Provisional Studies: Workshop #7 How to live together, and sharing the unknown

A project by Koki Tanaka
This project was realized for Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017

2017

Action, workshop, and video documentation

Actors / Participants: Tasnim Baghdadi, Stephan Biermann, Isa Selçuk Dilmen, Annette Hinricher, Anna Mondain-Monval, JoAnn Osborne, Rolf Tiemann, Lina Zaher

Facilitators: Ahmad Alajlan, Kai van Eikels, Andrew Maerkle, Hendrik Meyer, Tami Yanagisawa

Location: Aegidiimarkt, Münster

For Skulptur Projekte, Tanaka asked eight residents of Münster from various generations and different cultural backgrounds to partici- pate in workshops for nine days. Based on Roland Barthes’s book of the same title, the central question was, how to live together?

Tanaka invited contributions from ‘facilitators’ acting as temporary guests and sources of inspiration.
A total of eleven video sequences document things such as the night spent together on mats in the gymnasium, cooking a wartime recipe, the interview and shoot with a globalization expert from Syria, and physical exercises in an old nuclear bunker. The camera crew was also told to capture all the breaks and interruptions. So we witness moments of exhaustion as well as the moments when stereotypical roles and argument patterns are initiated or set off. And we also see moments of irritation or displeasure. From the very beginning, the presence of a film crew transforms the participants into subjects in front of the camera and, as such, into a designated, temporary, and defined group of performers. During the shoot, Tanaka sees himself as the viewer and leaves it up to the participants to guide the process, including the decision to stop an exercise. Like the everyday objects in the workshop, the artist’s notes are an important part of the work and are designed as independent publications.

The contextual starting point of the project was also the location where it took place: the Aegidiimarkt complex across from the LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur. Built in the late 1970s, the building incorporates space for living, shopping, work, and leisure. Next to the adult education centre there is a car park for the section of the building frequented most. It was erected during the Cold War and until 2015 designated as a WMD shelter which could house three thousand people in the event of an emergency. Researching the history of the place, we discover how various communities gathered or lived together there: prior to 1819, there was a monastery on the same site that had been used as a military barracks since 1830. After being destroyed in World War II, the property remained vacant for quite some time. The lines of sight that visitors are offered from the standpoint of the installation are directly connected to the Aegidiimarkt across from it.

by Sophia Trollmann (Skulptur Projekte 2017)