Poster Projekt, Part 1 Zagreb
22. September 2011 — Open End
22. September 2011 at 6 pm
Savska 25
10000 Zagreb
Preradovićeva 18
10000 Zagreb
The poster work "All das Wissen dieser Welt" shows the spine of a book. This book was a gift I received during our trip to Zagreb.
I was sitting on a train when another passenger suggested to me that my glasses were crooked.
I thought, what if the entire planet and everything on it was crooked and the only thing that was straight were my glasses?
Modernist photographer Tošo Dabac’s precise and clear images of Croatians in folkloristic costume exposes the circumstances of industrial production of folk costumes, epitomizing the concurrent and colliding forces of modernity, industrialization, and modernism in twentieth century Croatia.
Taking a picture, printing it and hang- ing it somewhere is a disarrangement of the visual world. In this work the above gets arranged vertically in between the horizontal street view. That makes me happy.
Walking is feeling the contours of the street with our feet. Some sensations during the walking experience can be more intense than others, manipu- lated states of proprioception make us aware of the otherwise unperceived differences.
When walking, the words on the walls are a sidewalk for your eyes’ feet. But some of the words suck, like advertis- ing words. What word waste. What doesn’t suck is how reading any of the walled words wind when walking, even the sucky ones, which makes your eyes wave crest trough.
Call is a conceptual work based on focussing attention to a specific moment via a phonecall.
At the time when the walk talkes place there will be a phonecall made by the artist: “Remember this is one of the most beautiful moments in your life.”
Fly gate is the aim to fullfil an artistic utopia and a long term personal dream. Its goal is that no fly should be killed anymore through the intentional will of human kind.
Asking seven shop assistants to sell me something beautiful.
A selection of individual perspectives looking at the world, are collected to form a map of the discoveries.
Special thanks to the following institutions and people for taking the time to talk and visit during the excursion that took place 6. — 10. September 2009: Branko Franceschi and the HDLU Croatian Association of Artists; Nicole Hewitt; Karla Pudar & SC Gallery, Snježana Pintarić, Leila Topić, Bruno Bahunek, Jasna Jakšić & Museum of Contemporary Art; Marina Benažić & Tošo Dabac Archive, Vesna Meštrić & Richter Collection; Darko Fritz; Tomislav Medak & Multimedijalni Institut, MAMA Club; Antonija Majača, Ivana Bago & Miroslav Kraljević Gallery; The Art Pavilion; Olga Majcen, Sunčica Ostojić & KONTEJNER / bureau of contemporary art praxis; Damir Očko, Silvio Vujičić, Lala Rasćić, Nika Radić, Andreja Kulunčić; Marko Sančanin, & Platforma 981; Vanja Žanko & Filip Trade Collection of Contemporary Art.
Thanks to Petra Vidović and Patricia Woltmann. Special thanks to Ivana Franke for her initial invitation to Zagreb and for giving life to the project and helping it to grow up. Final thanks to Olafur Eliasson for making all this possible.
Organisation: Institut für Raumexperimente (Eric Ellingsen, Sophia Pompéry and Christina Werner) in collaboration with Culture of Change, SC Gallery (Karla Pudar) and Multimedijalni Institut, MAMA (Peter Milat)
Poster Project Editors: Eric Ellingsen, Christina Werner, Ivana Franke. Design of original posters: Projektgruppe UdK Verlag (Julian von Klier, Massen Khattab)
Design: BASICS09
The Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) is an educational research project by Prof. Olafur Eliasson, affiliated to the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and supported by the Senate for Education, Science and Research in Berlin.
Ideas Are Motion: The Poster as an Experiment in Travel is prismatically structured to reflect the making of a class excursion (a road trip), within the making of an individual art project, within the making of a collective class project, within the feeling of a place, within an exhibition in that place. These trips range from urban cultural excursions in megacities like Tokyo, to three day walks in the wilderness of Iceland. Ideas are made in motion. The road trip turns into a round trip. Finished projects are projected back into the world. Having the experience comes with the responsibility of producing something from that experience that could add a different wobble to the world.
Ideas Are Motion takes place in:
(1) Zagreb, Croatia (2) Japan (3) Iceland
Informed by the particular artistic trajectory of each participant, the first half of the experiment involves asking each participant to design an individual project while visiting a place. The second part of the experiment formalizes the project around a similar format, a poster, into which that project is to be reflected. The parameters is that the content of the individual projects should be informed by the particular structure, qualities, and experience of movement, space, and time particular to each place.
Each poster is as different as each participant. Some posters are sketches of ideas, some finished statements, others dreams, or personal distortions. They are autonomous projects soon to be realized, parts realized in other places, and pitches for projects to come. In a real way, each poster is a still from a moving stream. That stream has streams.
Every place is a mangle of spatial relationships involving motions and emotions of scale, speed, perception, attention span, directionality, and distance. Posters are vehicles of urban communication which materialize these spatial relationships. Posters mobilize populations of perception. We behave differently because of the promiscuity of these kinds of signs in public space. We slow down, think about, read, reflect on, change plans. Urban signs are coordinated around the rhythms of our movement but they also help to coordinate that movement.
Spatially, posters involve a precise set of relationships between the material conditions of the poster (size of poster and surroundings), the curated placement of content on the poster (font sizes, color volume), the curated placement of the poster into public spaces (lines of sight, eye height, walls, walkways, where cars stop by street lights), and the phenomenal conditions of the way we work (how far away vs. how close a person vs. how fast we are moving; attention span vs. information overload vs. sticking memory; how long we take to scan vs. read something; image with word reading, etc). Seen in this way, posters are mirrors which confirm an approach, a direction of arrival, a route of passing through. Posters reflect the population’s psychological relationship to things we personally feel we want or need, and the things we go out of way for. Because posters have the ability to transport image and text information on a massive public scale, they are often only exploited in commercial markets as spatial flags for advertisements, solicitations, private or public events, and public announcements. However, used artistically to mediate the world around us, posters offer a phenomenal vehicle to hitchhike an encounter with art, and a formal opportunity to subvert the complete comodification of our public space, while materializing diverse art projects without predetermining an artistic content.
The third part of the experiment is the organization of group poster exhibitions. Working with curators and cultural institutions from the road tripped cities, the posters go back into an exhibition. Often, there is an opportunity to make additional instillations by individual participants of Institut für Raumexperimente which grow from the content in the original poster.
The poster project makes the concept act the art. The act demonstrates a process of how thinking feedbacks into a transformed thought and that thought feeds back into a transformed action of change in the world.
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The Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) is an educational research project directed by Professor Olafur Eliasson in affiliation with the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), with support from the Berlin Senate for Education, Science and Research.
Ideas Are Motion: The Poster as an Experiment in Travel exists as a limited edition publication. All proceeds will be donated to a foundation of the participants of the Institute’s choosing.