Last night we gathered around the fire at the construction site
A construction site of an art institution
This 9 year old art institution looking at city development from the perspective of art
The rooftop of this institution is now completely gone
The terrace which we built to cover the old train tracks is gone
We can now see the open sky
While standing at the core structure of the body
The skeleton of an institution
Last night we gathered around the fire at the construction site
Who made the fire?
It was Parkomplex an art collective we formed together
What is community - local - international - artist - curator -art - work?
Is this division of realities?
Or is this a big circle of realities?
Last night we gathered around the fire at the construction site
We are in circle
And it is warm
Why do we make this fire?
Who makes this fire?
Who is around this fire?
How do we continue making this fire?
PARKomplex (2021) is a continuation of Body and Institution (2020). After working with ‘ZK/U Workers’ as a community to unlearn structural inequality while reflecting on our own bodies as discourse producers of the institution, I wanted to move the anchor point of the community further to the park users around ZK/U.
** Drawing from Parkomplex member Adrain Omerovic
As ZK/U is located in a public park in Berlin Moabit, it has been developing loose relationships with the park users from the neighbourhood since its foundation. Despite the wide spectrum of communities of park users, my intention was to focus on the two regular park user groups: ‘The Boys in the Park’ and ‘The Families on Grill Picnics’. These two speculative groups as ‘communities’ to engage for an art project was my starting point of this journey. It means that I start with acknowledging my own prejudiced view on these two speculative groups.
When I started to work at ZK/U in 2017 as an intern for ‘Neighborhood, Community Projects’, I was asking myself: Who is ‘Neighborhood-Community’ by the (art) institutional definition and which gaze and voice an institution embodies, when it talks about ‘Neighborhood-Community’.
Why is the term ‘Neighborhood-Community’ often associated with adjectives such as marginalised, othered, weak or periphery? I’ve understood that there is misunderstanding on the building concept of ‘Community Engaged Art Projects’, which doesn’t acknowledge the artist as part of the community, but rather separates them into two categorizations and creates two different realities.
This is why WE: the community- ‘Boys in the Park’, the curator- ‘Ki’ and the artists ‘Nele and Nadia’ have decided to form a collective Parkomplex, where everyone performs agency together and shares autonomy of the project. What we mean with ‘sharing equal autonomy’ is from sharing organisational tasks to sharing budget honorarium together.
Parkomplex’s first joint project was to be on the topic of racism and police violence in public spaces. The police, especially the criminal police, have increased their presence in the park.
Parkomplex has developed an AR scene together, in collaboration with Sarah Buser, an artist who has expertise on site specific AR (Augmented Reality) installation. to reveal simultaneous but different realities among bodies existing in our beloved park, Wessi. Who has power to claim space and censor bodies? How do we reclaim our space and empower our bodies?
