The Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments, Berlin) traveled to Hong Kong, Shenzhen/Dongguan, Guangzhou and Beijing from 9.-25.1.2014. Walk-in-progress is an experiment timing space, primed by the experiences of traveling to meet, leaning into spatial relationships inveigling mental distances, generating moving stories, motions and emotions of scale, speeds slowing, perceptual political contracts of effort and energy, attention spanning directionality, agencies agency. Walk-in-progress shares ideas motion. Co-produced and hosted by Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, open to the public from 10.2.-10.3.2014.
The projects are ideas and interventions, images action. Some are precise statements, others errant dreams, others personal distortions and curated delusions. Some are autonomous projects soon to be realized, unknown characters operated on by translations, parts carried and realized in other places, co-authored in the approach, attempts and pitches for projects to come, reflections given to fade.
Walk-in-progress collects contributions by ææææ, Malte Bartsch, Rune Bosse, Merlin Carter, Leon Eixenberger, Eric Ellingsen, Tomas Espinosa, Markus Hoffmann, Jeremias Holliger, Elaine W. Ho, Rike Horb., Fabian Knecht, Felix Kiessling, Hans-Henning Korb, Norgard Kröger, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Felix Meyer, Vinzenz Reinecke, Nina Schuiki, Yuichiro Tamura, Kat Valastur, Raul Walch, Joanna Warsza, Christina Werner, Euan Willams.
Choreographed by Christina Werner & Eric Ellingsen.
With Special Thanks To: Zhang Wei & Hu Fang & team & Olafur Eliasson
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SILENT WALK, Friday, 17.1.2014 at 5 p.m.
On Friday 17.1.2014 a silent walk across downtown Guangzhou, spreading from the Xingang Middle Road, Chigang Market and Vitamin Creative Space featured the time-based works and interventions in the following order, designed by Eric Ellingsen, Christina Werner, Joanna Warzsa:
Silent Walk Manual:
Silent Walk: With a group or alone, walk through part of a city without speaking for at least 30 minutes. While walking, give continuous and focused attention to the loudest sound you hear around you by looking in every direction in which you hear something.
Hans-Henning Korb
跨时间纪念 (广州 Market Remix), 2013/14
Video soundscape installation, public intervention, text by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
“Could the atoms that are in my body right now also be part of other organisms in different dimensions?”
Norgard Kröger
Money for sale, 2014
Performance
…says the sentence on the Box. The Box is a reconstruction of the most commonly used market boxes at the market in the neighborhood of Vitamin Creative Space. Originally, it contained various kinds of Chinese paper currency, neatly set in the box. The walk started at Vitamin Creative Space and continued through the market. On the edge of the market where it opens into a residential area, the artist sold the money with the handwritten sentence 钱不可吞食 out of the box for the exact amount of its original value. The silence walk participants encountered this action, and the action was absorbed into and continued with the walk. Upon returning to Vitamin Creative Space, the last notes were “sold”/exchanged with visitors of the exhibition. The box is now empty of goods but contains the earned money.
Tomas Espinosa
Just try, 2014
Performance in the outdoor market
At a market in Guangzhou, China. It was Friday, and I went to the market for eight hours: four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon, waiting for some of the daily market visitors to come and touch the cucumbers that I made from white clay. Waiting for passersby to look into my eyes.
I understand my work as a reflection upon encounters about time—time to touch, time to speak, time to share.
Jonas Wendelin & Hans-Henning Korb
The land has been changed, the mountain has been moved, 2014
Postcard set and interventions in public space
“The land has been changed, the mountain has been moved” is a collection of works, which arose on the way from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. During the exhibition opening, the distribution of the postcards to people on the streets of Guangzhou accompanied further actions and interventions, in public and within the exhibition space.
Raul Walch
Concrete Inverts, 2014
Intervention in public space
Performed during the silence walk, the artist continues a series of work in which he fills and repairs potholes in the streets of Guangzhou. Applying one concrete layer over the other, he leaves untraceable marks of his performed rough labor.
Merlin Carter
Body Object Extension Ritual, 2014
Video intervention inside a internet café (See No. 4 above)
Nina Schuiki
Red thread, 2014
Intervention
Eric Ellingsen
To sew the sweater while the wool is on the sheep, 2014
translating performance
Write a one line poem. Walk the one line poem around different cities asking people to translate the poem into their langauge. Ask what the line means. Use that line in talks or interviews or papers. Excuse me, what you propound sounds like your saying Quintillian is sewing the sweater while the wool is still on the sheep. Ask others to do the same. Make the saying flock real. And then find a knitter to try making a sweater on a real sheep. It can be a grey sheep.
* * *
The Becoming
My dear friend who is getting ready to depart
-I had been longing to be your companion
yet I am tangled up with my routine
Now, I could only silently gaze at
your supposably returning path
Between the dawn and dusk
Between the brightest star and the dimmest soul
Between promise and betrayal
Prologue – to my friend who is getting ready to depart
1
Tunneled through a smoggy
motorway which lingers on the mountain
All at once I found myself nailed down my feet in front of a boundless, enormous dam
In that place there was tricolor waves swirling:
copper-ish sulphur
blackish auburn iron
grayish lead and zinc
as if the fissure and the rift etched on the earth
Wantonly meshing, coagulating
On the deserted land
land that deserted human
The village foregone
woven with the wild grass
prolonged blazing sunshine
Bamboo and musa basjoo have gradually found out
how to comfort the wounded nerve of the mountain range
In between the crease of time
Universe elongates
As if body’s stretching
—you slightly turn you back
What beyond the deserted land
startlingly an animistic land come into your sight:
It is almost a hidden garden under the cliff
The grace of labouring
has lighted up the flaring firewood, disperses the misty mountain mist
smoke rising up from the back of mud wall
Awaiting
Our descendants
Our descendants might could
from the track of the circular time
have a new starting over
landing on your feet on the muddy puddle pavement
We still could not forecast
how long we still need to walk
just to witness the tremendous origin
And stratus slides
faulting peak floating upon
The destined lowering of night curtain stressed the melancholy of the land
(Hu Fang)
* * *
WALK-IN-PROGRESS is co-produced and hosted by Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, open to the public from 10.2.-10.3.2014:
Malte Bartsch
1. Time Machine, 2014
(The machine has been installed at Vitamin Creative Space during the opening event on 17.1.2014)
Press a button. Button pressed – 5 sec. Button pressed – for another 5 sec. Press as long as you want.
The receipt of the total time is a work of art and a certificate of authenticity. Your time makes it work, makes the work.
2. Celebration Phantoms (Frightening), 2014
Mixed media; mirror ball, electronic firecrackers
Rune Bosse
3. Interconnecting Everywhere, 2012 -
Ongoing work (no. 10), longitude + latitude
In the beginning of 2012 I dug a hole. The next time I crossed a border, I made another hole, filled it up with the soil from the first hole, and carried on with the new soil.
Merlin Carter
4. Body Object Extension Ritual, 2014
Video
Can we turn objects into extensions of our bodies? How similar is our spatial awareness of a tool to the awareness of our own limbs? Jackie Chan is a master at integrating everyday objects into his fighting choreography and turning these things into extensions of his body. But since they are used for fighting they get damaged. The need to be healed. Once an object has been integrated into the body, does it become interdependent with other parts? Could we use Chinese medicine to heal our adopted limbs? This video explores the boundaries between the body, self, and the “external world” and the interdependence of those parts.
Leon Eixenberger
5. Sketch For a Village, 2014
Video
The work describes the intimate process of demurring, a moment of hard check in the development of an artistic project. In the context of a first encounter with an urban development zone in Guangzhou, China, where rapid acceleration of reshaping threatens grown and functioning social structures, the idea of hesitation enfolds the possibility to return from fantasies of the future into the present and to adapt the projection that came apart at the seams back to the feelings of the people who’s everyday reality it changes.
Tomas Espinosa
6. Solo toma tiempo (it takes time), 2014
Clay experiments
I understand this piece as a process of change. Everything changes and transforms constantly. Like 100 spheres made of white clay, every second in a moment of drying and every second the air inside finding a way out.
Markus Hoffmann
7. Heilmittel, 2014 / (Artist’s Antidote, 2014)
Medication to get rid of being an artist
The work Heilmittel (Artists Antidote) is part of a work cluster dealing with society’s definition of normality or rather with its anomalies. A performative installation, the work focuses on conceptions of being normal, being delusional and being an artist. Looking at the symptom descriptions for delusions in the ICD 10 evaluation (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) and replacing the word “patient” with “artist”, one must feel more than concerned. The ambivalence produced by this action was the starting point for the idea to visit a doctor practicing traditional Chinese Medicine to get cured of the actual state of being. By abstractly describing to the doctor the symptoms of being an artist, or rather the artistic working and thinking processes, the doctor made a diagnosis and handed over a prescription for a cure of this “state of thinking and being”. The prescription was forwarded to a traditional Chinese pharmacy in order to receive all ingredients needed to create the artist’s antidote. The ingredients were prepared according to the given instructions in a performative act during the opening of the exhibition. The resulting mixture was then put in a glass beneath the framed receipt. The installation Heilmittel constitutes a drinkable sculpture that as idea and placeholder, inherently questions concepts of being based on normative ideals.
Jeremias Holliger
8. Hear Sea, See Sea, Cease Here, 2014
Video 5:50 min, sound
In a structural experiment, the artist is exploring the relation of still photographs and running recordings of the sound of the sea. The first edition of an ongoing series turns to the far east coast of the Mediterranean sea in Tel Aviv, Israel. The sound of the waves form the basis of an incessant sound, punctuated by the clicking of the camera. Shoot and reload rhythmically parallel the hitting waves and the ebb of the water at the coast. The seemingly endless repetition drones on the borders of monotony, allowing the imagination to gather around this very basic setting of cinematographic exercise and the composition and re-composition of memory and place.
Rike Horb.
9. Melodic ending of spatial constrains, 2014
Roof tiles
Melodic Endings is the sound of broken clay. Is the curved shape of traditional roof tiles. Is tiles flattend to broken shards as the spectator walks through the exhibition space. Melodic Endings deals with things; the dynamic changes of China’s urban planning; the architecture of such change. Melodic Endings is clay tiles leftovers; is remnants of demolished houses, bought on a sidewalk market. Clay roof tiles is an older time period today, a land value pulverized in continuous endings starting.
Fabian Knecht
10. Entfernung, 2014
Action, Guangzhou, China; video of performance
The artist destroys a house in the suburbs of Guangzhou. He performs the labor of a Chinese worker who films the action.
Felix Kiessling
11. White Arsenic, 2014
Intervention, 0,00003 mg white arsenic / 3,500,000 square kilometres Zhu Jiang River and South China Sea
A homeopathic dose of poisonous white arsenic was thrown into the Zhu Jiang River (Pearl River). The smaller the dose (or the bigger the medium it gets administered with), the stronger its contrary effect and purifying potency.
12. Moon (CN), 2014
Photography
Documentation of the moon reflected in building facades in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Hans-Henning Korb
13. 跨时间纪念 (广州 Market Remix), 2013/14
Video soundscape Installation, public intervention; text by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
„Could the atoms that are in my body right now also be part of other organisms in different dimensions?”
Norgard Kröger
14. 钱不能吞食, 2014
Web video
„You can’t eat money“ is the translation of the words Norgard Kröger writes on every piece of paper currency she spends. Entered into the search field of the nationally most popular, public video platform, this sentence pulls up a performance video. In the video, the artist and another performer eat 5€ notes. Installed in the working area of vitamincreativspace at an unoccupied desk where someone seems to have just left for a little break, a Yuan note with the sentence in Chinese rests in front of a computer with the video running on the website www.56.com. The installation is part of an ongoing project started in November 2011 whose presentation differs in response to local conditions.
ææææ
15. øΩøΩøΩøΩ, 2014
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Vinzenz Reinecke
16. Asking Guangzhou, 2014
Intervention
“Please, can you write down a piece of wisdom?” I was walking around with this little note written in Chinese showing it to people to find out about there knowledge and wisdom. Now it goes on in the exhibition space. Visitors can also leave notes there on the table.
Nina Schuiki
17. Red thread, 2014
Intervention, elastic band (150 m), print (70 x 50 cm)
A red ribbon interweaves the inside and outside space of a thirty-two story apartment building in the Tianhe district – simultaneously threading a line through the high-rise pre-fabricated apartments and thereby manifesting visually the social fabric of the urban complex.
Yuichiro Tamura
18. Dream, I dream in forest, 2014
Mixed media from the urban forest
I slept for two nights in the urban village in Guangzhou, China. While asleep, I caught a strange dream. I told people I met about the dream. They offered objects to help realize the dream. I paid them for their things. The dream materializes.
Kat Valastur
19. Twelve faces of China, 2014
Video. Sound: Excerpt by Nick Land’s text „Circuits“, in „Fanged numena: Collected Writings 1987-2007“
Each face belongs to a process of disappearance, replaced by another face, it becomes a virtual pace through time.
Raul Walch
20. Untitled (City without ornament), 2014
Fabric, 170 x 220 cm
The series of fabric works focuses on the absence of ornaments in modern china. The outlines of the few visible patterns (such as metal bars on windows or cobble stones) in the cities’ architecture are transferred into textile pieces.
Euan Willams
21. The autonomous clock, 2014
What time is it on the Autonomous Clock? Where does the time go? Gaining 15 minutes to its conventional time-keeping everyday throughout the course of the day. Travelling eastward – an hour every four days. Perhaps you’ll synchronize – perhaps you’ll overlap. Please embed and spread it. Let’s all view this simultaneously.
www.theautonomousclock.com
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PERFORMANCES, Friday, 17.1.2014 from 7 pm
Followed by a gathering inside Vitamin Creative Space, common dumplings cooking, drinks, actions and performances:
Markus Hoffmann
Words about the World. The Mundane, 2014
A correspondence to the thoughts of Hu Fang
何穎雅 Elaine W. Ho
能坐好好的，为什么不站?, 2014 / Exhibition exercise, 2014
(English title: No. 2: What can a phrase such as ‘natural course’ mean anymore in a time of such intense production?)
Sitting down for the duration of an opening. Calling it a performance sets up a series of parameters for a willed physicality, passively received, curious interaction and a fixed perspective of concentrated observation, time withstanding.
Followed by evening drinks at the near by street vendors and performance by
Raul Walch
Street poem, 2014
Night performance
The poem is a collective sound work combining English and Chinese phonemes, activated through their simultaneous recitation by the participating audience.
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Exhibition Views