Only Temporary. Structures in Flux

Projects by Botschaft e.V. (1990–1996)

Forfattere

  • Annette Maechtel neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin

Nøgleord:

Temporary, Project, Representation, Instituent practices, Botschaft e.V.

Resumé

Botschaft e.V. was an association of up to fifteen people at a time, which in the six years of its existence in East Berlin, from 1990 to 1996, produced a multiplicity of spaces, discourses, media, personal constellations and fields of practice. In 1995, the group was invited to documenta X by its artistic director Catherine David, but refused to participate because in their view it would have narrowed them down as a group of artists. Their agenda, instead, was a wide range of exhibition projects, video and film productions, Internet platforms, self-organized seminars, clubs and political activism, which was constantly developed further through new projects. However, these project-based ways of working have entered into a complex and often complicit relationship with flexible and precarious work contexts that Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello characterized as part of a “new spirit of capitalism” (1999). This perspective overlooked and ignored the political dimension of a purely temporary structural fixation. This paper will describe a practice caught between the conflicting processes of institutionalizating and instituent practices as exemplified by Botschaft eV.. A nuanced presentation of their micropolitics shows how their ability to resist questions of representation and temporary power relations allowed them to create possibilities for action.

Forfatterbiografi

Annette Maechtel, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin

Annette Maechtel finished her thesis and holds a Dr. phil. Degree from the Theorie department at HGB Leipzig on the topic: “Thinking the Politics of the Temporary. Forms of Temporary Space Production in Post-Wall Berlin with a focus on the group ‘Botschaft e.V.’ 1990-1996”. Diploma in Design/University Duisburg-Essen/Folkwang. Studies in Historical Urbanism/TU Berlin. Practice as an independent curator in the field of design, architecture and fine arts. Publisher of the online-Audio-Archive together with Heimo Lattner www.ibid.berlin. From 2017 to 2019 she has been working as a post-doc reasearcher at UdK Berlin and from march 2020 on she is the managing director of neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin. In Nov. 2020 b_books will publish her dissertation.

Referencer

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Publiceret

2020-12-11