Limin-alley at Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

By Sara Bellini

“A successful city is an entity that is continually reconfiguring itself, changing its social structure and meaning, even if its contours don’t look very different” writes Deyan Sudjic in The Language of Cities. By successful, he means a city that is lively and functioning, where citizens not only feel safe and secure, but they feel like they belong. Well-maintained structures and infrastructures connect and serve people’s lives and “legible, handsome, easily negotiated public spaces make the individual feel part of something that they share with the rest of the city”.

The conversation on how we imagine the future of the city is at the core of Imagine! Belfast, a free festival about politics, culture and activism, promoting under-represented voices and equality. The annual event is now at its seventh edition and will run from the 22nd to the 28th of March, featuring talks, film, music, drama, readings, exhibitions, discussions and workshops. Highlights include an interview with Noam Chomsky and the possibility to pitch in ideas on how to change Belfast in the initiative Build Belfast Back Better. Due to the pandemic, all of the events are online, which means that anyone living elsewhere can join, with special exhibitions taking place in real life. 

One of them is Limin-alley, a group exhibition where eight local artists and designers are called to create site-specific pieces in “entries” (alleyways) across South and East Belfast. The project is a collaboration between 9ft in Common, developing a Belfast Alley Map, and Liminal [Space] Belfast, a platform for pop-up exhibitions in liminal spaces. The locations of Limin-alley, the alleyways between Belfast’s terrace houses, were chosen because of their potential for civic activism, due to their very nature of in-between spaces, neither completely private nor exactly public. The artworks will be on display between the 25th and 28th of March and will be introduced with an online talk by project partners Amberlea Neely, Aisling Rusk and Meadhbh McIlgorm on the 25th. Images of the exhibition will be available on the website of Liminal [Space] Belfast after the end of the festival.

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Although Limin-alley and the whole festival are Belfast specific, the themes and ideas are easily relatable. During the pandemic, as a consequence of the lockdown, the social fabrics of our cities have changed. The way we use public space has changed. The way we perceive togetherness. Even the way we experience the places we’ve always deemed safe, our own houses, where suddenly we have to spend more time than we deemed possible and at the same time we have to follow strict rules about whom we can allow in or about whom we can visit. Now more than ever, we need to imagine what could be and how we share our collective spaces, both physically in our cities and metaphorically in determining who gets to express themselves in politics, culture and public life.

To find out about all the events and to donate in support of the non-profit organisation behind the festival, please visit Imagine! Belfast
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Michael Schmidt at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) by Michael Schmidt

By Sara Bellini

When I think about the photography of Michael Schmidt, I think of Berlin. I think of his shots of Wedding* and of the Werkstatt für Photographie (Photography Workshop) he founded in Kreuzberg* in the 1970s. But you could argue that what really captures the attention in his photos is not the subject, but the way it’s presented.

Michael Schmidt was a policeman and a self-taught photographer. Some of his first notable works were commissioned by the Berlin Senate or districts of the city, as if the city commissioned him to reflect on itself. If we look at these series, like The Working Woman in Kreuzberg (1975), we see a documentary style, which became more and more abstract over the years.

The exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart is the first retrospective in Michael Schmidt’s native city in over twenty-five years. It encompasses forty years of photography, between 1965 and 2014, and it shows Berlin shifting from the post-war period to division to a re-unified city, tapering out in his last project on nature. Cityscapes, portraits, backyards, human bodies, pigs and apples find their place in the rooms of the station-turned-museum. From Wedding to Kreuzberg, from Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) to Ein-heit (U-ni-ty), from Stadtbilder (Cityscapes) to Lebensmittel (Food), from Frauen (Women) to Selbst (Self) to Natur (Nature), each project and aspect of Michael Schmidt as a photographer is there. And yet he always evades our complete understanding at the last moment, as if our reading of his work was never exhaustive.

Natur (Nature) by Michael Schmidt

I would recommend following the chronological order conceived by the curators to fully appreciate a changing city as well as Michael Schmidt’s evolution as an artist; from black and white to sporadic colour units to pictures of pictures and cropping techniques. From ‘The Wall’, that makes it clear where and when the image belongs, to a close-up on an anonymous wall that could be anywhere. I find it somehow poetic that Michael Schmidt’s final art book, published when he was already seriously ill, focused on the beauty of nature, transcending the urban landscape and ultimately human life itself.

The exhibition will reach first Paris and then Madrid in 2021 and will end in Vienna in 2022. Berliners will be able to see it until January the 17th, wearing a face mask and after buying a time-slot ticket - online or at the venue. Check out the SMB website for up-to-date opening hours and health measures. 

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* Wedding and Kreuzberg are districts of Berlin

The Welcome Chorus at Turner Contemporary, Margate

Image © Yuri Suzuki / Pentagram

Preview by Sara Bellini:

Yuri Suzuki is a Margate-based sound artist, designer and musician that uses sound to examine the relationship between people and their environment. As part of the festival Margate NOW, he was commissioned by Turner Contemporary, in collaboration with Kent Libraries, to create an interactive installation that will be activated for the duration of the Turner Prize opening on 27 September. 

The Welcome Chorus features twelve horns, representing the twelve districts of Kent and paying homage to the etymology of the county’s name: the Brythonic word ‘kantos’, meaning horn or hook. Twelve libraries all over Kent offered workshops open to everyone that gave the participants the possibility to record lyrics based on the different sides of their Kentish experience, encompassing history to landscape to migration. The recordings were processed by an AI software and will be reproduced by the horns installed at Turner Contemporary. The AI technology will be active throughout the exhibition to record the visitors’ voices, expand its own database and interactively change the installation itself. 

Turner Contemporary is also hosting another exhibition focused on Kent, belonging and identity. Barbara Walker has been artist in residence since April 2019 and from September until the following April she will present her artwork Place, Space and Who, featuring portraits and sound recordings centred on five women from the African Diaspora living in the Margate area. Barbara Walker’s works are the product of her experience growing up in the Black community in Birmingham and try to address the questions of race, gender, class, identity, belonging and (mis)representation.

The Welcome Chorus
28 September 2019 - 12 January 2020
Turner Contemporary, Margate (Google Maps)
Turner Contemporary Website

Home Where Home Is Not, at Glasgow Women's Library and Platform

Interregnum n.1, laser cut puzzle bricks, cork and wood, by Sogol Mabadi, 2018 / Photo Credit: Iman Tajik

By Sara Bellini:

Home Where Home Is Not is the brilliant title of an exhibition that combines the works of two Glasgow-based artists, jointly organised by the Glasgow Women’s Library and Platform. Sogol Mabadi and Birthe Jorgensen, both born outside the UK, explore the concept of ‘home’ in a context where people move freely and their identities are shaped by their multiple homes. 

Both Platform and Glasgow Women’s Library are arts centres involved with the local community and aiming at fostering creativity and making art accessible to everyone. The exhibition includes wood sculptures, sound art and installations and will be open until 3rd August in both locations. Admittance is free. 

As part of the exhibition, on Thursday 18th the artists will talk about Languages of Belonging with Amanda Thomson, visual artist and author of A Scots Dictionary of Nature. On Sunday 21st writer and director Julia Lee Barclay-Morton will give a performative tour of the exhibition in both locations. Check the websites about opening times and event tickets:

Glasgow Women's Library
Platform

The People's Forest

We’ve been following The People’s Forest project with interest, rooted as it is in place and what it inspires. Co-curated by Kirsteen McNish and Luke Turner, The People’s Forest includes a programme of events, talks, gigs and artistic collaborations, and continues the history of great writers drawing inspiration from nature and the outdoors to present a literary programme designed to seek out new writing related to Epping Forest – London’s strange and wonderful woodland, and its unique history that has been shaped and maintained by man.

As part of the project,  Faber New Poet and Caught by the River poet-in-residence Will Burns will create a series of new works inspired by Epping Forest. Over the year Burns will pen a collection of poems, one per season, in part reflecting on the unique nature of Epping intertwined with his own experience of the forest real and imagined, and we are extremely pleased and proud to announce that we will be publishing one of the forthcoming poems here on the Elsewhere: A Journal of Place blog.

Burns has proposed a long walk from Wendover Woods to Epping Forest, revisiting the physical act that his mother made in her lifetime, and as a family unit twenty years ago. This journey will in part shape the latter part of the series and will revisit family history, memory and these two forests many miles apart. This journey will cross the rivers and chalk streams and hillsides of this odd and lost middle land between the capital and the bulk of the country. He will also be exploring what this strip of lush, wooded country means - this dividing line, in this divided time.

Will’s first poem “The Word For Wood” appeared in Caught By The River’s online journal in March that conjures up themes of isolation, crisis and crossroads:

The fertility symbols of other, older cultures
harass me through the cold wood.
The sounds of jackdaws going berserk
(though the sound is not their name…).
I might as well come clean—
all this is to impress somebody else
though they have long given up interest.
First I read they had left the conversation,
then I watched them leave the house,
finally I heard they left town

Speaking about the project and his connection to the location, Burns said:

“Epping Forest has loomed strange in my imagination since childhood. I grew up just outside its shadow, in Enfield, and my mother was born in Epping itself without ever knowing the place. Since moving out of London at 10, I have always loved woods – either 'my own’ out here in Wendover, or others that I’ve visited. They are places unlike any other in our imaginations and I feel as if there is a whole chapter of my memory linked to that part of London but somehow missing. I hope to recover it through a year of walking and thinking and writing in the forest.”

We are really excited to read more from Will as the project continues and we hope to bring more from The People’s Forest to our readers in the coming months. For the full programme of events taking place, click here.

100 Years Bauhaus: Bauhaus Museum in Weimar

Foto: Andrew Alberts, © heike hanada laboratory of art and architecture 2019

This year marks the centenary of the Bauhaus, and there are celebrations taking place all around the world – anywhere, in fact, that the design school’s influence can be felt. In Weimar, the city where it all began back in 1919, a new museum has opened in a building designed by Heike Hanada and inaugurated earlier this month.

The intention of the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar is to be both a dialogue with the past and an interrogation of the future, and developed around the fundamental question: “How do we want to live together?”* In an echo of the founders of the Bauhaus, questions of how we build a society and where art and technology, architecture and everyday life function together, are key themes of the new space.

As a reflection on the past, present and future, the location of the Bauhaus Museum itself, close to the Nazi Gauform and the Jakobsplan student accommodation from the GDR, is a reminder of how the political-economic landscape, architecture and community life are always intertwined.

Bauhaus Museum, Weimar (Google Maps)
From April 2019
Museum website

*Wie wollen wir zusammenleben?

Exhibition: Queer Spaces at Whitechapel Gallery

Ralph Dunn / Public Toilets / 2004 / Photograph: Courtesy the artist

How has the London cityscape influenced the social life of the LGBTQ+ community in the past thirty years? And what are the effects of the current redevelopment plans on queer spaces? These are the core questions explored in the exhibition Queer Spaces: London 1980s – Today, which opened at the Whitechapel Gallery on 2 April.

The exhibition includes the ongoing research on queer venues compiled by UCL Urban Laboratory from 1986. Parallel to this archive, works focussed on the recent past are presented by contemporary artists like Tom Burr, Evan Ifekoya, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Prem Sahib and Ralph Dunn.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings / The Scarcity of Liberty #1 / 2016 / Cork board mounted on wooden frame,magazine pages, pins / Courtesy the artists and Arcadia Missa

In the past decade around half of the LGBTQ+ venues in London have shut down due to rising rents and capitalistic ventures. This exhibition aims to show why identity-specific cultural infrastructures are important and what is threatening them, and how the diverse queer community contributes to London activism, creativity and self-expression.

Queer Spaces: London 1980s - Today
Whitechapel Gallery, London (Google Maps)
2 April - 25 August 2019
Exhibition website

Like Home

In our home town of Berlin, Catherine Marshall visits an exhibition that explores notions of place and home through the work of different artists:

In a grand corner apartment block in Berlin’s Mitte near Friedrichstraße, eleven artists with a connection to South America and Berlin have set up temporary home, or ‘Like Home” as the exhibition is titled. It is organised by the project Loop Raum, and the focus of the work is on abstraction, patterning, repetition and colour. Visiting it transported me back to the time of abundant unrenovated spaces in Berlin, where you might come across pop-up exhibitions in unusual places and have the pleasure of discovering the unexpected. Stepping into the the first-floor apartment where the exhibition is held, the space exudes the former grandeur of its Grunderzeit architecture with its high ceilings, intricate stucco and beautiful parquet flooring. At the same time, the rooms are damp and cold in places, the corridors are quite spooky and maze-like and plaster lies exposed with remnants of wallpaper from bygone years. We start to explore.

Carla Guagliardi / "O Lugar do ar" (The place of air)

In the first room, we see a delicate kinetic sculpture of iron rods supported by rubber bands that crisscross the entire room by the Brazilian artist Carla Guagliardi.  A piece called "O Lugar do ar" (The place of air), its structure imposes a new language over the room with its potential to shift and change shape. It's material and formal abstraction is incongruous to the historicist style of the room, yet it reinvents it. It is not solid and fixed, yet it has a strong presence. When we endeavour to make a new city feel like home, we wish to carve out a space for ourselves, both physically and mentally. Due to economic necessity, a transient way of life can also become a permanent state.

We turn the corner down a long corridor where a small drawing by Columbian artist Carlos Silva from his ‘Mazy Drawing’ series hangs. Its overlapping squares of blue ink appear to have been made with a scraping technique. The wall it hangs on carries its own marks: Swathes of white filler on plywood and torn wallpaper edges. The work draws attention to the layers of workmanship and materials of the flat itself. In this show, many of the artworks resonate with the apartment itself, its ghosts and history, making us question who might have lived here. It reminds us also that home is never static, is not just located in place but also in time. 

Carlos Silva / "Mazy Drawing II"

Leaving the corridor, Chilean artistGonzalo Reyes Araos’ grid-like “RGB Painting” revels in glitches that might appear on a computer screen, except that this is reproduced here meticulously in paint. It’s as if the romantic landscape genre of the eighteenth century practiced by artists such as Caneletto has been updated. Instead of architectural ruins we have crumbling technology. Have we passed the threshold where our home screens feel more like home than our actual home?

Other works in the show play with optical illusion, geometric forms and seem to want to reach beyond the boundaries possible between four walls or even within the limits of their own frames. Carla Bertone’s colourful painting ‘Turgoxid’ looks as if origami paper has been folded and refolded in a quest to reach the limits imposed by the square, if there are any. Maria Muroz’s “Lemniscata” is a play on the mathematical symbol of an infinity loop. Close up, however the progression of colour through the figure of eight is not so straightforward. New angles and colours become apparent, questioning our own logic.

When you move city or country or live between places then perhaps there is ‘no place like home’. Instead it is something better, a plurality of homes, experiences, memories, friends and origins. We have moved on from Dorothy’s trance-line repetitions of “there is no place like home” as she returns to her Kansas’ origin. We prefer the uncertainty of Oz, and its new possibilities. In ‘Like Home’ I felt these artists might enjoy that notion too.

The exhibition ‘Like Home’ has been extended to July 21 and has been expanded to include an additional fifteen more artists. It can be seen at GLINT, Glinkastraße 17, 10117. The show was originally paired with another project called ‘No Place’ with the joint title ‘No place/ Like Home’

Borders and their consequences: Introducing 'the corridor'

Image: Vera Drebusch

The Corridor is a new project from Ireland exploring borders and their consequences. One of the founders of the project is the Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger, who we asked to introduce the project and the first events and actions that will be taking place in the coming months:

Who needs borders anyway?

For a year now, my wife Anne and I live in Dundalk in Ireland. We moved here for a variety of reasons: to live and work in a smaller town away from the molochs of Berlin and Dublin (where renting out has become impossible anyway), to live by the sea, to be close to my office. We knew that we would be moving next to one of the main Brexit-faultlines, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The longer we live here, the more we've become fascinated with the history of our new hometown and worried about what the future might hold for the communities north and south of the border. As a writer & journalist and a curator & arts manager coming from a country which was defined by a border for several decades, we now want to explore the area through both our fields of expertise, and have created 'the corridor'.    

'the corridor' is an interdisciplinary and discursive project that which explores borders and their political, social and cultural consequences through a series of public talks, screenings and exhibitions. With artists from all fields, historians, sociologists, contemporary witnesses and other experts we want to discuss the history of the Irish border and the future challenges of the upcoming EU border for this area. Our first event series is a collaboration with the 1. Deutsches Stromorchester (1st German Electrophonic Orchestra), and you can find more details on our website. Coming events will include a fish dinner with fishermen from both sides of the border initiated by German artist Vera Drebusch, and an exchange about walking borders between Elsewhere editor-in-chief Paul Scraton and Irish writers Garett Carr and Evelyn Conlon. 

To paraphrase Jan Morris, if race is a fraud, then nationality is a cruel pretense. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of the corridor between Belfast and Dublin shows, it is disposable. You can find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. So who needs borders anyway?