Terremoto 11

Curators On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Curadores al borde de un ataque de nervios

Dorothée Dupuis (ed.)
Terremoto, Motto Books

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form documents the groundbreaking retrospective curated by Elena Filipovic with the artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal that traveled to Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in 2010 and 2011.

Open daily
15th — 22nd October 2017
2 — 8pm

DOC
‪26 Rue du Docteur Potain‬
75019 Paris

Motto is pleased to install a temporary bookshop at DOC Paris during FIAC. During its week of operation, the display of publications from all around the world will be accompanied by an extensive programme of events, including exhibitions, performances and concerts.

The bookstore will present a full range of backlist titles, including projects co-published with partners such as Bergen Kunsthall, CAC Geneva, ChertLuedde, Compagnia, Harun Farocki Institut, HEAD Geneva, MAO Ljubljana, Museo Fundacao Berardo, New Documents, Supportico Lopez, Terremoto, WIELS and zweikommasieben.

Next to these publications, artist’s editions by Sara MacKillop, Simon Popper, Erik Steinbrecher, and Jean-Michel Wicker will also be on display.

Motto Books’ main bookstore is based in Berlin-Kreuzberg, with a selection of more than 15,000 titles ranging from artist’s books, design, photography, poetry and theory. In recent years, Motto’s publishing activities have developed into releasing over 20 titles a year, with many books made entirely by the artists themselves.

The extra bookstore will be open daily at DOC Paris ‪from 2pm until 8pm‬, ‪from the 15th to 22nd of October‬.

Events:
Concert:
Martina Lussi (Live)
ZWEIKOMMASIEBEN DJs
‪Präsens Editionen book display
19.10.2017 6 — 10pm

Launch:
Rosie Ruiz Shortcuts to Fame
Lisa Guedel-Dolle
Motto Publishing
21.10.2017 4 — 8pm

Further programming:
http://doc.work/project_category/evenements/

In 1970, Trasov assumed the identity of Mr. Peanut, donning a handmade paper mâché replica of the mascot of the Planters Peanut Company. Soon after, he produced The Mr. Peanut Mayoralty Campaign of 1974, a twenty-day performance developed in collaboration with members of the Vancouver arts community. The legume quickly became Trasov’s cipher and central component of his practice. Mr. Peanut Drawings collects nearly a hundred of Trasov’s Peanut drawings together with a text by Nancy Tousley.

€40.00

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You Just Have to Experience It
Tuesday 4th July 2017
From 7pm
Motto Berlin

You Just Have to Experience It is a publication and event. It combines citations culled from the book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 to trace a history of the changing role of the spectator in art and exhibitions from Minimalism to Relational Art, and New Institutionalism to the present.

Produced on the occasion of the launch of Beyond Objecthood, this public talk in the shape of a performance reading presents a brief history of the exhibition as a critical form from the 1960s to the present, a form that inherently solicits spectators into temporal and spatial experiences and situations as indispensable components of the work.

The title refers to a statement by the American artist Tony Smith who recounts in a 1966 Artforum interview a ride on the newly minted New Jersey Turnpike, recalling a transformative nighttime experience of moving through space and time on the unmarked highway. This experience caused him to question the viability of art to represent something like that. You Just Have to Experience It uses this moment as a point of departure to explore how the criticality once posed by figures like Smith who solicited spectators into durational experiences in their work faces many challenges, not least of which is competing with the institutions that give it voice in an era when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

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James Voorhies is a curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art, as well as Dean of Fine Arts and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial practice that inhabits and connects with institutions, designers and publishers to realise projects with artists and writers. The projects forge intersections among art, design, education, and consumer culture to rethink how institutions address and engage spectators.

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Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968

Editors: Jennifer Sigler, Leah Whitman Salkin
Publisher: Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Pages: 208

“Run for Cover!”
No. 42
S/S 2016

Table of Contents:
Editor’s note: Dreadful Design
Jennifer Sigler
Wide Open
Nancy Etcoff
Fortress London: The New US Embassy and the Rise of Counter-Terror Urbanism
Oliver Wainwright
Feeling Invaded
John Kuo Wei Tchen
Gimme Shelter: Refugee Architecture in Germany
Niklas Maak
Phobia and the City: Rome
Lars Lerup
Holding Fear
Sonja Dümpelmann
Unsettling Unsettlements
Marianne F. Potvin
Anthropocenophobia: The Stone Falls on the City
Renata Tyszczuk
Solitary in Solidarity
Daniel D’Oca
Fear Ebbs on the Skyline but Rises on the Ground
Blair Kamin
Get Me Out of Here: The Solemn Geography of Women in Horror Film
Caryn Coleman
Reading Jane Jabobs in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter
Stuart Schrader
Un-War
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Animal Eyes & Invisible Hunters
Eugénie Shinkle
Fearful Asymmetry: Insurgency and the Architectures of Terror
Joshua Comaroff
Die Noctuque
Enrique Ramirez
A Certain Darkness
Demdike Stare & Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Who’s Afraid of the Covered Face?
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Artifacts of Exclusion
Interboro Partners
Fear Is in the Detail
Francesca Hughes & Gergely Kovács
The Iconic Ghetto and the Stigma of Blackness
Elijah Anderson
A Toxic Patrimony
Dan Borelli
The Green Zone: Architectures of Precarious Politics
Amin Alsaden
How to Draw Medellín
Alejandro Echeverri & Alejandro Valdivieso
Mortal Cities
Arna Mačkić
Bringing Back the Front: Relieving the Great War
Justin Fowler
Home Safe
Geoff Manaugh
The Fall of Postmodernism and the New Empowerment
Michael Murphy
Building for the Total Breakdown
Jacob Lillemose
A State of Emergency
Léopold Lambert
Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo
Laura Kurgan
Nuclear Pillowcases
Andrew Wasserman
The Real Move
Elizabeth Streb & Chelsea Spencer
Fear, Faith, and Disaster Preparedness
Arif Khan
The House of One: Facing Fear
Lara Schrijver
Pastiche of Ghosts
Metahaven
Second Nature
Ralph Ghoche
Suspunk: Thinking with Suspicious Packages
Javier Arbona, Bryan Finocki, Nick Sowers
The Horror, the Horror
Bart Lootsma
Robert Smithson, Evel Knievel, and the Landscape of Reclamation
Edward Eigen
Kites
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Feared Spaces, Feared Bodies
Toni L. Griffin
Fear, Fire, and Forty-One Snakes: Notes on the Burning Theater
Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen
Ambiguous Thresholds
Nuttinee Karnchanaporn

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There is a strikingly conspicuous high-rise building behind the Leipzig Central Station that contrasts with the city horizon. The 96 meters high tower, in a dignified shining pearl color, was first called Interhotel Merkur and is now The Westin Leipzig. With 27 floors it hosts more that 400 rooms with event and seminar spaces on separate floors, shops, restaurants. It’s a little city within the city.

In 2008, shortly after starting to study at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, I learnt that it is one of the few buildings that a Japanese construction company has build in German Democratic Republic in the late 1970s (there is two other constructions to be find in Dresden and Berlin). Something around and in this building triggered me to feel at home. When I saw it, I thought of the World Trade Center in Tokyo, from the top of which I enjoyed the Summer Festival of fireworks one day before my departure to Leipzig. So at that time I started to project my personal conflicts of a stranger in a new city on this huge building which became both a symbol of my hometown (even if, to be honest, there is nothing Japanese in its architecture) and of my frustrations.

With the celebrations of the 25 year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of GDR, I wanted to know more about this building. Until then I had just looked at it from a distance and I finally decided to enter the Interhotel Merkur after 6 years of observation. I booked a room for one night there, took my camera and opened the door.

The Four-star hotel was deserted. Its Japanese restaurant which was once the best in Leipzig had no guests. And a cleaning man said to me: « I have been working here since the opening of the hotel, it was full of business people from all over the world in the 1980s ». He also explained me that the hotel was a hotbed of “illegal” prostitution (however this prostitution took roll as the espionage). I went to the reception and asked: « I heard that this hotel was build by a Japanese company. Is that right ? » A young man answered: « never heard about that » but the next morning I found a letter in my room with that simple sentence : This hotel was built by the Kajima Corporation.

In the summer 2014 I visited the library of Kajima Corporation in Tokyo. The librarian, Ms. Oda, prepared for me archive photos of construction, company’s monthly report, and even confidential documents. She also introduced me to Mr. Shimazu who was in charge of the architectural design team and lived in Leipzig from 1978 to 1981. I got the opportunity to hear their anecdotes, like the event that happened on January 12th, 1979 when the construction office was robed and all the money (GDR-Mark) from the safe was stolen. Additionally one roll of 35mm film that was in the camera of Mr. Sako, a colleague of Mr. Shimazu, had been gone as well. The camera was still in the office, but it had been opened and the negative had vanished. What was photographed in Mr. Sako’s camera must be normally the hotel’s construction process but that disparition had something from a spy movie. They went to the police but neither cash nor the film have ever been back.

I have been photographing modern architecture in Germany since 2008 and I am continuing to shoot similar buildings depending on my trips. In the process of creation, there is always a logical decision on positioning three bodies: the architectural body, the machinal body (camera) and my own body (photographer). But with Interhotel Merkur, I was strangely so excited that I could not measure the distances between the different « actors ». This architecture has, for me, the presence of a real and existing body that contains its story and its emotion. The building has its own life (which I am probably projecting on it) and, therefore, is reluctant to my photographs. But, for the History it represents, for its architecture (between classical Plattenbau and Japanese brutalism), for its role in my personal life, I decided to give it a try, again and again, until I obtain the right portrait of that motionless character of concrete.

When I left the archive of Kajima Corporation after my third visit, the librarian said to me: « Thank you, you shed light on our work, which has been forgotten ». This made me understand the real meaning of my obsession for the Interhotel Merkur: I sensed a Japanese spirit (or a soul?) in Leipzig. And I need to follow it before it flies too far away.

*This essay was originally written by the artist, and edited by Thibaut de Ruyter, for the publication「Stadt Bild / Image of City」(Cooperation by Berlinische Galerie, Deusche Bank Kunsthalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Nationalgalerie-Staatlische Museen zu Berlin)

Japan in der DDR – Tamami Iinuma – Exhibition Opening 28.05.16 @ Motto Berlin at 6pm.

Even is a new magazine that interprets contemporary art, its structures and its environment. Published three times a year, Even features long-form articles that range from monographic studies to broad critical analysis; distinctive reviews that take in multiple exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide; and extensive interviews with artists and arts professionals.

Even seeks to break the deadlock between academic obscurantism on one side, and top-ten lists and party coverage on the other. With a unique and legible voice, Even revives the tradition of criticism for the twenty-first century.

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Questioning the physicality of space and the meaning of an object within its relation to a viewer, I tend to intertwine the viewer’s visual memory and imagination by repeating previous moments of an experience. The architectonic theatre features various objects and [theatro] expands on the notion of ‘view’ (‘thea’ in Greek, where the word ‘theatre’ comes from). The word ‘view’ is also the root of the word ‘theory’ [coming from the junction of the words ’thea’(=view) and ‘oro’( =to perceive)]. Intending the theory as practice, Ι composed [theatro] as an act of theory, asking ‘Does a de-construction of a composition inquire or does it request a knowledge of the past?’

[theatro] is a rhythmical reading experience, a 5.5 meters long transcript of a seminar performance reflecting it’s original pulse and duration. It is based on the seminar performance “PUZZLE”, that took place at FROWN, Athens initiated by Maria Lalou, consisted of Katerina Drakopoulou [A], Maro Zacharogianni [B], Maria Lalou [O], Mirrored Glass Object [X] and a live-feed camera. In this work Maria Lalou uses two software platforms for writing. Powerpoint for the pre-fabricated text and a live performed text on ‘Word’, both projected on the screen from her computer. [theatro] is verbatim transcription of the piece with several functions. Next to the documentation of the PUZZLE performance and a manual reading, it also serves as a script for the play, ‘I AM A ‘Φ’.

During the book launch in Motto Lalou will introduce the work with the lecture performance ‘theatre of consciousness’ a work based on a critical text that Lalou has written in 2013 for the academic press ‘activate’ published in London prior to the idea of [theatro]. The performance’ theatre of consciousness refers to the seen and the seer through an analysis that places the audience in a central position and as a core thematic of ‘the seen’.

[theatro] is published by Onomatopee launched primary in Eindhoven at Lalou’s solo exhibition ‘a spect’ during June 2015. The publication is designed in collaboration with Yin Yin Wong/Werkplats and includes an introduction to the work by Alena Alexandrova.

[theatro] leporello will be installed in its full length from the 19th November in the vitrines of Motto accessed through the public space. Lalou is producing a limited edition of prints of the floor plan ‘archetype’ which is one of her basic tools for this series of work, to will be installed in the exhibition space.

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Maria Lalou is an artist born in Athens in 1977. She works with the science of objects – containers, spatial installations, film and accumulated performances, developing context as of extensions of architecture. Lalou’s specialization at glass science has been evolving in contextualizing aspects of mass / surface / space/ time /duration in the sphere of cognition by challenging the bodily experience and questioning alignment of the vertical and horizontal, disposition and disorientation. She graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Fine Arts and from Technical University of Athens in Architecture, Design of Space – Object and Constructive Arts. She has been researcher at DasArts Amsterdam and an invited resident in e- mobilArt program for Interactive Artists. Lalou’s works have been shown amongst others in the Contemporary Art Museum of Thessaloniki during the 2nd Biennale of Thessaloniki, in ‘Technopolis’ Industrial Museum of Athens and at ‘Living Spaces’-2nd Contemporary Art Festival in Damascus, ‘Manobra’ Festival in Sao Paolo Brazil. She has been in collaboration with institutions as the E-Engineering of the Hogeschool of Amsterdam as an external adviser, with Roehampton Univesity in London as a writer on a post academic journal and an invited lecturer by Rijksacademie Studios in Amsterdam in 2012. For more info visit: http://reaction-lalou.com

Design: Ott Metusala. Advisor: Janice McNab. Amsterdam 2015

€8.00

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