Day 16
Cultural Producers Brunch
Today we invited “Cultural Producers” from 4 different organisations based in Berlin.
Anette Schäfer – Trampoline
I was very interested by Anette Schäfer’s practice as creative director and curator of Trampoline. Trampoline Agency for Art and Media was initially established in 1997 in Nottingham, UK. It has since expanded to a base in Berlin while maintaining an office in Nottingham.
Trampoline offers support to artists working within the realms of technology and digital culture. Through the production of festivals, exhibitions and other curated projects Trampoline aims to aid the development of artists’ projects and research.
The areas that Trampoline moves are of particular interest to me; media, digital culture and public programming, all within three strands of curation, production and knowledge transfer.
They have worked with some big names, including Heath Bunting who is a big influence on my current research subjects.
Iepe Rubinh – Platoon Kunsthalle/Chess Boxing
Iepe (The Joker) Rubinh is a Dutch artist who has been based in Berlin for the past 15 years. He is the man behind such public art projects as The Joker Performances and Painting Reality.
Iepe’s latest project is the creation of a new sport, Chess Boxing. Chess Boxing was first visualised by French comicbook author, Enki Bilal. And it was Bilal’s initial idea that inspired Iepe to realise the initial idea into an internationally recognised sport that challenges the participants both physically and mentally. The perfect sport? Well, I’ll always be a lover of the ‘beautiful game’ but I find this project fascinating and I hope that the initial success of Chess Boxing since the first world championship fight in 2003 continues to grow.
During conversation Iepe mentioned that he first moved to Berlin with the vision of going to film school. Although that did not work out, you can clearly see through his use of video and how his works are documented that film still forms a major aspect of his practice, particulalrly affecting how his projects are perceived.
Benji Martin and April Gertler – tête
tête is a project space situated in the Prenzlauerberg district of Berlin at the former TÄT art space.
The space is operated as a time share for artists to make use of the space for a month at a time. There is no limitation to in what way artists utilise building as long as it is returned to a suitable state by the end of each residency.
Benji, one of the main organiser of the space with April, spoke of how he like the programming to be free and undefined. As stated on their website “tête has the potential, even destiny, to become an art space as social experiment”. This is certainly not how would approach running a space of this nature.
I am interested in the idea of a gallery as a social experiment, but I am also aware that each artist is relying on a space’s director or curator to uphold the integrety of that artist’s practice by programming them alongside artists of similar ability and approach. The nature of a time-share is that anybody can be positioned alongside anybody else in a schedule and this can have a detrimental effect on how an artist is perceived by a regularly attending audience.
In fact, I feel that a space of this nature will struggle to maintain a regular audience if said audience is not exposed to a regulated and carefully formulated programme of exhibitions and events.
While working alongside Benji, April also organises an artist residency programme, Picture Berlin, each summer at tête. The five week residency offers artists the opportunity to develop their practice while also engaging in the Berlin art scene through art and contemporary photography.
Lorenzo Sandoval
Lorenzo is an artist and an exhibition display designer. He will returning to Node soon to discuss the display techniques we will be using for our forthcoming exhibition. I will talk more about Lorenzo and his practice following this forthcoming visit.
