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FLUTGRABEN E.V. [DE] Inverse Institution | >> PROGRAMM CONTACT | RENTING | ASSOCIATION | PARTNERS | WATCHTOWER | WATCHTOWER SCHLESISCHER BUSCH Puschkinallee opening hours 2013 May through October Saturday 11 am - 2 pm Sunday 11 am - 5 pm and by appointment. Email us info@flutgraben.org or call during office hours Mon-Fri 9:30 am - 3 pm fon: +49 30 5321-9658 ------------------------------------------------------------ RIGHT NOW, NOT YET, NO LONGER Program Border Watchtower since 2011 With: Sebastian Hau-Walker, Johan Siebers, Nebojsa Milikic, Elske Rosenfeld and Christine Brecht, and Tijana Stevanovic Developed by Sönke Hallmann, Inga Zimprich and Janine Eisenächer Since 2011 Flutgraben e.V. has oriented its programming of the former border watchtower towards exploring the specificity of this time-space. Artists as well as theoreticians are invited to the tower for two-week research residencies, and to critically engage with the processes and politics of representing history through their own various practices. They address the watchtower as a field of complex temporal convergences, in which historical events can be approached from the different positionalities of a now, a not yet and a no more. To the historical significance of the tower, the programme thus adds the perspective of the present and that of possible futures. ------------------------------------------------------------ 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------ Because I know the recurring scenario so damn well September 16th 2011, 7pm Tijana Stevanovic is a Belgrade-based architect, who has been invited to make use of the watchtower Schlesischer Busch as a working and thinking space during the last two weeks. Addressing the tissue - the ones in your pocket from previous dinners - Tijana has been concerned with a crisis of architecture that keeps on appearing as a crisis of articulation. Simultaneously covering and displaying, with the tissue the intimate space of the melodrama unfolds in one's own hands, locating oneself at the heart of the crisis, which is always bigger than to find a compromise... ------------------------------------------------------------ July 24 - 26th 2011 Cluster Kollektiv ------------------------------------------------------------ Avantgarde und Mahnmal zugleich sein (Being Avant-garde and Memorial at Once) April 29th to 14th June 2011 A project of Flutgraben e.V. in cooperation with Grenzläufte e.V. Concept and Realisation: Christine Brecht and Elske Rosenfeld With financial support by Kulturamt Treptow-Köpenick In 1990 a bunch of young people talk an officer of the East German border guards into relinquishing one of the border towers in Berlin Treptow to them. They take possession of the tower and declare it a "Museum of Forbidden Art". They use it to put on concerts and show non-conformist art from the GDR that had been banned until recently. One of those people and the driving force behind the project is Kalle Winkler, an East German songwriter who was arrested in East Berlin in the early 80ies for singing critical songs and later extradited to West Berlin. Back in East Berlin in 1990, formulating the programme of the "Museum" he writes: "We are here to be avant-garde and memorial at once". The grand verbal gesture kick-starts a re-coding of the tower that continues into the present day - as the site for artistically investigating its own historicity and exploring the interrelationship between politics and art. With this exhibition, Flutgraben e.V. brings the post-89 history of the border tower into focus, thus making accessible and archiving the emergence and background of its own ongoing artistic and theoretical engagement with the site. ------------------------------------------------------------ WATCHTOWER / GHOSTS About the (Im-)Possibility of Speaking about 89 Three-month artistic research project at Flutgraben e.V. & the Watchtower at Schlesischer Busch, Berlin Treptow, 2010 In a series of talks and presentations the project brought together artistic, activist, documentary and theoretical materials and positions from and about the historical events of 89 in East Germany in an attempt to create a shared space in which the utopian and radical aspects of this period might re-emerge, ghostlike, at the borders and in the fissures of the official histories of the time. A four-part series of talks, "Bleibe im Land und wehre dich täglich" The Experience of 89 as Political Resource, invited guests to discuss - from within their specific double positions as both protagonists and analysts/ historians - themes such as the (non-)role of art in the political events of 89, the (non-)continuity of East German critical practices into the present political landscape, and the domestication of 89 through the mechanisms of its historization. The Research Station on the top floor of the watchtower, which formed the conceptual and logistical centre of the project, consisted of a combined work space/ archive built from old East German furniture in collaboration with artist Inken Reinert. On the middle floor of the tower works by invited artists as well as documentary materials were made accessible to visitors and passers-by in changing short-term exhibitions. ------------------------------------------------------------ 2005 - 2009 LAST INSPECTION Curated by Svenja Moor (et al) The project Last Inspection (Letzte Überprüfung) at Grenzwachturm Schlesischer Busch ended in 2009. From 2005 the former watchtower of the Berlin Wall was the starting point for artistic examinations into borders in the form of site-specific, interventional, and situational presentations of international artists. The project enjoyed an increasing popularity among Berliners as well as tourists. Within the context of memorials and other places commemorating the Berlin Wall and the time of division, the project held an exceptional and very particular position, especially in its methods of applying artistic interventions as a way of connecting past and present. Research about the history of the watchtower and the border section Schlesischer Busch accompanied the programme. |