Workshop collaboration with Barbara Lubich and Elisabeth Wulff-Werthner from cultural center Zentralwerk, Dresden, at the annual Trans Europe Halles conference. Bilbao, Spain, 2018. The “Chewing Gum Effect” is what we explored together in this workshop. Outgoing from artistic experiences and strategies in Dresden and Nuremberg (Germany) we discussed their patterns, forms of articulations and potentials. We shared our experiences chewed the gum together into a consistence that is neither too fluid nor too tight to work with in present and future.
Description: Heritage sites reflect their former significance, rise and fall of economies, cultural achievements or urban developments, they tell stories about past and people, about their destinies, hopes and fates. These stories and memories, the historic lessons, are resources of urban development, of regional identity and they can be revived, interpreted and transformed to new life.
Cultural initiatives accept this challenge for new life and diversity, they create heritage revalorization concepts as an alternative to the common hyper-capitalistic, hyper-professionalised, hyper-automatised, hyper-informed, hyper-controlled, hyper-regulated urban environment. They use low-threshold reconstruction, independent collective organisation and forms of artistic and intellectual production to handle the past, present and future. Often this challenge turns out to be a never ending story that feels like a sticky mass which lames bodies and minds of yourself and your collective. If you try to catch it, the mass becomes fluid and if you try to escape, it becomes the highly adhesive chewing gum during tough discussions which rise again and again, critical points that are often been heared. But after chewing a certain time, within an intuitive and open minded experimental process, every strong initiative creates its strategies to make bubbles out of it! This bubbles helps to dance the revolution, to overcome the heavy weight of the past without forgetting it.