City in Transition





City in Transition is a German/Bulgarian exchange project initiated by the Goethe Institute in Sofia and the Association for Cultural Affairs in Foreign Countries in Berlin. Bulgarian and German artists and scientists worked for the period of one year on projects focussing on Sofia, on the political and social changes, and the way these changes can be perceived and interpreted. All projects share the approach of thinking in models when formulating a question and the play with an unknown variable – the city of Sofia, where the projects have emerged.

makePARADE

In makePARADE, an interactive video installation by team.metabolit (Dorothee Fichtmuller and Daniela Maria Hirsch), users can determine the course and the arrangement of a parade. From a heightened, cockpit-shaped desk, one person at a time can take command of makePARADE's sphere of control. Individual sequences of the parade, including the preparation and dispersal, can be triggered via specified buttons. More than 40 of these buttons allow the user to freely arrange the images and sounds that constitute the parade. The operating centre offers a new, playful approach to a traditional form of representation. The video material was shot during a Bulgarian parade, then it was split into individual sequences, turning the documentary material into a stock of freely combinable components. This changes a fixed dramaturgy into a selectable order of events. In abstraction, makePARADE evolves into the prototype for a universal parade.

Made in China

As a walkabout in a supermarket – the innocent tourism today – here are the photographs of Borjana Pandova and Ivan Nikolov. Plastic fairy tales about the mute horror we face the new dwellers of our dreams with: we all are aware that the real world is substituted by cheap useless plastic, that the logo substitutes for the meaning of the symbol, that the religion now has a certain price.
When you enter these photographs, and entering is inevitable due their size, you walk in world of false ratios – the Important becomes Boring, the Big becomes Small, your Necessity of Believing becomes a promotional pricelist of the Big Image Sale, but there is no Alice to lead you through the decisions – there are toys from the local bazaar. They freeze the necessity of thinking and consolation. You will get out of the walkabout with no scratch. Adventures are postponed for another epoch.

Sofia Time Travel Experiment

Horner/Antlfinger‘s point of departure for their project Sofia Time Travel Experiment, speaking with the unconscious social mind are the traffic surveillance towers of the police in Sofia. In a reversal of their original function, they serve the artists as viewing platforms from which to look into the future – from observation to imagining a possible future city. Their method is unusual: to facilitate unrestricted imagination, Horner/Antlfinger conducted several trance sessions in September 2005 with a group of Bulgarian and German participants, in cooperation with Jenia Georgieva and Roumen Georgiev, the directors of the Milton H. Erickson Institute in Sofia. Erickson, constructivist and founder of contemporary hypnotherapy, made use of mental time travels in order to evoke images from the past and to implement new perspectives as well as imagine alternative visions of the self in the future. During the trance sessions, the group undertook mental journeys to the city‘s past, present and future: the resulting inner images are documented in sound recordings and drawings. In the exhibition, a selection of this material is presented, framed by a specially designed architectural element.

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