Formats of the public
Installations and projects by Tulip House
A public space is generated in the encounter between narrated history
and the richness of experience.
Alexander Kluge
The installations of Tulip House are concerned with the construction of
public spaces in which narrative formats of conveying and dealing with
knowledge are probed.
These spaces allow professional knowledge and theoretical discourses to encounter the practices of everyday life, work, and individual narration, thus creating a public geography in which knowledge and information is communicated visually and in a process of negotiation.
Tulip House's spaces for discussion and gathering work
within the genre of narration as a personalized, intimate dialogue, contrasting
the familiar formats of speech, lecture, or panel discussion, which are
always addressed to an anonymous audience. This narration consists of
accounts, misrepresentations, evocations and lies - a public construction
of contents, performed by the subjective intent of the individual to create
a mise en scène:
The narrative form establishes a balance between individual and collective
experience.
These discussions between two "experts" take place in spaces separated from the audience and are transmitted in the media of vision and sound.The invited narrators and speakers in this installation are all specialists in their fields, and above all practitioners of the respective theme, concretely concerned in their work with social deficits.
Within this format, the theme is dealt with in a way that it is traced back and attributed to the person and his or her daily practice. The audience becomes a voyeur and witness of an evolving dialogue, a narration situated somewhere between interview, expert debate, confession, interrogation, and analytical session.
In the process, outdated rhetorical gestures of representation are avoided, and the qualities of an adult education center, a private conversation, of consulting and service provision are linked with those of an experienced public sphere, thus creating an exchange market, a public black market of necessary knowledge.
The information and assembly venues of Tulip House are played both live and with medially recorded material; the electronic media storage (the archive) corresponds with the "play/acting".
Precursors of this type of installation were,
among others:
I lab U. Stages Interview Situations.1993,Künstlerhaus Bethanien
Berlin, Director: David Maayan (Hurtzig)
Departement for Temporary Memory
2000, Hamburg (Tulip House)
Information Retrieval, 2001, British
Museum, London (Hurtzig)
The congress form of the project Lovepangs by heavygirlslighten, 2001
Volksbühne am Rosa- Luxemburg- Platz, Berlin (Hurtzig)
The Refugee: Services rendered to
Undesirables, Mobile Academy, 2002 Berlin (Tulip House)