Lichtenberg Studios

Fliegende Papierzeichen
In Lichtenberg I have walked around with papers whose function is to remove grease from the face. But I prefer to write on them.
I have treated them as if they were flying carpets, using a transparent and flexible foil that allows me to focus/title the place I pass by.
Lichtenberg is full of monuments and memorials. A signpost.
My papers seem to subtitle activities, events and people in history, forms of survival, attempts at emancipation. They are notes from a world that is interpretable but subject to fallacies.
The photographs I have taken of the hanging papers are leaps in the duration of time and also possible conversations.
In Berlin, aquariums always explode.

Rummelsburg depatrimonial
The group of drawings I have made at Lichtenberg Studios is fed by a series of stories drawn from my daily experience in researching the context in which I have lived.
The expulsion of the homeless from Rummelsburg Bay during the pandemic and the construction of the new aquarium hotel there.
The Rummelsburg labour camp and the last days of the war, from where the Mallorcan prisoner Sebastiá Santandreu left to place the Republican flag in Franco’s embassy and many other stories of those days.
The consultations in the museum’s archive – I had never slept on top of an archive before – revisiting the figure of Heiner Muller, whose scenography for his work Quartetto I made when I was very young, in 1990, has been a real reencounter.
My obsession with scores and chamber music that in Berlin holds up so well.
The texts that accompany the drawings are a poetic intervention, mediated by the translator. In a way they are introversions that respond to my infatuation with the beauty of the figure of the idiot, understood as the person who prefers the immanent life to any kind of snobbery or transcendence and lives ignoring all the zombie leisure that accompanies gentrification.

Settling Scores was a two-part public engagement that we facilitated toward the end of our one-month residency at Lichtenberg Studios. The idea driving these engagements, in which we invited participants to join us in walking, listening, and performing in public spaces, originated in our desire to share our perception of particular sites in Lichtenberg in non-invasive ways – specifically without the use of politically loaded objects such as cameras or microphones. The two engagements we offered took place in Neu-Hohenschönhausen and Karlshorst respectively, and for each place we wrote scores that participants would use to engage physically and playfully with their surroundings. Our aim was also to experiment with a technique for addressing the history of these sites in a non-didactic way, through which participants could ask questions and draw conclusions based on their own, personal experiences. We were very inspired by a workshop we attended earlier in our residency period, given by Elena Biserna, in which we discovered different walking scores written by artists.

Spontan Leben

(For beginners)

Go to a park or any other area where you feel safe and at ease. Look around you and find a place, person, or object you would like to interact with. Be spontaneous!

(For experts)

Go to all kinds of public spaces and perform small, spontaneous acts.

If you’re lacking ideas, try one from this catch-all list (which is not exhaustive):

Climb a tree
Call your friend from a phone booth
Dance with yourself
Give a big smile to a civil servant from your local tax office
Buy a transport ticket and offer it to someone
Send a postcard to your neighbour
Have lunch with strangers

Budget Tischtennis

Play table tennis using no equipment but the table itself. Play singles or doubles matches. Keep your scores. Play with intent. Play fiercely. Play to win.

For groups:

Those who are not playing should spectate the match and help to keep score. Imagine the movement, speed, and direction of the ball. Follow it with your eyes and your head. Your active engagement in the match will help to keep the players in the zone.