Rotterdam was very badly destroyed during the Second World War, a fact that can still be felt today. Since its reconstruction in the 1950s, the city has been an experimental field for modern architecture.

Photographer Annette Kisling spent a year in Rotterdam in 2003 and gave her photographic impressions of the city’s multi-layered, lively, and at the same time fragile appearance. She continues her work in Rotterdam from 2017 to 2023. The city has changed a lot in the meantime. Diversity has remained Rotterdam, but a new exclusivity has been added. The city is focusing more and more on densification and economic upgrading.

With Verplaatst, an extensive photographic series has been created that gives a complex impression of the city’s development. The publication of the same name comprises a selection of 174 photographs that Kisling has compiled especially for the e-book.

The post Verplaatst Edition appeared first on EECLECTIC.

Rotterdam was very badly destroyed during the Second World War, a fact that can still be felt today. Since its reconstruction in the 1950s, the city has been an experimental field for modern architecture.

Photographer Annette Kisling spent a year in Rotterdam in 2003 and gave her photographic impressions of the city’s multi-layered, lively, and at the same time fragile appearance. She continues her work in Rotterdam from 2017 to 2023. The city has changed a lot in the meantime. Diversity has remained Rotterdam, but a new exclusivity has been added. The city is focusing more and more on densification and economic upgrading.

With Verplaatst, an extensive photographic series has been created that gives a complex impression of the city’s development. The publication of the same name comprises a selection of 174 photographs that Kisling has compiled especially for the e-book.

The post Verplaatst appeared first on EECLECTIC.

Cultural scientist Angela McRobbie, who has been following Turanskyj’s work for a long time, introduces the material. The script is supplemented by preparatory material for the shoot from the filmmaker’s estate and by unpublished film clips.

“The first inspiration for my film was Richard Sennet’s book ‘The Corrosion of Character’. Sennet describes the harsh demands of postmodern capitalism on the individual. […] The more affirmative female characters – the City of Women – are contrasted by my heroine. She is a critic and doubter who tries in vain to adapt to the circumstances without losing her autonomy and dignity. But it is made clear to her that this can no longer be done – the price of adaptation would be the abandonment of her critical attitude towards the world.” Tatjana Turanskyj

The publication is published as a memorial and a call to “carry on” (weitermachen*) on the first anniversary of Tatjana Turanskyj’s death on 18 September 2022.

The post Eine flexible Frau – Drehbuch und Materialien appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations I–V (Buch) appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations (Special Edition) appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations, Part V: Oversocialised – The Operating and the Informing Artist appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations, Part IV: Everything is Original / Nothing is Original appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations, Part III: Who is the Owner of Meaning? appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations, Part II: Disko-Diskurs-Objekt appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This is about the search for the sculptural conditions of what reality provides and the historically invisible. About how we can react to urban space in a situational-spatial and performative-materialised way. What does it mean artistically (but also for urban planning) to be active in public space, if you are interested in being socially effective?

All these approaches, temporary developments and implementations are done with different partners on site and with various authors.

Starting in Rome, where Erik Göngrich was residing from September 2018 to July 2019.

The post Atlas of Sculptural Situations, Part I: Dov’è Roma appeared first on EECLECTIC.

On 4 April 2016, around forty people gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin Mitte. Most of them had attended the site’s dedication in 1986—the lived history of a place whose meaning has consistently been denied.

In the 1950s and 60s the site was earmarked for a high-rise tower for the East German government yet this never materialized. Then in 1973 plans were laid—and ultimately realized—for a forum in the form of a public park. After 1989 the park remained unchanged or possibly was even forgotten.

Today, there are two opposing camps: on the one hand those who advocate an exact reconstruction of the city’s ground plan as it looked here in medieval times—almost as if the historicism driving the reconstruction of the palace on the far bank of the Spree has proved contagious; and on the other, the ‘modernists,’ who are committed to preserving and further developing the last vestiges of East German Modernist architecture and urban planning.

Located as it is between the television tower and the future Humboldt Forum, the Marx-Engels-Forum is a place of commemoration par excellence. It has been closed to the public since 2010 owing to work to extend the subway line U5, but is set to enjoy a new lease of life as an urban recreation zone by 2019. This publication illustrates and puts up for debate both the history of the site and the recurrent negotiations regarding its use, including those of 2015 in which the public was invited to participate. How might an open space—since, YES, that’s what is all about—be preserved at a prime downtown location and configured such as to accommodate continually changing uses?

If freedom is to be a feature of the appropriation of the forum then freedom must be inscribed in the very design of this urban public space, from its inception. And what better solution therefore, than to base its development on the physical presence of various sculptural ensembles? After all, the sculptures were there first—and not only those of Marx and Engels!

The post Marx-Engels-Forum – JA! appeared first on EECLECTIC.