The transit lounge is the archetypal transit space, the point where the hyper-global + hyper-local coincide; a location which blurs traditional conceptions of geo-political boundaries, creating pockets of international space within the borders of individual nation-states. An in-between space, it exists relative to a fixed departure and arrival point, not to the area that surrounds it.

The Transit Lounge is a series of overlapping residencies for Australian and German artists and architects in Berlin. It is also a blog where themes relating to the project will develop, collaborations will be initiated and sustained, and observations on the city collected. The Transit Lounge invites you to participate in these transnational conversations by commenting on the blog.

For more information email us: transit [AT] transitlounge [DOT] org

The transit lounge is supported by Culturia and the DAZ

Monday, April 23, 2007



transit lounge exhibition

UNDERSCORE


isabel cordeiro
jasper knight
kenzee patterson
jodi rose
isabelle toland

thursday april 26 2007 19:00-22:00


Underscore is an exhibition comprising five international artists who have each been participating in the Transit Lounge residency at Josetti Höffe, Berlin.
For this show, the artists have been working collaboratively and individually on a series of new works reflecting on their experiences of Berlin, while also addressing the theme of the residency, "transit." The resulting sound, installation, and video works explore marginalised spaces and discarded objects. In this case, the underscore serves to underline the spaces in between, the ignored and the unnoticed. In a reconfiguration, the familiar and the preconceived are conflated with the lost and forgotten.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

12.04.07 19-22:00 1/2


INTERIM WORK BY KENZEE PATTERSON, JASPER KNIGHT + ISABELLE TOLAND

in conjunction with

PLACES OUT OF PURPOSE

Thursday, April 12, 2007

RE

The program challenges artists to rethink their approach to art-making by encouraging them to adapt, reuse, evolve and even destroy the work of previous artists in the space.

I will re-use the posts.

The process of conversation has been shifted and re-interpreted for me in a number of ways through undertaking this project.

The first night at r e:

became filtered through the resonance of the past specific to this place.

And because I do believe in words and in their power to deceive, I have deceived my self starting re-blogging.


Reframing the blog - repetition

"How can you disturb the linearity of spaces?"

One strategy for me to reframe the blog will be the repetition: I just catch some words, some sentences, some images to activate them again - to break the linearity of the blog, to create a new context for them, to create a re-collage. the repetition is never the same.

so don't wonder...

What's your Egypt?

Dear all,

I'm sorry - I vanished for a time because I moved and was in a state of transit that didn't give me so much space to reflect on transit itself...

But now it's over and I try again to create a kind of blog moderator. (suggestions/ideas about what to do as a blog moderator are always welcome!)

Easter and Pessah is over now - and anyway I'm not religious. But I believe, that all these stories and myths are still circulating and they are deeply rooted in our (western) cultural/individual archive of imagination. That's why I just want to recollect the story : The jews flew from Egypt to the "Holy Land", so they were migrating. That's why they eat until nowadays this special kind of bread that doesn't take to much time to prepare: a migration bread, a transit bread. Jesus turned/translated this physical migration into a more spiritual transition.
But anyhow: "Egypt" means "frontier, limit, barrier" in Hebrew. So today Pessah means to cross inner boarders, to overrun the personal "Egypt" inside oneself.

I find that story interesting, because it's not only a story about transit but also about the opposite of transit: about boarders, limits, barriers - and maybe swells (the red sea?).
And I asked myself if the transit doesn't always rely on limits. There's an interdependence, a reciprocal figure in it. Because you need a limit to feel the transgression - and where is the space in between, the swell?

See you this evening

Alma

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Zwischenpausen

"I like the freedom of bring suspended between two places; all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I'm going." *

The process of conversation has been shifted and re-interpreted for me in a number of ways through undertaking this project. The first night at r e: set live improv in the transit lounge provided a space for meeting new people and forced me to overcome shyness, asking complete strangers to sit down and talk with me (only two people said 'no') and then having old friends eager to catch up. Listening to them again in the following days as they were uploaded to the website, I found myself experiencing a strange sense of instant nostalgia, memories forced into being before their natural time to re-surface.

After three days of Pixelache Festival madness in Helsinki, not only did every pixel ache, I began to feel like a conversation vampire, sucking the words out of people. Anytime there was a good conversation and it wasn't recorded I had a sense of loss, and felt out-of-sorts when drifting through the kiasma lounge with no-one to talk to. Eventually this prompted me to create a more structured framework, so that in the time 'off' I could talk naturally, without the pressure of wishing to trace every word through the microphone. Eric Minkkinen was my neighbour in the lounge area, and convinced me to sign up and 'perform' a conversation for his leplacard heaphone concert. I talked with Keirjsti, a Norwegian conceptual artist whose work with knitting and capital punishment left no words of response, and told me 'art is my home.'

'home is a very temporary place. and most of it maybe in ones heart or somewhere in ones body... the portuguese and brasilians have this beautiful word for this strange kind of longing to leave but never really arriving ....saudades...'

On returning to Berlin, to the incessant longing that is never satisfied by one place alone, I found my relationship to conversation shifted yet again through the prism of history and personal stories collected and told in 'Stasiland'. The process of monitoring and documenting conversation became filtered through the resonance of the past specific to this place. It is layered with the apparatus of power; if we are watching you ergo you are an enemy of the state.
The power of radio to transmit information from the 'other side' of the wall is a common theme, and when the decision was made to allow free travel this also came over the radio.

Listening back to the collections of voices from Helsinki with this in mind, I am struck by how many of the artists and random people I spoke to expressed anti-authoritarian and overtly political views. Interrogating the technology itself with Armin; questioning the value of the concept and framework of participation by Andrew; exploring violence and harmony through the writing of Teemu; explicitly recording 'permission to use this conversation' as instructed by the executive producer at ABC Radio; finding a new form of interaction with multiple pathways and endless associations. Now a new conversation has started, and we continue to listen to the voices of freedom on the air and in our hearts.

"How easy it is for the interviewer to assume moral authority by virtue of the fact 'he' gets to ask the questions" *

* Anna Funder 'Stasiland'

Monday, April 09, 2007

PLACES OUT OF PURPOSE (12.04.07 19 - 22:00)


Ι attribute to my self the task to find places without a task, without a function.
I name them Places_Out_Of_Purpose.

Places abandoned by their rulers, by their function.

Could you detect Places_Out_Of_Purpose within the limits of your own apartment?
Are there Places_Out_Of_Purpose in virtual spaces?

How can you disturb the linearity of spaces?

Zwischenpausen
radio in transit
start a conversation
invent a story that could have occurred
a place consisting of words

traces of failure
places of possibility
the moment of destruction