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien,
included all participants who had documented their urban explorations
by taking photographs, making videos, audio-recordings, collecting
found objects, keeping journals etc. The polyphony of voices
and redistribution of representational authority raised both
political and epistemological questions about ‘who’
is authorized to “represent the city”.
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'The chorus of idle steps’ fragmented totalizing representations
of the city, and opened up a plurality of perspectives, which
in turn produced provisional, transient, partial perceptions
and representations. Once these representations were assembled,
the spaces of the city were incorporated into something closer
to a fictional narrative than an objective record.
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