180°, 2012
Site Specific Installation at the Kunstvereien Tiergarten, Berlin
Variable size
The urban space and the connections between political, social and architectural contexts are crucial to my research. I’ve worked in many city suburbs putting in place site-specific installations and projects questioning ‘ghettoization’ issues in peripheral residential areas.
Moabit is traditionally a working class neighborhood in the former West Berlin. During the 1960s and 1970s this area attracted asylum seekers, immigrants and became mostly populated by Turkish people. Due to its proximity to the current Government District, the area is undergoing a radical transformation and witnessing a strong real estate speculation, as already happened in Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Kunstverein Tiergarten was the former district library and is located in Turmstrasse, the main shopping street of the area. The space has a 86 meter long window looking out on the street. Therefore passersby, inhabitants and the street in general affect very much the perception of the space. The window framing or screening the real life outside, was the strong impression I got when I first visited the space. Although being an ordinary and common scene, the street and its varied social composition were for me interesting and fascinating enough. I just wanted to show it through a unusual perspective and produce in the visitors of the exhibition the feeling to look at this people for the first time. To do so, I thought of a trick I used at my drawing class when I was a student. We used to rotate our drawings of 180° to detect the errors that we were otherwise unable to see, being the brain too much used to looking at the picture in that way. Therefore I thought to overturn the street view in the exhibition space and trasformed the former gallery entrance hall into a camera obscura. The projection produced by mean of a small hole cut into the black foil covering the window, is partially blurred and the street shows a different atmosphere. When a person finally comes into focus the everyday scenario turn into a movie scene. Thanks to this device the people themselves disclose a different character and a new grace.
