MY WALL ARCHIVE

www.w-a-n-d.blogspot.com




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Nobody has the intention to build a wall

Performance, 40min., Apern Seestadt, Vienna













































































While some are falling for centuries, others are pulled back again: the wall as an architectural construction is part of the history of the city. Its social and political importance is still current. Although the wall has a protective function, it is the expression of power and discrimination and triggers of anxiety and hostility. 

In Aspern Seestadt, one of the largest urban development projects in Europe, VERSUS is dealing with this topic in a performative way by using a wooden cube, which is provided by the festival „in:visible city“.
A cube is a geometric figure defined by eight points. The compounds of the points result into lines and surfaces, which define the exterior and the interior of the body. In Nobody has the intention to build a wall the cube is beeing deconstructed and choped into little pieces unless only a pile of wooden sticks remains, which referes on the deconstruction and the utopia of a city that is not determined by separation and exclusion.
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A-W





collages, pencil on paper, 420x297mm, 2011




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Bergwelten

wood, varnish, coloured light, 2011















The starting point of Bergwelten is the rock wall as a simulation of mountain. A rock wall is an object composed of colourful, geometric modules covered with bright plastic handles one can climb on. While the wall intends absolute functionality, its shape is not created by mimetic impulses. Nature is transformed to pure utilitarian architecture and turns into commodity.
Bergwelten responds to this commodity fetish by being pictured after the same reproduction criterias like its model. The result is an object that reminds of a minimal art sculpture: A rectangular white box, made ​​from industrially manufactured materials, which is illuminated by two coloured neon lights.


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reflecting against identity II

20 drawings, pencil on paper, 14,8 x 21cm, 2011



 










The series of drawings initiate from a still in the video work reflecting against identity. By etching, erasing and addition of lines, the implied 
formal relationships within the drawing change while elements of the original structure are always maintained.
reflecting against identity II is an attempt to transform the architecture of the Flak Tower, to use alienation and abstraction, through drawing, 

to affect a change in meaning.

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reflecting against identity

video, HD, 10min., 16:9, colour, sound: dominik traun, 2011


„Day and night the Sewer flows underground, hidden under the second city. But day and night in Vienna are only apparently separated from each other via some opaque system, they continuously pass over each other and into each other, bring each to disappear, like the `normal and pathological designated states of mind ‚, as says Freud.“ (Gerhard Roth, Archive des Schweigens) 

Vienna is a tourist city of magnificent landmarks, but strolling through the town one comes to places that do not conform to the familiar City. Places, which seem repulsive and terrible, about which one would like to know more, yet are left un-commented. They remain, deprived of their history and pushed into a schizophrenic landscape, a mixture of cultural tradition, vernacular and amnesiac lust.
The flak towers (machine gun air defences), built after the annexation of the city by the Nazis, are six colossal concrete towers situated in central Vienna. They are firmly anchored in the city and have become familiar buildings, yet as relics of the war they seem to incur no reasonable discussion. 

The video installation reflecting against identity deals with the current circumstance of one anti-aircraft tower in particular, now an aquarium, as a place of repression through the denial of its history and the circumstances which brought about its construction.  Looking at how the fear of this past contributes towards collective repression and thus promotes a displacement, the impotence of the attempt to deny responsibility and futility of evacuating blame. Will this memory die? Will we be guilt free in the future? Debt free? How will the flak towers be seen if memory is forgotten? 


The film is an architectural portrait that reflects this schizophrenic situation, the persistent of history and the futility of attempting to make invisible an object whose historical significance is obvious and unavoidable. Capturing traces of the architecture and exploring where its history and spirit intrude into the present, I attempt to deconstruct the tower, an action both costly and difficult is possible in film.


Thanks to: Valentina Cancelli, Markus Hafner, Gerhard Rauscher, Dr. Marcello La Speranza, Felix Schörschek


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conquest of the garden

video, HD, 12min, 16:9, colour, stereo, sound: dominik traun, 2010
„Utopia, represents an ideal of the good, to contrast with the evils and ills of existing societies. The idea of utopia suggests a refuge from the troubles of this world as well as a hope for a better one.“ (Moss-Kanter 1972)

Conquest of the Garden is a video looking at the luxury residential complex Sobhan situated in the north of Tehran, Iran. It is characterized by its isolation from non-residents, physical barriers to prevent strangers from entering the settlement and a private infrastructure. At the end of the 80s the American sociologist Evan McKenzie coined the term Privatopia, which describes the longing for the American Dream in closed housing developments, through the privatization of public space and public life. In relation to Iran this is particularly applicable yet takes on quite a different relationship to the prevailing norms. As a result of the current political regime the lives of most Iranians is withdrawn geographically: The house represents a place of refuge, the closed housing estate a fortress.

Conquest of the Garden reflects the ambiguities of the closed housing estate. The video entangles general documentation and poetics of architecture with a network that refers to the specific location and its control schemes in relation to those outside the walls of the community. The norms inside and outside and their evident impact on behaviour. A space is created, composed of the juxtaposition and contradictions speaking of a denial approaching insanity in the urban condition. The idyllic image is thus increasingly paralyzed and the idea of a utopian, separate living space that can be split off from its growing relationships to the wider condition brought into question.
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heidiland II

collaboration with Matthew Lenkiewicz
video installation, wood, spray-on snow, HD video, 12min, 16:9, colour, stereo, sound: haarmann, moritz ecker, 2010

Heidiland II deals with the construction or reconstruction of space. Originally rooted in a distinct context but are implemented in a new one. The removal of context transforms the place to a room without history or culture, wrapped in a veil of absurdity.
The reconstruction of spaces is a phenomenon that is observed in many places in society. In the form of the preservation of historic architecture or in the mimetic way of life of many migrants who, in their new environment, try to recreate their usual environs ("Heimat"), or indeed in the infant recreation of adult themes and the adult recreation of existing of adult themes.The video work is set in and around the ski hall in Oberhof, Thüringen, a town known in Germany as winter sports centre. Since attached to the railway in the 1800s the town has steadily grown as a popular winter sports and leisure destination, seeing a boom in the GDR times, when the town was systematically developed into a leisure and sports centre. 
Now, the town’s economy is based solely on the winter tourism.In recent years however changing climate conditions give Oberhof ever decreasing snowy days a year, and increasingly artificial snow production or imported snow is needed to sustain the life of the town. As the environment, on which the culture and the economy is based, itself begins to migrate and, in September last year, faced with an economic and cultural excess, a refrigerated hall was built, specifically designed for cross country skiing. 
Ski domes, for me, reflect on the reconstruction of places: a closed hall with indoor ski slope, the floor is covered with snow. They are built where there is either no longer or has never been any opportunity to ski geographically, while their designs are based on certain abstract ideals.
Heidiland II is an attempt at a re-staging of the ski centre. It is no longer an architecture of function, but rather it questions the nature of the object, of place and of its mimic. In how far is such a space only image of a reality and how much does this make up the reality in which we find ourselves today? What effect does this architecture have on society, towns and entire landscapes?

Installation view, gallery loge, Essen, 2010
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look at me

collaboration with Yassu Yabara
installation, paper, spray paint, paste, July 2009, Berlin 


How much do we know about us? What significance has history and what do we learn from it? How sustainable is information and how much information has survived into the present? Look at me deals with these questions, and functions as a dynamic installation in the black cube at the Rosa Luxemburg Platz. For four weeks the cube, which is a massive construction of concrete, scaffolding, roof slats and a black truck tarpaulin, works as an Open Space Forum for any kind of performance, which deals with the Antike. It can convert into a stage, a university, a club, a film studio and it is not at least a public space. Regular seminars, performances, boxing matches and readings are taking place. Thus, the cube lifts dramatically from the next door standing very established theatre Volksbühne, and creates a democratical platform, for a wide public to exchange, mark and pull away.

Look at me likes the vivid, rich spirit of the cube, which is reminiscent of an Agora. The installation wants to archive the atmosphere and to make it visible for those who popped in later. Leaning on Hans Haacke's memorial at the Rosa Luxemburg Platz, we make a similar intervention, in which we try to capture and visualze the history of the place.
Every action / performance is reduced on a quote, which is „immortalized“ on white paper stripes, which are pasted on the floor directly after the action. Thus, the area with increasing time and increasing number of events will be more and more white. The present is perhaps taken completely by history. But at the same time the memorial, due to its sensitive materiality, won´t last forever. So after a time only a faint trace of a memory will be left.
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schnittstelle

installation, bags and boxes in an empty shop, Essen 2007




A cultural diversity divides the Viehoferplatz, in the downtown of Essen into fragments: Afroshop, Italo wholesaler, unemployment bicycle repair workshop, Asia Center, tattoo studio, Heinrich Heine bookshop and much more. The impression of introverted, small worlds come up when one observe the gray urban landscape in the north of Essen from the distance. This is reviewed as soon as man penetrates into it: 

the apparent limits or boundaries are transformed into surprising openness; the initial restraint into interest.

In Schnittstelle installed walls, divide the room and pretend to threat and restrict the visitor in his physical freedom. However, the viewer realizes that the boundaries dont fulfill the criterias of any apparent border. Transparency, lightness and the shape of the high walls make them look open, fragile and even guide the spectator to walk in.
The work is shown in an empty shop at Viehoferplatz. The idea of the installation is inspired by interviews I made with the shop holders of that area, and consists exclusively material collected from the stores.

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heidiland I


video installation, plastic, wood, video, mini-DV, 2009

Heidiland I deals with the construction or reconstruction of rooms. Spaces which are originally rooted in a different context but are implemented in a new environment. The installation consists of a sculpture and a video work, which depict the alpine ski center in the Ruhr. The Alpin Center in Bottrop Kirchhellen was opened in September 2001 and is a refrigerated, indoor slope, containing artificially produced snow. When built this was the longest artificial ski slope in the world at 640 meters long and 30 meters wide, bringing year round winter sports, snowboarding and skiing to the Ruhr.
The work attempts to re-stage the Alpine Center in a foreign context. The architecture no longer has any pretence of function but tries to presents itself as an abstracted, symbolic form. To what extent does such a space represent an idealised image and to what extent does the world around us attempt to mimic such an image of reality? 

Instalation view, the fridge gallery, Sofia / Bulgaria, 2009
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