texts

Pierangelo Maset and Bill Masuch ⎟ Questions to Seraphina Lenz ⎟2010

The degree of complexity of the works within the framework of the “Werkstatt für Veränderung” is enormous and detached for the most part from individual artistic objects. Although there is the aesthetic production of flyers, films, posters, etc., the work as a whole is not recorded by it. How can the project be communicated to observers, who, as a rule, only observed it in extracts?

I also only witnessed extracts of the project although I was there every day. This has to do with the type of work. I can, however, explain the central idea of the concept and the artistic working method. My starting point was the assumption that the utilisation of an area is a sculptural-creative process. The title Werkstatt für Veränderung describes the artistic operating principle. It says that a group will be active here, that it is interested in change, and that this is connected with work, but leaves the question of who belongs to the group and what type of change is concerned open. Every year, I thought up an intervention that achieved an eye-catching change and as a result, visually suggested another possible use. For example, I started with the cleaning of the area so that people were able to sit on the grass. All the interventions are based on formal considerations. The cleaning, for example, was always undertaken by five men in light blue overalls who had practised a choreography with a trainer beforehand. What was concerned was both the effect of cleanliness as well as the symbolic-performative quality of the action, and, therefore, visibility.

What artistic antecedents would you associate yourself with as an artist ?

I studied with Reiner Ruthenbeck in Münster. Humour, material accuracy and reduction of form played a large role and there was not that much talk of art, although it was not about anything else.
In addition, the concept of sculpture as Joseph Beuys developed it is the basic underlying idea from which I proceed. He showed that a sculptural process is a process of solidification in which something solid is formed from something fluid, and he also recognized the principle in social processes. With this, the idea of what a sculpture can be is expanded. A public debate, for example, that reproduces particular opinions and is anchored in the minds of many people ultimately has material effects.
Creating an awareness of the formed nature of the world is one of Beuys’s greatest artistic realisations. With this, he shows that people are able to form the world. Art can, thus, be a force in society and effective in social respects.

How did the decisions for the specific projects come about?

For the competition, I initially developed five of ten possible interventions based on observations in the park and conversations in the neighbourhood. These were different transformations that were meant to stimulate various actions, uncomplicated and direct: the park for sitting and sunning, as a reading room at night, as a source of food, and a space for movement.
During the three weeks that every project lasted, I was there every day in order to witness the reactions of the people at first hand. The workshop works at the container developed from this, and the ideas for further projects thus also came into being—through being with the local residents, many of whom I have got to know personally in the meantime. They said: The park is the stage, the place where people meet each other, where one plays a role, where people know each other and experience stories. Filmpark and hidden talents touch on this. It was not about developing an extraordinary idea. Ideas that seem banal can sometimes be much more expedient and capable of connecting people. To make them become reality is what is then exceptional.

Why do the aesthetics of everyday life and social ritual play such central roles in the project?

In my work, the everyday generally plays a large role. It defines life inconspicuously and, nevertheless, quite intensively. Turning it upside-down in a playful way and thus putting it at a distance was something I have always enjoyed, because by doing so, one gains room to manoeuvre and discovers new possibilities.
I can describe this based on the example of the project the green night: the vast majority of the round 400 residents in a tower block exchanged the standard light bulbs in their apartments for green ones at my instigation. An everyday action in a familiar building that, as a result, became a green monument, a sight worth seeing.
In the park, I placed particular value on direct communication. Complicated mediation efforts are unnecessary when you seize on something familiar. For example, everyone is familiar with children’s face painting from street festivals. But it involves much more. An astounding poetry of transformation developed from the make-up sessions during the filming in the park. These transformed creatures that not only looked different, but, as a result, also moved differently and played with the situation, gradually populated the park. In the face-painting scene in Filmpark, one looks directly into the faces of the children and also senses the attention they had experienced at the hands of the make-up artists.
In my design, I saw social rituals as a possibility to create connections. This seemed important at this location that had actually been cut through by the construction of the federal motorway. Over time, a whole series of such rituals formed around the project. For example, every year we celebrated a festival at the end of the three-week project. Since children already asked me in the second year: When will the festival take place again? That was how they interpreted the situation that the Werkstatt für Veränderung had created in three weeks. I then seized on it, I couldn’t have thought up anything better myself.

The project lasted for an extremely long time, almost ten years. What happened to the location during this time?

In the immediate vicinity, day care centres and new playgrounds were created. On the street along the park, old, in part derelict buildings were renovated or torn down, new ones were built, and the school received an annex building and, therefore, became more opened up toward the park. As a whole, the area has become more attractive for families with children.
In the project itself, a community slowly formed on its own. People came again and again, met each other, got to know each other, and new people joined each year.
In the park, a change of generations took place: the Wederboys, a group of young men who explained to me at the very beginning that they were in charge there, grew up. The brothers who were two years or so younger and their friends now met in the park and took on the role and title of their predecessors.
The malfunctioning irrigation system hasn’t been in operation in recent years, and there is hardly any grass anymore. As a result, the vegetation has become more varied and wild herbs and flowers have spread. Recently, even rocket has been growing.

Which project surprised you the most?

It was the project moving visitors in 2005. A large, white horse was our guest and grazed where otherwise dog dirt and shards of glass usually lie. In this project, three things surprised me at the same time: firstly, that it was able to take place at all—which was connected to a chain of lucky circumstances. The Bezirksamt and the Senatsverwaltung reacted to the proposal with the greatest easygoingness. A horse is, after all, a relatively large animal that, when in doubt, does not abide by the regulations. The reaction of the residents was also something that could not have been fore-seen. They could have, for example, protested against the reduction in space. But the opposite was the case: they were enthused, and one local resident even served as night guard at the stall.
But what was most astounding for me was how participation and wanting to be there grew from day to day as if according to the snowball effect, and radically changed the whole atmosphere in the park. Girls had the say. The entertainment programme was self-made. Something that I had not factored in came to life there and grew.

What experiences of borders were had and/or crossings of borders were made with respect to the system of art and to the real space?

A young man from the Wederpark project once came to our gallery in the Brunnenstrasse.(1) He had dressed himself up and was thought to be a Saudi collector. That was such a crossing of borders. They mostly bring misunderstandings along with them.
The project was an act of balancing on this border: the work with the Bezirksamt required clarifying discussions on my part in order to explain and safeguard the autonomy that is necessary to the artistically defined process.
During the project weeks, as a result of my daily presence in the park, I was the recipient of many complaints and claims, since I had to set limits. Since the project could easily have become the service for everyone and everything. I instead had concrete proposals for joint productions, such as, for example, a film, a performance, a large meal. That was what I concentrated on when possible.
In the system of art, the immanent inconspicuousness of the project did not directly lead to great attention. Logical, but it couldn’t be changed. Attracting as many people as possible from the field of art to the park wasn’t suitable, since they weren’t involved in the process. Why should they also come to an area on the outskirts of Neukölln, to a park in which something visibly artistic was not taking place on an ongoing basis? For example: women sitting at café tables, children lying around on blankets and writing, others walking through the area with frames they had built—what was that supposed to be? A performance? The majority of people from the art context, myself included, are trained to recognise or to define what belongs to it and what doesn’t, and have a limited time budget to dedicate to things. At the beginning, I even avoided telling other artists that I was doing a lantern workshop in the park, for example, because it looked like doing handicrafts—and admittedly, it was handicrafts. At least up to the moment when I, as a reaction to the children’s clumsiness in using pens and scissors and to the halting production of the lanterns, had them perforate the metre-large cardboard with thick nails, and a starry sky was created. There were many such moments when things shifted.
While the project was running, during the whole year, it was difficult to mediate it argumentatively within the art context. By doing so, I would have placed myself above the process to too great an extent. Perhaps this book can serve as this mediation retrospectively.

What significance does the project have for your further work as an artist?

The commitment to this location and the people there over such a long period of time was a defining experience and a type of school of life. I was able to get to know the social realities up close, met many people with different personal circumstances, and experienced how artistic work can be educational work on an extremely fundamental level. The collaboration with artists from dance, film, and literature also expanded my horizons. Every year, a team of people who were strangers to one another and initially spoke differ-ent languages formed. Initiating processes in which many different people are involved is an exercise in perception, communication, and understanding.
The diverse mediation tasks that I had to complete in the project, in the end, also provided the opportunity to think about artistic autonomy. To be able there to place myself outside of the customary logic of economic utilisation for a moment seemed to me to be an opportunity for art. And also to take the risk of not being understood. That is a scope for development that is necessary within my work.
What distinguishes the project from other participatory interventions, for example, those of the 1990s?

Heterogeneity and the immense production of discourse were characteristics of the interventions of the 1990s.
Conferences were organised, artists’ texts created. And crit-icism was offered everywhere: the participating public was only used; art allowed itself to be instrumentalised in order
to remedy social injustices, it pursued harmonisation and whitewashed conflicts by doing so; artist XY was suitable as a role model for neo-liberal thinking—in the worst case, without him noticing it. Questions of hierarchy and power led to the role of the artist being repudiated anew again and again. It was a great achievement to explore problem areas so comprehensively and in depth. Much was clarified, considered, said, and written. Thanks to these debates and thanks as well to radical positions such as that of Wochenklausur2 or park fiction3, it is today possible to act in a more reflective and also more sober manner with regard to participatory interventions. I profited quite a bit from that. Today, it is really no longer possible to say that you didn’t know anything about the fact that hierarchies and the roles of those participating in a participatory project have to be considered and negotiated in detail. What is also connected with this type of project is often a usefulness that is desired from outside. That is also not bad per se, as long as it can be recognised and reconciled with the artistic work. Or one confronts the demand from the outside directly in advance in the form of a task that one sets for oneself.

1 Galerie oqbo was established by seven Berlin artists in 2008. www.oqbo.de

2 Wochenklausur is a group of artists who have been undertaking interventions in social life since 1993. They use established art locations from which they address socio-political deficiencies and develop and implement proposals for improvement.

3 park fiction is an initiative of local residents and artists in Hamburg–St. Pauli that was formed in the middle of the 1990s in order to create a public park on the bank of the River Elbe, although a development plan for this location had already been decided on. The network began with a collective wish production for a park, achieved extensive public attention, and prevented the sale of the land. In the end, such a park was created on the bank of the River Elbe in Hamburg.

published in Seraphina Lenz, Werkstatt für Veränderung, Salon Verlag Köln 2011

Claudia Wahjudi⎟ A Citizen Amongst Citizens On Seraphina Lenz’s Long-Term Project “Werkstatt für Veränderung”⎟2004/2011

Like border rivers, the large streets of Berlin divide the districts, separate them into dark districts here and colourfully renovated ones there, into those with old or new buildings, with many young people or with few. Life on the other side of the roadway is different. In the neighbourhood of Neubritz, located in the Berlin district of Neukölln, in spite of the fact that roadways also divide the residential quarter, everything is, nonetheless, somewhat different. Although Britzer Damm and Buschkrugallee delimit the quarter from neighbouring areas, the new segment of the motorway in the middle of it does not divide the residents but rather brings them together. This is because the lid over the underground artery was closed and Carl-Weder-Park was planted. Since 2001, it has been the centre of the redevelopment area with its new and old buildings in which primary school children and pensioners, Muslims, Christians, and those without a religion, the self-employed, the unemployed, and the employed, young mothers and young men from gangs all live. The park is thus something like a communication hub for all these different people, and a community centre without a roof or a programme.
Here, the “Werkstatt für Veränderung”, an art project led by the Berlin artist Seraphina Lenz becomes active in the summer. It can already be recognised from a distance as a result of the light blue colour with the butterfly logo. Light blue shines the container for the Werkstatt, light blue are the overalls of the cleaning team that removes the paper and dog dirt from the lawn at the beginning of the art season: a calming colour that seems has a sculptural effect in the green of the elongated park. Light blue, therefore, were also the 1,000 helium balloons that tugged at benches, fences, and the hands of pupils, or simple flew into the sky in 2002, the first year of the Werkstatt. And light blue were the deckchairs that the Werkstatt hired out the following year and that have since then given the park the appearance of a lido — today the neighbouring pizzeria is responsible for hiring them out. In the summer of 2004, the Werkstatt then dedicated itself to the subject of light, with actions including an evening of readings under standard lamps, a one-week lantern workshop for children, and a meeting of neighbours, who lit up their park with light sources that they had brought with them. All these actions temporarily changed the look of the park — by means of a usage that goes beyond the possibilities suggested by the park architecture, and gradually alters the impression of the green area. On the evenings of lights, for example, Carl-Weder-Park seemed inviting and cosy rather than instilling fear, as big city parks otherwise readily do in the dark. The Werkstatt für Veränderung works on commission for the Bezirksamt Neukölln, which held a competition as part of its search for art to provide the park with an identify. It, nevertheless, does not make commissioned art in the traditional sense – what the commissioning authority ultimately receives is open. Since the Werkstatt does not add anything permanent to the landscape architecture but rather seizes on the way the park is already being used in developing its concepts. Although it can plan, the realisation is in the hands of local residents. The Werkstatt only makes an offer, and this is what distinguishes it from much artistic work in the urban environment. It neither installs sculpture nor offers art education, nor does it do project art, and thus does not establish social facilities in cooperation with local residents or plan an entire park, as occurred in Hamburg. In short: the Werkstatt does not work toward a concrete result. One could instead call its actions “performative interventions”: one-time actions that briefly intercede in life in Neubritz. Nothing remains of such an action except for memories and souvenirs such as postcards. It is specifically this that makes the actions so memorable: Do you still remember when…?
The Werkstatt does not provoke. It adapts itself to the surroundings to such an extent that the signature of the artist remains recognisable, but the main actors are the neighbours. Without their participation there would not be a project. As a result, the Werkstatt has to respond to criticism and suggestions, change plans, be responsive. Seraphina Lenz comes again each summer, prospectively for ten years. This is also something that distinguishes her project from those of other artists, who leave once their work is done and only learn how neighbours and passers-by react to it indirectly. The Werkstatt für Veränderung is, therefore, also about conversation and exchange, about give and take. It is, so to speak, very democratic: not in the sense of a form of government, but rather in the sense of participating with equal rights in the designing of public life.
The Werkstatt für Veränderung continues the tradition of Public Art, or more specifically: of Community Based Art. Yet in contrast to its well-known predecessors in New York or in Hamburg, its goal is not the creation of a new area, not a community garden or even an entire park that comes into being as a result of discussions with local residents or particular demographic groups and many shared hours of work. Seraphina Lenz also does not see herself as an instigator of initiatives concerned with improving specific areas of life, such as those established at the suggestion of the Viennese artists’ group Wochenklausur to address the medical needs of the homeless in Vienna or to bring together the jobless in Berlin and advise them. Concerned here, therefore, is not “intervention art (as realpolitik)”, as the art historian Holger Kube Ventura once called it. One might instead speak of a modest offer — an offer that the local residents around the park in Neukölln can take advantage of, or not. This might bring to mind the famous library that Clegg & Guttmann once set up in control boxes on streets, in which neighbours were able to exchange books, and which were meant to function on a foundation of trust. But Lenz’s Werkstatt seems much less sculptural, and is based not on trust alone. The artist, who is present every year on weekends, retains control of dates, objects, and actions. Trust, is, however, also called for in Carl-Weder-Park. The artist has to be able to rely on the fact that no one obstructs the process or even destroys what has been created, and the local residents have to be able to rely on the fact that no one wants to push them to become better or also only other citizens. And still more: the Werkstatt für Veränderung seems to strengthen trust in the everyday on site and with the public and in the abilities of the people around Carl-Weder-Park, be it with the notebook full of recipes for good traditional fare from around the world that the local residents have put together, or with a film in which the children of the neighbourhood demonstrate their abilities. At first glance, this might seem to be a modest aspiration. It is, nonetheless, possibly a fitting response to an open debate that persistently assumes that citizens behave in a faulty manner: be it with the accusation of insufficient integration, be it with the absurd assertion that Germany is having “the wrong” children, be it with the insinuation that people allow their children to eat too many chips.
With its democratic approach, the Werkstatt für Veränderung addresses a criticism of the urban environment as above all artists themselves have expressed it. In the 1990s, the intention of furnishing the urban environment with further sculptures, statues, and objects, which had to compete with the numerous interventions of authorities and companies in the city space and whose presence the other users of the city had not requested, seemed increasingly arrogant. Too much is too much. In addition, the question circulated of what right artists had to force art on the eyes and ears of local residents and passers-by without their being asked, to accost them with sensory impressions and manipulate their perception in places where they were, however, also only “citizens amongst citizens”, as the sculptor Inge Mahn once formulated. The Werkstatt für Veränderung is familiar with this misgiving. Seraphina Lenz, therefore, also intervenes in such a restrained way in Carl-Weder-Park because the building of the motorway has already changed so much in Neubritz — and art should not become the icing on the cake of urban development impositions.

Art in the urban environment makes a more modest appearance. The era of making expansive gestures is over for now; and those who attempt them nevertheless know that they are mostly citing their predecessors in doing so. There are, however, also more mundane reasons than civic modesty for the restraint. On the one hand, the empty public coffers: when a local authority allows itself art in the urban environment today, then only still rarely with high follow-up costs, as in the case of a fountain sculpture. On the other hand, sculptures, statuary, and installations increasingly benefited the state and the economy in the 1990s, assisted tourism and city-marketing, manifested the national desire for representation, for example with art at the new government buildings in the German capital, and aided in inscribing company identities onto the cityscape, such in the case of DaimlerChrysler and Sony at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. If artists, therefore, favour fleeting interventions over more long-term positioning of works, then this is also to withdraw their works from the clutches of the state and the economy and to insist on acting on their own mandate, even if the state or the economy provides the funding for it. Moreover, the aggressive spread of advertising in the urban environment actually competes with art there. Hardly any sculpture, hardly any mural can grab as much attention as the advertising banners that shroud the entire length of tower blocks. And the time for sound installations in the urban space may also be over if acoustic advertising actually comes to the streets, as has been debated at many a convention. It is, therefore, no surprise that sculpture and installations intended to stand in the open air have thus fled to state garden shows and other protected spaces.

There, they escape the questions currently being asked about the sense and purpose of “art in the public space”, and, accordingly, about what at this time can be considered as the public space and as the public sphere. The street, which has long not been the marketplace it was before the invention of the telephone, radio, and automobile? The Internet with its confusing forums and newsrooms to which not everyone always has access? Media, such as television or newspapers, which only allow one-way communication and are mostly in private hands? These questions have gained urgency as it has become clear in recent years that societies are becoming fragmented, that milieus — separated according to education, income, and lifestyle — are distancing themselves from one another: in the metaphorical, discursive sense as well as on site in cities. Under such conditions, it is difficult to act publicly or even to participate in designing the public sphere, especially since the languages of the milieus are distancing themselves from one another, and especially since no equal access to the institutions of political participation prevails. Discourse in which a shared language is practised is, however, a possibility, a first step toward establishing a public sphere in fragmented society: in conversations of “citizens amongst citizens”, in encounters of actors in the urban environment in which individuals can grasp political subjects, as the sociologist Saskia Sassen hopes for the residents of global cities in her book Losing control? Sovereignty in An Age of Globalization.
In the small neighbourhood of Neubritz, the Werkstatt für Veränderung stimulates such conversation; it also stimulates it nonverbally through utilising creative elements such as deckchairs and lamps.
Thus, in Carl-Weder-Park in Neukölln, social action does not turn out to be sculptural action, as Beuys once defined it — instead, in the everyday life in the park, sculptural action expands to become social action.

Claudia Wahjudi, 11/04
The German text appeared in a shorter version in 2004 in the second workshop letter of the Werkstatt für Veränderung.