FridayHave a mask!
Guide: Tom Schremmer


16:00Meeting at Johannaparkyou’re all invited to join the second discourse tour. today’s tour is different than yesterday. today the paths are much longer, we’ll have more time for discourse and interactions with ourselves. we’ll probably have significantly fewer people crossing our path today than on the first day. Johannapark is part of the central cultural park Klara Zetkin: it was built as a kind of botanical garden by Wilhelm Seyffert, who wanted to construct a memorial to his deceased daughter Johanna (21). yesterday, we talked about fragility as a march of mourning…
mourning seems to be something that is carried out collectively for many people, just like joy, it is a common experience. the mourning of the conservatives that things are not like they used to be. the mourning of the left that the future is not yet today. every demonstration is a march of mourning. every walk during the corona pandemic… freedom? 16:00Johannapark
Noé LeleuCOME, HURRY AND RUN, YOU FLEETING FEET, REACH THE HEAVEN THAT NO ELSE COVERS from Bach’s oratorio: … just before we discover that jesus is no longer “imprisoned”. he died for the people and is among them again. agile. fragile?
this performative installation is about permeability.
a curtain must be felted by foot for hours before it can be hung up.
like a membrane, or a heart valve, the curtain opens and lets the view in, onto the makers or straight through. the installation reminds me of the basic principles of Hannah Arendt’s Vita Activa: work, produce, act.
it is about the principles of creating and furnishing: why do people make things? the associated demarcation from nature with ownership. nature: open to everyone. the socialist nature? the biblical moment of knowledge is also directly linked to work. man creates his own garden as an inaccessible image of paradise. and even this garden wants to be protected. Arendt's Homo Faber (man who uses tools) builds his eden within nature instead of continuing to live in it, to understand it as paradise. why? by being able to recognize, do we act?
now we are in this park. are we in nature? or are we not ca 16:30Clara Zetkin Park • Brahmsplatz
Bernhard BormannNatursitz yesterday we already talked about the struggle of two Leviathans: Hobbes' anthropocene Leviathan and Latour's Gaia Leviathan. the installation seems only quite different. it suddenly reflects the artificiality of our nature. in germany, there' s probably no place that has not been influenced by humans. Hannah Arendt's Homo Faber has long since become Animal Laborans: he draws only from his own reified world. ever more riskily, he channels nature's energy into his vicinity in order to maintain huge networks and energy-guzzling infrastructure. he is removed from nature. and thus also from the sense of home of an Adam and Eve who must protect themselves from nature. and god gave them skins to cover their nakedness. the Animal Laborans' focus of fear is no longer on nature, but on other zoons within the politicon.
the government is to blame, not the pandemic.
the pandemic was even made by the government. isn't that a fantastic insight into our humanized natural world? for the 1897 industrial exhibition, the area was drained and exhibits were shown, e.g. a replica of the Wartburg or PoCs, in a so-called "n-word village". what exactly does the village have to do with industry in saxony?
demarcation between supposed "natural peoples" and civilization. self-aggrandizement? it was on display for a year and was not the only village of its kind in Leipzig. these villages were also on display at the zoo. huge halls were built in today's park area, similar to those used for the world exhibition in Paris. and the name?
Clara Zetkin - women's rights activist. together with Rosa Luxemburg, she created an important center for the women's rights movement in Leipzig. right next to Johannapark was the ADF Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women's Association). Henriette Goldschmidt founded the first "girls" high school on what is now Goldschmidtstrasse. the parallel street is named after Auguste Schmidt, an important writer who advocated for education for all: in 1865, together with Henriette Goldschmidt and Louise Otto-Peters, Helene Lange founded the Frauenbildungsverein (Women's Education Association) in Leipzig, from which the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Women's Association) then emerged. Louise Otto-Peters was perhaps the first important major publishing feminist in the German language from 1844, even before the first german parliament in Frankfurt am Main.
all these women are present in the cityscape in the form of street names and pictures and monuments, house names and memorial plaques.
as you walk, call to mind places and topographies, street names or all kinds of places that you can use as impulses during this tour. at the Sachsenbrücke. let's see this bridge metaphorically: we build a bridge, leave history behind us, the Schaudörfer, where PoC were exhibited, the street names, etc.
let's use the "veil of ignorance", according to John Rawls, which is supposed to establish the "original position" - meaning a fictitious state of the human being to make decisions without being distracted by various social influences. it is about social contracts: how can we exist together as a society? the rupture in many societies is big, topics like nature consciousness were (as already mentioned several times) also important in the 1920s, also a time of big social change.
now a unification without war has to succeed. decisions have to be made. in a world, which is increasingly determined by algorithms, which will make every decision for us: are we still us? our person? or are we algorithms? controlled readability, calculable?
perhaps it’s helpful...
to free yourself from all these influences with the veil of ignorance until the next station. ca 17:15Sophie WolfPORTAL OF COMMITMENT during the corona-lockdown there was a great deal of international solidarity with George Floyd: Black Lives Matter. as is so often the case, however, interest quickly died down again.
the artist wants to change this through her portal: with a thought experiment, but also physically. the portal leads into a parallel world.
it is just like this world, except that you decide for yourself whether you really stand up for what you have always wanted to stand up for in your everyday life.
it is, so to speak, also a portal of decisions. as you walk through the portal, you hear a sound collage of fragments and quotes from online interviews, lectures and video chats, with the writers and activists: Naomi Klein, a Canadian critic of globalism / Arundhati Roy, an Indian activist who speaks out against terror / Imani Perry, an interdisciplinary scholar who researches "race," law, literature, and African American culture / Robert Paul Wolff, anarchist and Marxist, who has long worked in the department of African American studies, and wrote an autobiography entitled "Autobiography of an Ex-White Man" / Assad Rehman, director of "War on Want," a free welfare organization whose goal is to eliminate poverty. it is a very long way to the next destination. let's reflect on what we have seen so far.
why do topics like race war in the USA and globalization suddenly overlap with nature-oriented architecture and nature consciousness in this topographical exhibition? are we simply an exhibition that throws together everything that is currently important? maybe. but there is a very concrete line leading from fragility, to the pandemic, to nature consciousness, to the socially intensified rupture - everything is shaking, we not only have the feeling of living in uncertain times, they actually are more fr-agile. a barcode as a sign for the sellout of nature Richard Wagner Hain
FELLIGRAM online presence makes appearing in reality much more difficult. no one moves through space the way they did before. we are like kings who are only seen in pictures and suddenly have to shine in real life as well. what does that do to our self-perception and our own activity when, through algorithms and this pandemic, certain images can no longer be "lived", when we have to stay at home? the common thread is the intrusion of the pandemic into the public space, it has revealed its fragility to us, and thus our own. a floating installation 18:30Kleine Luppe
Steph JoyceCARING & RELATING the raft floats with two 220L barrels, which makes its condition quite wobbly.
the artist will read a text about relationships, loneliness and the pandemic and experiences with the self, the interpersonal and the community during the COVID-19-pandemic. most of the text is about personal experience and the sudden moment of doing nothing, of not taking action, as Hannah Arendt does in her Vita Activa.
rather, the artist gives us a glimpse into her private feelings, similar to an introduction to her art. thus, quite different from the beginning of our tour, where everything functioned without language, here the innermost feelings are expressed with language, quite fragilely. unsteady on her raft, threatening to capsize: it is reminiscent of Boccaccio's "Il Decamerone," which gives precise insights into the lives of people in northern Italy during the plague epidemic: ten people gathered in a small house in the countryside, like a sinking ship. many people fled the cities on safe (?) rafts, with small goods, they came together to do nothing, stories were told. no current events, because nothing happened. that was it, then the people disappeared again and never came together again.

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