2-3 streets

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House on Hans-Böckler-Platz, Mülheim
Oesterholzstrasse, Dortmund.
Sankt-Johann-Strasse, Duisburg.

2-3 streets. An exhibition in cities in the Ruhr area by Jochen Gerz was part of the RUHR.2010 project , which represented the Ruhr area as the European Capital of Culture . Selected participants from several countries, to whom rent-free apartments were made available, wrote as authors on a joint text. The aim of the work was to change the streets. A total of 887 people have become authors, and their work has left many marks on the streets.

exhibition

Jochen Gerz 's concept was created in 2006 on behalf of the NRW cultural secretariat . After that, three completely normal streets with vacancies in three cities in the Ruhr area were to become art and an exhibition for a year. 78 creatives were invited to live rent-free in the exhibition for a year and to write a joint text that would be published in book form at the end of the year. Since basically everyone could take part in this creative process, the tendency of the work was just as unpredictable as the development of social relationships and changes in the streets: "We write ... and in the end my street will no longer be the same."

As an exhibition, reality - everyday life in the streets - should become the object of aesthetic experience. The audience of the Capital of Culture and the residents of the region have been practicing the visitor school in 2-3 streets, based on Bazon Brock's visitor schools, since documenta 4 (1968) . Sociologists, cultural scientists and urbanists conduct scientific studies, and the media coverage sheds additional light on the otherwise rather marginalized neighborhoods. In return, new publics emerge on site, in which the street forms an image of itself. The project was designed as a social process that is unique in the art landscape and aims not only at changing the streets, but also at the art. It presupposes the creativity and authorship of the whole society as a basic condition of contemporary culture.

procedure

Two years after the artistic concept came into being , the exhibition was held in three of the five originally interested Ruhr area cities - Duisburg , Mülheim an der Ruhr and Dortmund . In one street each, vacant properties were renovated and made available rent-free for a year. The streets were typical of West German post-war cities and did not contain any particularities worth mentioning. The only selection criterion was that they are located in a neighborhood that is "being renewed, changed or newly created, renovated, rehabilitated or rededicated."

The capital of culture, the Ministry of Building and Transport , the Ministry of Economy, SMEs and Energy as well as the local housing associations participated in the financing . The profiles of the quarters were different in each city. In Mülheim, 13 apartments from the 3rd to 20th floor of a renovated high-rise building at the train station (Hans-Böckler-Platz 7/9) were part of the exhibition, in Duisburg-Hochfeld , an old working-class district, 20 apartments in Saarbrücker Straße / Sankt- Johann-Straße, and 24 apartments in the north of Dortmund not far from Borsigplatz , in the square between Schlosser- and Oesterholzstraße.

In response to the advertisement inviting the participants (“Basic salary: one year rent-free living”), which was placed in real estate portals, daily newspapers and cultural magazines at the end of 2008, 1,457 interested parties answered. This was followed by a one-year e-mail exchange with the candidates, which enabled them to deal with the project at an early stage. The criterion for participation was the motivation to design one's own foreign environment for a year and to write regularly on the joint text. From the applications from 30 countries (and four continents), 78 participants were ultimately selected. Their number resulted from the number of apartments provided by the cities.

The move began in autumn 2009, the artistic work on January 1, 2010. On site and in a coordination office in Essen, 20 employees worked with the participants for a year and supported the development of numerous projects with the neighborhood. By the end of the year, over 1,300 people were touring the streets. 887 authors wrote together in 10,000 articles on 3,000 pages. Under the aspect of sustainability, a continuation beyond the art context was named as one of the project goals.

Writing the text

“2-3 Streets TEXT” is the result of uncontrolled collective authorship . Residents, passers-by and visitors took part. All contributions followed on from what had already been written in chronological order and merged into a single continuous text over the course of the year. All contributions that came from the authors themselves and had not previously been published were taken into account.

The text was created using browser-based software and saved in a central archive that could not be viewed when it was written. Only a monitor in the Folkwang Museum showed briefly word for word at the moment of the recording in the archive. The authors were unable to recall their contributions, correct them or explicitly follow up on the preceding. By always starting anew, a permanent present was created in which an ongoing process is depicted. “The process is similar to that of the cut-up , with the difference, however, that here no text was cut up and reassembled, but rather heterogeneous 'cuts' were made by the writers and serially merged on the computer. In this way a document was created that brings the simultaneity and polyphony of reality to a more radical and direct view than all previous attempts in experimental literature have been able to do. "

The work did not become known to its authors until after the end of the year with the publication of the book. Your contribution as a polyphonic, 16-language monologue becomes a "river without banks."

change

Perhaps “2-3 Streets” shows more than the current possibilities of art and literature . The work not only detects the changes in the social self-image of culture, economy, urban development, but provokes them. It is based on the observation that people in a heterogeneous “cultural society” orient themselves less as spectators towards traditional culture (regardless of the provenance), but rather inform and constitute it in the media. The longing for self-insurance seems to be just as great as the reluctance to follow traditional patterns. The resulting tension uses "2-3 streets" twice. On the one hand, the work tests what the practice of art can be under these circumstances. On the other hand, she pursues the change in the environment itself as a goal of the experiment, which does not see itself as art alone. The prerequisite for this is the expansion of the concept of the author into the area of ​​the inactive audience. Authorship is understood as one's own creative contribution to the public as well as to one's own life, and participation in the cultural society of everyone.

“Social creativity” has proven to be a sustainable practice. After the end of the exhibition on December 31, 2010, half of the participants from "2-3 Streets" on Dortmund's Borsigplatz decided to stay together and continue the work in the street under the name "Borsig11" on their own initiative.

literature

  • Jochen Gerz (Ed.): 2–3 streets. An exhibition in cities in the Ruhr area by Jochen Gerz . Text and making-of tape. DuMont, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8321-9374-4 .
  • Jochen Gerz: 2-3 streets. An exhibition in cities in the Ruhr area (artistic concept, 2006, PDF file: 160 KB )
  • European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010: Book two . Klartext, Ruhr 2010 GmbH, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8375-0316-6 .
  • Davide Brocchi, Marion Eisele (2011): The exhibition “2-3 Streets” - Report on the accompanying social science study. Düsseldorf: Institute for Art History of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, n.V. (excerpt from: PDF file: 0.6 MB )

Web links

Commons : 2-3 streets  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Jochen Gerz: Concept 2-3 Streets, in: 2-3 Streets MAKING OF, ed. v. Hermann Pfütze, DuMont, Cologne 2011.
  2. ↑ Ralf Georg Czapla : … a simultaneous tangle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms , in: 2-3 Streets MAKING OF, ed. v. Hermann Pfütze, DuMont, Cologne 2011.
  3. ↑ Michael Kohler: River without a bank. In: fr.de . November 29, 2010, accessed November 18, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Hermann Pfütze: Art disappears in society - the exhibition "2-3 Strassen" by Jochen Gerz during the European Capital of Culture Ruhr 2010 , in: Kunstforum International, vol. 206, 2010, p. 198ff.
  5. ↑ Feasibility Borsig11 eV [1]