Hans Ulrich Obrist Intro

Hans Ulrich Obrist was juror for literature at the Akademie Schloss Solitude between 2002 and 2004. He wrote this very beautiful preface to the book "Did someone say participate", edited by Shumon Basar and Markus Miessen and published by MIT Press.

I think it is very close to the working methodology that was used for the "Searching for an ideal urbanity" show. So instead of rewriting what was so clearly stated, I simply put his text here.

PREFACE

Participation Lasts Forever

Hans Ulrich Obrist

ESWAD
(Everything started with Alexander Dorner) As a high school student, I came across a second hand bookstore in St Gallen that had a copy of Alexander Dorner’s Ways Beyond Art. Dorner ran the Hannover Museum in northern Germany in the 1920s, defined the museum as an energy plant, a Kraftwerk. He invited artists such as El Lissitzky to develop new and dynamic displays for what he called the "museum on the move." While operating in the pseudo-neutral spaces that dated from the nineteenth century, dominant at the time of his Hannover "reign", Dorner managed to define the museum's functions in ways that are relevant today. On various occasions, he spoke or wrote of “the museum in a state of permanent transformation”; “the museum as oscillating between object and process”; the "elastic museum," i.e. flexible displays within an adaptable building; and crucially, “the museum as a bridge built between artists and a variety of scientific disciplines.” Of this last aspect Dorner said “We cannot understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we don't examine other fields of life.” This is something that I have tried to introduce in my curatorial work – by inviting architects, philosophers, film-makers and political thinkers into the orbit of the exhibition. If we consider the life of an exhibition as ongoing, we can view it as a complex dynamic learning system. One should renounce the closed, paralysing homogeneity of the traditional exhibition master plan. Artworks would be allowed to extend tentacles to other works – and other fields of knowledge. The curator mustn't stand in the way of such growth.

GENERALIST
Harald Szeemann – considered by many as the first true independent curator – defined this long list of the “curator as generalist” which has been growing ever since:

The curator is administrator, sensitive art-lover, writer of prefaces, librarian, manager, accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.

To which Barbara Vanderlinden and I added: fundraiser, researcher, teacher, editor, blogger, web-master, documentarian, and most important of all: someone who has conversations. Conversations with artists and other practitioners. Curators are agents of trans-disciplinarity. Last but not least there is the notion of the translator. The curator must negotiate between the different realities and fields implicated in exhibition-making. Indeed, there have been periods when I wondered whether I could spend my whole life in the art world or whether it was too narrow. As a result, I constantly ventured into other geographies and other disciplines. For example, my science research occurred through exhibitions like Bridge the Gap, Laboratorium, and
Art and Brain. In addition, ever since the exhibitions Mutations and Cities on the Move, I have retained a strong tie to architecture and urbanism – which continues through my involvement with Domus. But, I never left the art-world. The art-world permits this enormous degree of freedom. It allows you to make these external connections.

SELF-ORGANIZATION
One main difference to Szeemann is important. I think there is less a question of authorship – as in the “auteur” – but curating as teamwork. Curatorial teams started in the 1990s due to the complexity of more and more global research. Collaborative curatorial models replaced the single curator in phenomena like Manifesta and new Biennales. Questioning the need for curatorial master-plans also stems from my experience with urbanism. In the 1950s, many urbanists questioned Le Corbusier's master-planned structures, into which everything had to fit in a modernist way. They began redefining dialogues with the local and the global. I have been greatly influenced by theories of urbanism, namely by architects like Cedric Price's “Non-plan”, Yona Friedman's amazing capacity of self-organization, and Oskar Hanson's “open form”. This influence is on-going. The exhibition is not just one exhibition; it's more like an archipelago. And then obviously it’s the task of the curator to link all these archipelagos, to make it legible for an audience to experience: the convention is to have isolated distinct objects or distinct monographic presentations of artists, which is one possibility but there are many other possibilities. In the strictly segregated situation of group shows, very often artists don’t know what their neighbour is doing – and this seems strange to me.

BRIDGING
The role of the curator is to create free space, not occupy existing space. It’s reminiscent of an idea that Felix Feneon developed in the early 20th century: of the curator being a pedestrian bridge. In my practice, the curator has to bridge gaps and build bridges between artists, publics, institutions, and other types of communities. The crux of this work is building temporary communities, by connecting different people and practices, and creating the conditions for triggering sparks between them. To put it simply, curating is being involved in the creation, production, realization and promotion of ephemeral situations. While exhibitions may seem futile in this sense, they are an extremely interesting activity because they allow both artists and architects to test reality. Take the example of architecture – within the architectural
exhibition architects have induced the most interesting display features: from Mies van der Rohe to Peter and Alison Smithson, Zaha Hadid to Shigeru Ban, generations of architects have often begun to develop their language through exhibition designs.

CONTACT ZONES
First I was inviting artists and architects to art museums. Then I was increasingly asked to curate in the architecture or science world and things started to go back and forth. In the writer Edouard Glissant's words, “The idea of a non-linear time [... or the] coexistence of several time zones would of course allow for a great variety of different contact zones...” This is to say that perhaps the exhibition could become a reciprocal contact zone between the museum and the city.

Another interesting thing is this whole idea of “local” and the “global”. At the moment we are experiencing a mushroom-like explosion of biennales all over the world. There are hundreds of new ones coming up. There are positive and negative aspects of this. The positive aspect is obviously that it allows laboratories of new ideas to have more opportunities, which I think is development. It also shows that the world is multi-centred: we no longer have one or two centres, we have a prolificness of many centres. We can only understand the global if we are at the same time looking very carefully and in a focussed way at local conditions.

PRODUCE REALITY
La Cohée du Lamentin, by Edouard Glissant, was published in 2005, and considers the nature pf producing reality today. It links very much with an interest I have in unrealised public projects. While public art entails a negotiation with reality that produces innovative, exciting work, it also implicates multiple parties, running the constant risk of censure. Bertrand Lavier once said, his only unrealised projects went unrealised because everyone agreed upon them! Unrealised endeavours in the visual arts (public commissions that were postponed or censored; competition
runner-ups; partially-realised plans; missed opportunities; or
”desk-drawer” projects) generally remain unnoticed. Since 1990, I have been gathering these projects into a “reservoir of ideas”. Throughout my 500 or more interviews with artists, architects, scientists and others, my only persistent question has been about unrealised projects. The penultimate step of this project is the foundation of an Agency for Unrealised Projects, architectural and artistic, at the Serpentine Gallery, London, which will be co-directed by Julia Peyton Jones and myself. Rather than discussing unrealised projects for utopia or archive’s sake, we want to produce reality. We firmly believe that the past is an important toolkit and many of these projects could easily happen in a different social framework. (This project will also be in collaboration with E-Flux).

SOMEONE SAID PARTICIPATE?

PARTICIPATION has been used a lot lately. What does this word mean today
after it has been turned into a cliché so often? How can people participate? Also how can the architect or curator participate? Who has the initiative?

At the beginning, participation was very “authentic” (according to Yona Friedman, and Giancarlo de Carlo). Then it became politically instrumentalized and often degraded. When Rem Koolhaas and I asked de Carlo about this issue he said: “I agree with you. If you consider the era of the 60s, there were at the same time two things which were very important. One was the rebellion of the students, and the other one was a new consciousness in the trade-unions. During that time, I had made two projects: one was for a housing complex in Terni, and the other one was the urban plan for the new center of Rimini, both based on the idea of participation. Then after that moment a more bureaucratic period began, when participation became
something very formalistic and stupid. The problem to me had changed: the question was how to make an architecture which can intrinsically be participated, and this becomes a question of language. How can the language be such that it favours and
pushes participation? I think that this question still has to be explored, in many different fields: So I believe that the crucial issue is to use language that people can understand, penetrate and eventually use. So the process in my opinion takes a lot longer. Participation is something that you should start – and this is
something that you should not forget– it lasts forever.”

THE FUTURE WILL BE A HURRICANE
TIME/ SPACE SPACE/ TIME.
There is only a now and there is only a here. If we lost memory there is no time, there is only now. If we cannot move there is no space: it becomes virtual. As Yona Friedman once told me: “The only real thing is the here and now. The future is an intellectual construction.”

I recently asked artists and architects for their definition of the future. The incomplete list follows here:

the future will be chrome
Rirkrit Tiravanija

the future will be curved
Olafur Eliasson

the future will be "in the name of the future"
Anri Sala

the future will be so subjective
Tino Sehgal

the future will be bouclette
Douglas Gordon

the future will be curious
Nico Dockx

the future will be obsolete
Tacita Dean

the future will be asymmetric
Pedro Reyes

the future will be a slap in the face.
Cao Fei

the future will be delayed
Loris Greaud

the future does not exist but in snapshots
Philippe Parreno

the future will be tropical
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

future? ...you must be mistaken
Trisha Donnelly

the future will be overgrown and decayed
Simryn Gill

the future will be tense
John Baldessari

Zukunft ist lecker
Hans-Peter Feldmann

Zukunft ist wichtiger als Freizeit
Helmut Kohl (proposed by Carsten Höller)

a future fuelled by human waste
Matthew Barney

the future is going nowhere without us
Paul Chan

the future is now – the future is it
Doug Aitken

the future is one night, just look up
Tomas Saraceno

the future will be a remake...
Didier Fiuza Faustino

the future is what we construct from what we remember of the past – the
present is the time of instantaneous revelation
Lawrence Weiner

the future is this place at a different time.
Bruce Sterling

the future will be widely reproduced and distributed
Cory Doctorow

the future will be whatever we make it
Jacque Fresco

the future will involve splendour and poverty
Arto Lindsay

the future is uncertain because it will be what we make it
Immanuel Wallerstein

the future is waiting – the future will be self-organized
Raqs Media Collective

Dum Spero/While I breathe, I hope
Nancy Spero

this is not the future
Jordan Wolfson

the future is a dog/l'avenir c'est la femme
Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron

on its way; it was here yesterday
Hreinn Fridfinnsson

the future will be an armchair strategist, the future will be like no snow
on the broken bridge
Yang Fudong

the future always flies in under the radar
Martha Rosler

suture that future
Peter Doig

'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow' (Shakespeare)
Richard Hamilton

the future is overrated
Cerith Wyn Evans

futuro = $B!g(B
Hector Zamorra

the future is a large pharmacy with a memory deficit
David Askevold

the future will be bamboo
Tay Kheng Soon

the future will be ousss
Koo Jeong-A

the future will be...grains, particles & bits.
the future will be...ripples, waves & flow.
the future will be...mix, swarms, multitudes.
the future will be...the future we deserve but with some surprises, if
only some of us take notice.
Vito Acconci

In the future...the earth as a weapon...
Allora&Calzadilla

the future is our excuse
Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel

the future will be repeated
Marlene Dumas

ok, ok i'll tell you about the future; but i am very busy right now;
give me a couple of days more to finish some things and i'll get back to
you.
Jimmie Durham

future is instant
Yung Ho Chang

”The future is not”
Zaha Hadid

the future is private
Anton Vidokle

the future will be layered and inconsistent
Liam Gillick

the future is a piano wire in a pussy powering something important
Matthew Ronay

in the future perhaps there will be no past
Daniel Birnbaum

the future is menace
Carolee Schneemann

the future is a forget-me-not
Molly Nesbit

the future is an knowing exchange of glances
Sarah Morris

The future: Scratching on things I could disavow
Walid Raad

the future is our own wishful thinking.
Liu Ding

le futur est un étoilement
Edouard Glissant

the future is now
Maurizio Cattelan

the future has a silver lining
Thomas Demand

the future is now and here
Yona Friedman

Roemer III

The exhibition evening Roemer III at the project space of Akademie Schloss Solitude had the topic photography of an urban practice and can be seen as a preview for the upcoming »Searching for an Ideal Urbanity« project. (Lange Nacht der Museen, Stuttgart, March, 17th)

Luciano Basauri & Dafne Berc


Sanford Biggers



Seung Pyo Hong


Ligia Nobre


Damaso Reyes


Henrietta Rose-Innes


Alexander Schellow


Ulrike Syha


Popok Tri Wahyudi

Mapping the city

A quite mainstream exhibition in Amsterdam, at the Stedelijk. Neverthelles there are some relevant pieces. The title sounds as a joke. "Mapping", come on, move over!

Beach tourism

This symposium in Spain, Tourism XXL, the European Megalopolis , touches issues similar to those explored by Basauri and Berc on Croatia...

Ideal city Invisible cities

Colin Hardley, Folly for a forgotten future, 2006.

In 2006 the exhibition Ideal city/Invisible cities touched the issue of the ideal city, through the realization of site specific works, in Zamość, Poland and Potsdam, Germany, both cities that were the results of ideal city planning. The text below is the concept of that exhibition. The artists involved were:
Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, Archigram, Colin Ardley, Tim Ayres, Mirosław Bałka, Daniela Brahm, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Rui Calçada Bastos, Brian O’Connell, Constant, Jonas Dahlberg, Tacita Dean, Jarosław Fliciński, Carlos Garaicoa, Dan Graham, George Hadjimichalis, Rula Halawani, Franka Hörnschemeyer, Craigie Horsfield, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Jakob Kolding, Ola Kolehmainen, Lucas Lenglet, Sol LeWitt, Teresa Murak, David Maljković, Gerold Miller, Matthias Müller, Daniel Roth, Albrecht Schäfer, Kai Schiemenz, Les Schliesser, Melanie Smith, Monika Sosnowska, David Tremlett, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Krzysztof Zieliński, Tilman Wendland.

Since early modernity, visual artists have been intensely interested in the idea of the ideal city. Utopian-architectural designs and free artistic works have thereby often entered into indissoluble alliance. This is as true of the architectural fantasies of Bruno Taut and the German group ‘Die Gläserne Kette’ as it is of the designs of the Russian Constructivists such as Tatlin, Malevich, and El Lissitzky and continues as far to Constant’s “New Babylon” project and the works of the Archigram Group in the 1960s. In the last 25 years, however, this idea has no longer played a noteworthy role in artistic discourse, although many artists deal with the thematic field of space/house/city in their works. The general absence of utopian thinking in the political and societal realm is manifested in the arts also in this respect. Whereas the city as utopian design, as “housing” for a free and humane society, occupied artists well into the 1970s, today it is the house, the individual shell of existence, that serves as starting point and material for many installations and sculptures. The list of artists who have addressed this theme is meanwhile unsurveyable. It extends from Gordon Matta-Clark and Dan Graham through Mario Merz, Rachel Whiteread, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Andrea Zittel to younger artists like Monika Sosnowska. Conspicuous thereby is that current works hardly ever submit architecture to a fundamental criticism with artistic means, which was still the case with Matta-Clark and Dan Graham’s early works. Rather, artists create “archi-sculptures”, housings, cells, caves – symbolic or real sites of retreat. The idea of the Ideal City was always tied to the question of how the world should best be set up. So thinking about the form of the ideal city often developed in parallel with political-societal utopias. The conspicuous lack of interest in the theme of the “Ideal City” is surely also based in the suspicion of totalitarianism under which utopias in general meanwhile seem to stand. This fundamental mistrust is quite justified in relation to the planning of ideal cities. A totalitarian or at least clearly authoritarian aspect inheres in the great majority of plannings. Following geometrical regularities, usually planned in the form of orthogonal grids, ideal cities were regarded as a sign and expression of human rationality. The use of the grid for city layouts often found its continuation in the individual buildings, whose façades and forms of construction vary similar basic modules. The actual inhabitants of the cities were supposed to and required to submit to the given grid. The one-dimensionality of the plannings extended into everyday human life. Often the inventors of the new worlds also determined a generally mandatory new dress code, a new language, or a new calendar. Standardization, strict hierarchies, and social control often characterize the ideas of ideal cities. Only a few ideal cities were ever partially or completely built. In particular, the ideal city plannings that were closely tied to societal utopias usually remained unrealized – they may be called the invisible cities. Italo Calvino’s collection of city portraits, published in 1972 under the title “Le città invisibili”, adds poetic ideal cities from the spirit of imagination to the historical ones. But in Europe, as well as in North and South America, there are a number of visible cities whose shape is owed to the concept of the ideal city. Among them are, above all, princely foundations like the Renaissance cities Sabbioneta and Pienza in Italy, Zamość in Poland, and Baroque city constructions like Potsdam and Vila Real de Santo Antonio in Portugal. While in these cities the clear gridding of the city’s layout and the uniformity of construction have in part survived to this day, the social potential of the ideal city is more palpable in the settlements that arose from the spirit of Utopian Socialism in the 19th century, for example Godin’s “Familistère” in Guise in northern France and in workers’ settlements like Karlsruhe- Dammerstock and Berlin’s Hufeisensiedlung, which developed as late heirs of the idea in the 1920s, especially in Germany. Today, the fascination exerted by the idea of the ideal city is primarily aesthetic. But the strict grid and clear structuring are not exhausted in the charm of the surface; the utopian spirit beneath it is palpable – including in its ominousness. Especially today, when the discourse about form and development of urban space is governed by actual political themes like ‘Shrinking Cities’, it seems necessary to review/give the concept of the Ideal City a fresh glance.

Some logistics for the opening

Searching for an ideal urbanity, opening days from 29th March to 1st of April 2007.

Guests:

Jurors:

- Fabrizio Gallanti from 27.3. to 31.3

- Ivan Vladislavic from 29.3 to 2.4. (then Munich?)

- Fiona Raby from 31.3. to 4.4.

- Kevin Volans from 29.3., will stay longer until the end of May!

- Biljana Srbljanovic will join, no date mentionned

- Rirkrit Tiravanija will join, no date mentionned

Other guests:

- Stefano Mirti, designer, Milano, from 29.3 to 1.4.

- Xavier Juillot, artist, France, from 30.3 to 1.4.

- Achim Bertenburg, artist, Bremen (cooperates with Korpys/Löffler)

Former fellows participating in the exhibition and joining:

- Susanne Bürner, videoartist, Berlin

- Margarita Dorovska, culture manager, Sofia /

- Korpys & Loeffler, artists, Berlin/Bremen

- Marzena Nowak, artist, Warsaw

- SMAQ (Sabine Müller, Andreas Quednau), architects, Berlin

- Stephen Waddell, artist, Berlin

- Vlad Nancã, artist, Bucharest

- Annett Zinsmeister, architect, Berlin

- Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, architect, Basel

- Zoran Pantelic artist, Novi Sad

- Andrea Melloni, sound artist, Berlin

- Patricia Reed, videoartist, Berlin

- Karin Damrau, architect, Berlin

- Sarnath Banerjee, graphic novelist, New Dehli

- Krassimir Terziev, videoartist, Sofia

Current fellows:

Sanford Biggers, Luciano Basauri & Dafne Berc, Seung Pyo Hong, Dagmar Keller &

Martin Wittwer, Q Takeki Maeda & Jay Chung, Ligia Nobre, Henrietta Rose-Innes,

Alexander Schellow, Ulrike Syha, Cobi van Tonder, Popok Tri Wahyudi

Schedule

Thursday, 29th of March, Opening with

- Speech by JBJ

- Screening of „Ponderings in Solitude“ by Sarnath Banerjee and Andrea Melloni

- Videoscreening performance by Patricia Reed

- Staged reading, text by Ulrike Syha

Friday, 30th,

morning

individual studiovisits of jurors (or long sleep if the night was too short)

afternoon

Fabrizio's lecture about Henry Lefebvre’s concept of Urbanity, Guibal Saal

Stefano Mirti's lecture about „urbanity as a politic and poetic stake“, Guibal Saal

Xavier Juillot, presentation of his work

Collective tour through the exhibition, discussions

End of the discussions around 7.30 pm

evening

monthly dinner with all the participants

Saturday 31st

morning

visit at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart of Alexander Schellow's exhibition

afternoon to be precised:

The jurors speak about their own work (to be confirmed)

Possible presentations by the fellows,

continuation of the discussion about the exhibition

individual studio visits

End about 19.30

evening

improvised dinner

Sunday, 1st of April

open day, invididual studiovisits of the jurors, departure of the guests

Brussels - A Manifesto

Pier Vittorio Aureli, who will participate to our symposium in May, was involved, together with the Berlage Institute, where he teaches, to this project for Brussels.

Europe is an utopia, and Brussels might be its capital.

Another ideality

The French photographer and editor Frédéric Chaubin, has been documenting the architecture of the former USSR. It was certainly another kind of "ideal urbanity".
His pictures will be on show at the Storefront Gallery in New York from the 24th of April.

Susanne Bürner 2

Some more snapshots.

Susanne Bürner 1

Some snapshots.
Fountains in Stuttgart

Xavier Juillot

Another participant to the project is the French artist Xavier Jullot, very active since the '60s. Here is his DNA spiral in the Zurich station (2000).

Searching for an ideal urbanity, today in Stuttgart

Jean-Baptiste Joly, 4-3-2007

Moving in a Smarter City

Symposium: Moving in a Smarter City

March 1, 2007 to March 2, 2007

Akademie Schloss Solitude

The importance of cities as human habitats is steadily increasing. More than half of the world’s human population presently lives in cities – they are the motor of economic and societal development. At the advent of the 21st century, cities are transforming themselves through new possibilities for mobility: the individual combination of various modes of transportation and communication makes a new urban life possible for city-dwellers and continually blurs the boundaries between public and private spaces.

The symposium »Moving in a Smarter City« is dedicated to the question of which societal shifts cities are subject to and which challenges need to be posed upon the mobility of tomorrow. Even beyond industrialized nations, the postindustrial age’s foundation lies upon multimediality, flexibility, technological and individual information. But how do tomorrow’s »smart cities« (William J. Mitchell, MIT) look? These are the issues that will be addressed by the symposium from the 1st to the 2nd March 2007, organized jointly by the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the ICN Business School, Nancy and Villes 2.0, Paris.

The symposium will take place at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Conference language will be English.

Registration with Catharina Märklin,cm@akademie-solitude.de, T. 0711-99619-134.

The art, science & business program is made possible through the financial support of the Baden-Württemberg Landesstiftung Foundation, the City of Stuttgart as well as the LBBW Arts and Culture Foundation.

Program

Thursday, March 1, 2007

8:00 pm
Welcome and Introduction by Jean-Baptiste Joly, Director of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and Stéphane Boiteux, General Director of ICN Business School, Nancy

following presentations
»Stuttgart and the Challenge of Mobility«, Wolfgang Schuster, Lord Mayor of Stuttgart.

»The Smart City: The Three Hubs and Their Interaction«, Bruno Marzloff, Groupe Chronos, Paris
Hubs: In the 1990s, »hubs« referred to the optimization of air-transport systems and the modification of flow within physical networks. Today, this »distributed« mobility is changing scale: with the diversification of transportation systems, hubs operate throughout the urban network and modify the very concept of urban mobility.


Friday, March 2, 2007

I. Section »Between Smart and Smarter«, 9:00 am – 1:30 pm, Lectures
Moderation by Jean-Baptiste Joly
with Georges Amar, Director of Innovation in Services, RATP, Paris; Klaus Georg Bürger, Director of Coordination Technology Projects, Robert Bosch GmbH, Stuttgart; Volkmar Döricht, Corporate Technology, Siemens AG, Munich and Federico Casalegno, Visiting Research Scientist at the Research Group »Smart Cities«, MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge/MA.
André Rossinot, the Mayor of Nancy, will join the section with a video conference in French, simultaneously translated into English.


II. Section »Hubs and Networks in the Pervasive City. The Permanent Accessibility to Places and Resources«, Panel Discussion, 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Introduction and Moderation by Daniel Kaplan, Délégué général of FING, Paris
with Albert Asseraf, Strategy, Marketing and Research Director of JCDecaux Airport and JCDecaux Artvertising for France, Neuilly-sur-Seine; Stefano Mirti, Coordinator Design Department, NABA, Milan; Ligia Nobre, Architect, Sao Paulo; Patrick Jourdan, Director of Sales and Marketing of VINCIPark, Nanterre.


III. Section »Hubs, Networks and Individual Needs in a Smart City. A New Organization of the City Around the Individuals«, Panel Discussion, 5:00 – 6:30 pm
Introduction and Moderation by Georges Amar
with Chantal de Gournay, Laboratoire UCE, France Télécom Research & Development, Issy-les-Moulineaux; Tilo F. Schweers, Manager Homologation, Special Vehicles and Technical Communication, DaimlerChrysler AG, Böblingen and others.

Final Conclusion of the symposium by Bruno Marzloff and Jean-Baptiste Joly

Römerstraße, lange Nacht der Museen, die Römer 3, 17th of March 2007.

Römerstraße, Lange Nacht der Museen, die Römer 3, 17th of March 2007.

During the event that will join all cultural institutions of Stuttgart, the gallery space at Römerstraße, will present several works of artists from Stuttgart and fellows at Solitude. Several works are related and/or preview of the "ideal urbanity" show.

The artists will be:
- Philipp Metz, 2 photographs, before and after urbanity, 120 x 100 cm, large front wall in the central room.

- Oliver Hartung, 1 photograph approx. 150 x 100 cm or different smaller photographs (urban situations in the USA), approx. 50 x 70 cm in room 1 (right side).

- Oliver Zwink, 10 photographs (urban landscapes in London) size postcards in room 1 (left side).

- Christine Erhard, 5 photographs 70 x 90 cm, architecture as a model, in room 3, right wall next to the window.

- Popok Tri Wahyudi, coloured image in the windows in the central room on the left side next to the entrance door.

- Seung Pyo Hong, one photograph and drawings of the x citizen mask, in room 3, wall on the right side of the door.

- Daphne Berc and Luciano Basauri, slide show with dutch artificial landscape and Tokio landscape (Kodak Carrousel) central room, space between the windows.

- Alexander Schellow, drawings on the two columns, central room.

- Keller & Wittwer, photographs of urban situations (documenting the work between their two last projects) big wall on the left side in room 3 (like for Römer 2).

- Henrietta Rose Innes, text on paper or spoken (with headphones) with some reference digital photographs of the urban and suburban situation in Cape Town; wall in the central room between room 2 and room 3.

- Ligia Nobre and Paola Salerno, micro phenomenology of urban situation, as a prefiguration of the urbanity project in Solitude on the wall in the central room between room 2 and room 3 (shared with Henrietta).

- Sanford Biggers, polaroid camera to be used by the visitors, the results are immediatly pinned on the wall in the triangle space next to the bar in the central room.

- Damaso Reyes, urban and semi urban situation in Europe, videoprojection in the room 2.