No Fon, No Fax, No Mail – Komm!
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Exhibition 18 April – 15 May 2008 in the Goethe-Institut Lissabon.
Concept and coordination: Daniela Brasil
Invited Artists: Bernhard König, Erika Foltinova, Katrin Karioth, Katya Crisóstomo, Martina Novakova, Mariana Viegas, Pedro Veloso, Raluca Davidel, Sarah Borree, Sergio Zevallos, Theresa Dietl, Undine Siepker, Veranit Amornprasertsri.
funded by Goethe Institute, FCT – Portuguese foundation for Science and Technology and the Bauhaus-University Weimar
visit the project website here
On the one hand, there is the dematerialization of daily life, which becomes more and more electronic. On the other hand, there is the increasing spectacularization and the excess of images, which become more and more manipulated. Countering the “two-dimensionalization” of our cities and of our own bodies, NO FON NO FAX NO MAIL, KOMM! is a TRIBUTE TO EXPERIENCE. To be fully in one place: with all the senses, in all the senses.
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Bernhard König und Raluca Davidel
Cartobiographies and sensorial mapping, Daniela Brasil
The works shown here are unfoldings of conversations with invited artists and of theoretical and practical content that I developed with architecture and art students at the department of Spatial Planning and Spatial Research at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. They evolved from a first journey through Lisbon in literature (Pessoa, Saramago and Tabucchi) and in film (Wenders and Tanner).
We navigated through the authors’ poetic narratives and discovered a vivid Lisbon that was full of smells, memories and intensities. Thereby, we were aware of different ways of perception, of the limits of language, and got lost in translations. We were searching for specific Lisbons through a variety of forms of representation and as a result questioning traditional urbanism approaches that study cities through maps, facts and statistics. Inspired by flâneurie and traveling in imaginary ships – on a route contrary to the discoverers – we navigated through “The Book of Disquiet”, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” and “Requiem” as well as through the movies “Lisbon Story” and “Dans la ville blanche”. The poetic seas revealed to the disquiet and foreign eyes a white city, moreover, a city that is written in ink and smells like coffee.
Starting from Pessoa`s idea that
“it is in us that landscapes become landscapes”,
we tried to discover landscapes through interior journeys in Weimar. These trips challenged the frontiers between reality and fiction, or between reality and its different interpretations. These specific and fluid Lisbons show that nothing is generic – not even the theoretically generic place par excellence: the airport – neither the Portela airport, nor Lisbon, nor Weimar, nor any other biographical city of us travelers.
Cities are as specific as any of us percieves and experiences them. Thus, next to the Lisbon as it is shown here, many others exist. Cities travel like people and its experiences, incorporated within the narratives of travelers.
Finally, there are not only the travelers that travel from city to city but also cities travel from traveler to traveler.
Daniela Brasil, 2008
graphic material, Daniela Brasil+Bernhard König
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