Eine Brücke kann Orte und Menschen miteinander verbinden, genauso wie ein Reisepass das Überschreiten von Grenzen ermöglichen kann. Doch was passiert, wenn Brücken zu Mauern werden und Pässe zu Grenzen?

Zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt in der Geschichte erfanden einige Menschen Nationen und nationale Grenzen. Diese von Menschen geschaffenen Trennungen orientierten sich manchmal an geografischen Grenzen wie einem Gebirge, einem Fluss oder einem Meer. Oft sind sie Ergebnisse von Krieg und Herrschaft und führten zu gewaltsamen Trennungen von Menschen und Land. Mit den Ländergrenzen kamen Pässe, Dokumente und Instrumente, um Reisen und Grenzübertritte zu dokumentieren und oft auch zu verhindern.

In der heutigen Welt haben wir nicht alle das gleiche Recht, uns zu bewegen und andere Orte zu betreten. Nicht alle Pässe sind gleich: Es gibt Pässe, die längere Reisen erlauben als andere, Pässe, die nur kurze Entfernungen zulassen, und Pässe, die eher einer Mauer als einer Brücke gleichen.
Warum dürfen manche Menschen reisen und andere nicht? Was bedeutet diese Bewegungs(un-)freiheit für die Menschen?

Die Oberbaumbrücke ist ein wichtiges historisches Wahrzeichen in Berlin, das im Laufe der Geschichte die paradoxe Funktion einer Mauer übernommen hat: eine Mauer, die die Stadt trennte, eine Mauer, die Menschen voneinander trennte. Heute gibt es glücklicherweise keine Mauer mehr und die Brücke fungiert als Brücke. Dennoch gibt es jeden Tag Grenzen, die Menschen und Orte voneinander trennen und Ungleichheiten schaffen.

In einem viertägigen Workshop mit der Künstlerin Daniela Medina Poch erstellen die Schüler*innen fiktive Reisepässe, um über die aktuelle Migrationspolitik und grenzüberschreitende Solidarität nachzudenken. Während dieser vier Tage werden wir uns mit der Frage beschäftigen: Was ist derzeit unzugänglich und sollte als Akt der Solidarität zugänglich gemacht werden?

Ein Projekt von Daniela Medina Poch in Zusammenarbeit mit dem FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum im Rahmen der “werkstatt denkmal” von Denk Mal in Berlin e.V.
Organisation: Jorinde Splettstößer

‘To un-know that green is green’ a collective exploration designed and conducted by Daniela Medina Poch around un-knowing as an experiment and method of investigation, un-knowing as an approach to embodied listening and interspecies entanglements; an experimental time-space in conversation with Berlin’s Tiefwerder Wiesen.

What inner and outer worlds can emerge from un-knowing?
Can un-knowing allow a wider listening and a more porous attunement to our environments? In which ways can the acceptance of not knowing contribute to de-canonizing hegemonic knowledge systems?

We wandered and wondered, we listened in many ways and we read excerpts of texts from Édouard Glissant, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Sana N’Hada, Francesc Tosquelles, Éricka Flórez, Donna Haraway and Daniela Medina Poch.

‘To un-know that green is green’ took place in the frame of Swamps & Stars a program curated by Planetary Listening.

How do we remember things?
How does the city remember its history?
What stories do children want to make visible?
What kind of monuments do they want to claim for their concerns?

These questions were the focus of the two-day workshop (October 29-30, 2022 at FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum) with artist:s Daniela Medina Poch and Pablo Santacana López. Children and adults explored in an accessible and dynamic way different ways in which people or a society remember.

This project is part of a series of artistic activations of the online platform “Kolonialismus Begegnen,” an archive initiated by the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum that gathers traces and voices on the postcolonial history of Berlin’s districts. It shows that colonialism is neither a historical event nor an exclusively academic or political concept, but rather a power structure that influences our present – a structure that we can change together.

How can art practice contribute to diversifying and democratizing the flow and visibility of statistical information? In which ways can statistics become a tool to account for the non-yet-visible and the non-yet-quantifiable? How can we forge cultures of grass-root statistics and how do we represent them? How do statistics contribute to the shaping of a socio-political context?

“Statistics on the Table: An Artistic Approach” is a research laboratory around the production, management and dissemination of statistical data nowadays. CO–RE hosted a program of three phases – input, research and output. During the initial phase, discussion sessions were held with guest experts on data science and statistics: the contextualization of Alexanderplatz (Stefanie Endlich), the project of Haus der Statistik (Dariya Kryshen), Statistics related with Violence as Commodity (Igor Vidor), Embodied Information and Data Humanism (Domestic Data Streamers), Statistical Numbing (Moritz Stefaner), Critical Cartography and Data Visualization (Orangotango).

As a follow-up, participants developed an investigation around statistics, concluded with on-site installations at the façade of Haus B, Haus der Statistik. The exhibition “What counts when we count?” is composed of artists, curators and cultural producers, many either alumni or presently students of the MA Kunst im Kontext at UdK

Joint workshop around whispers and secrets, landscape embodiment and non-linear recording and writing. After reviewing several referents of field receptivity, we developed some writing exercises that we later recited through tin and chord phones, making compositions that dialogued with the landscape and with other people present at the Floating University.

A visual artist and a designer explore the meeting points between the two disciplines to develop tools for appropriation and resignification of public space. Combining body-machine approaches, we seek to explore creative uses of new media approaches applied to relational dynamics in a certain context.

Aiming to strengthen the relationship of the artistic center with the surrounding ecosystem, all interventions are thought to be at a one-to-one scale. At the end of the workshop, we propose to make a small exhibition in order to socialize the process and the outcomes.

How to think in alternative networks between inhabitants and passers-by who share a public space?How do grass root movements change top down infrastructure? How do public and private spaces intermingle through performativity?

Which non-hegemonic systems of value can we think of through the framework of contemporary art? As art practitioners, which alternative system can we build to revalue our work without having to commit to the rules of the existing system?

Often the relationship between art and finance represent an oxymoron. Despite the fact that art is a multimillionaire business ($66 Billion dollar industry (2016)) and quite precarious at the same time, the romantic idea of the artist who remains ‘pure’ and out of the economical system seems to remain valid. Art business works under a different logic than other businesses do, and to make art practice sustainable, contemporary artists – producers of a commerciable subjectivity – need to know how to relate to this financial dimension.

This lab comes from the need to reflect, demystify and understand the relationship between arts and finance, while questioning some paradigms the lab aims to host a space to conceive non-hegemonic systems of value and strategies of fnancial subversion. The Fine Art – Finance Lab has been developed by Daniela Medina Poch and Juan David Galindo and it has been presented in three versions: Fine Art – Financ€ Lab Amsterdam – April, 2016 at 4Bid Gallery at OT301, Amsterdam, NL as 5-day workshop which involved local lecturers, performances and an exhibition. Within the program Money Lab3 on December, 2016 at Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam we presented our series of performances together with Igno Notemans. Laboratorio de Arte y Dinero IDARTES – November, 2017, Bogotá, the program was included as a program of the district and together with Fundación Arteria we organized a complex and diverse 15-day workshop that took place at the theater of the Museum of Modern Art and other ephemeral locations in Bogota, Colombia.

How can we use the frame of art to expand and diversify the action of protesting?

In the first part we will deal with the relation object-performance-protest. Oranges, toilet paper, a bottle of wine, a candle… from a daily life point of view, any object is subject to symbolize our struggle or what we fight against. In the second phase we examine the case of the Puerto Rican Perreo Combativo, the power of Reggaeton as a catalyzer of protest and of national strike. From this point we build together and perform a Reggaeton song.

Both performance and protest go beyond representation. Both seek to manifest a statement through the presence of the body within a context that becomes transversal to the action and dialogue with the present realities. The workshop seeks to encourage citizen participation in micro-politics by acting creatively to react upon the disagreements or pursue ideals which deal with our context. Everyday objects, songs and subjects will be brought up as ingredients of our collective performance session.

Within the framework of the Second encounter of Objects and Walls Tlaxala 3 and Institute of Endotic Research

Based on the drifts of Baudelaire and Guy Debord, this workshop proposes the exploration of a territory under affective and poetic criteria. At the same time, it seeks to promote interaction between passers-by and contribute to link the art institution with the surrounding neighbourhood.

Special thanks to Alberto Campuzano and the students of Universidad Departamental de Bellas Artes.