"That is the first task of storytelling. It opens
up a theatre in order to legitimize actual deeds. It creates a realm where
daring and accidental public practice become authorized." Michel
Certeau.
The archive disappears. The archive as a 'memory
stick', as a magazine, a library, a real place, is washed away in the
currents of the digital data stream.
This archive has temporarily sought refuge in a kiosk. A kiosk at the
point in time of its revolutionary self-consciousness - designed with
the austerity of the Russian Constructivists in the 1920s, at a time when
art was emphatically linked with life. Not a sales desk for information,
but transportable architecture for propagandistic speakers.

KIOSK design: Stephen Craig
The 'KIOSK for useful knowledge' is mobile and within it a continuously
growing archive is being created on the theme of "Stories about places,
cities and territories". It is an audio-visual discussion archive:
specialists will meet practical experts through a dialogue. Professional
knowledge and theory meet the practicalities of everyday life, unpublished
thoughts, ideas and fragments of memory. The dialogue partners will overlay
the facts with layers of stories and describe routes that make a path
through their knowledge.
Every dialogue is a new entry into the archive and will be made public
and displayed live in the KIOSK cinema: two screens, on which the faces
of the people conversing are transmitted from a hidden room, a physiognomic
theatre using views and counterviews.
The KIOSK will tour through the entrances one comes across as a customer,
patient or applicant and to specific 'temporary use' locations. Ideally,
the KIOSK should be constructed in the waiting room of an employment office,
a train station or in shopping malls, resulting in a short-term black
market for stories within the controlled security zones of our public
lives.
KIOSK is a mobile research unit produced by the ErsatzStadt
(SubstituteCity) project, which collects, documents and archives using
this theme. In the next few months a growing archive will be created with
a variety of data - always at new locations.
A project by Tulip House for SubstituteCity.
KIOSK design: Stephen Craig
Construction: a- mano Schreinerei, Karlsruhe
Audiovisual conception: Produktion Eins/ cine plus
Production: Katharina von Wilcke/ department (Space1/Life1),
Philipp Schmidt (Life5)
Technical coordination: Jochen Massar (Space 1/3)
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