TRANSIT LOUNGE

TRANSIT LOUNGE 2008: BERLIN BRISBANE PERTH MELBOURNE SYDNEY

2008-01-09T13:39:00.000+01:00

TRANSIT LOUNGE 2008 – BERLIN-BRISBANE-PERTH-MELBOURNE-SYDNEY

In 2008, TRANSIT LOUNGE begins in TRUDE, Calvino’s ubiquitous city of tourism. From the 16th of January, TRUDE will be found between the cities of Berlin, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, as 15 artists collaborate remotely on the evolution of a complex, emergent structure.

The platform for this trans-disciplinary exchange is the TRANSIT LOUNGE website, powered by open-source, wiki software. An organic structure, the site grows in multiple directions as the content is layered and interlinked, tracing remote interactions and local interventions between artists. The latency of these dialogues across time zones and locations creates feedback loops (local interventions – web – local interventions) opening up spaces for mistranslation resonating between the different cities.

The multitude of inputs, exchanges, and disruptions will be distilled in an exhibition which opens in Berlin at PROGRAM on the 31st January, 2008 to coincide with transmediale.08. Here the variations will continue to multiply as the process is augmented by the actions of visitors to the space.

TRANSIT LOUNGE is a project by Katie Hepworth (Sydney) and Miriam Mlecek (Berlin) and involves the following artists:

Chris Bennie (Brisbane), Bianca Calandra (Berlin), Robert Curgenven (Berlin), Cat Hope (Perth), Tanja Kimme (Melbourne), Govinda Lange (Paris-Berlin), Somaya Langley (Berlin), Sarah Last (Brisbane), Silvia Marzall (Berlin), Ben Milbourne (Melbourne), Michael Prior (Melbourne), Lynda Roberts (Melbourne), Jodi Rose (Berlin), Sumugan Sivanesan (Sydney), Anna Tautfest (Berlin)

EMERGENCES

PROGRAM Gallery
Invalidienstr 115
10115 Berlin

Vernissage: 19:00, 31.01.08
Opening Times: 14-19:00, 01.02.08-06.02.08

(other sites to be announced)

TRANSIT LOUNGE is a partner event of transmediale.08 CONSPIRE…

TRANSIT LOUNGE would like to thank the Australia Council for their support.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

TRUDE

2008-01-09T13:38:00.000+01:00

“If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the other, with the same little garnish and yellowish houses. Following he same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had no changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already know the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and seller of hardware; I had ended the days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like, “they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by the sole Trude, which does not begin,nor end. Only the name of the airport changes.”

ITALO CALVINO - INVISIBLE CITIES

DATES

2008-01-05T07:39:00.000+01:00

The new website is almost finished + will go live HERE on the 11th of Jan. The 14 artists from Berlin, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne will begin their online exchange on the 16th Jan, going through until the 6th Feb. The ensuing collaborations, disruptions, interuptions and evolutions will be distilled in an exhibition to be held in Berlin from the 31st Jan - 6th Feb, to coincide with the Transmediale.

WHERE
Program Gallery
Invalidenstr 115
10115 Berlin
www.programonline.de

WHEN
Vernissage: 7pm, 31st Jan 2008
Opening Times: 2-7pm, 1st - 6th Feb 2008

To receive updates about the project please subscribe to our email list by going to www.transitlounge.org/subscribe.html and filling in your details.

transit lounge 2008

2007-12-10T12:45:00.000+01:00

transit lounge will be back in Berlin + across Australia for 3 weeks in 2008. A partner event of transmediale.08, CONSPIRE...transit lounge 2008 will involve 6 artists working together (and separately) in Berlin, responding to the secret instructions and obstructions received from artists in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Paris, in a 4d online and real world game of exquisite corpse of video, sound, images and performance.

transit lounge will run from Jan 15th - Feb 4th, and will be open to the public in Berlin from Jan 31st at Program Gallery, Mitte.

Project artists include: Bianca Calandra, Robert Curgenven, Benjamin Ducroz, Katie Hepworth, Govinda Lange, Somaya Langley, Silvia Marzall, Kristina Matovic, Michael Prior, Jodi Rose, Sumugan Sivanesan, Anna Tautfest...with more to be announced shortly.

The project website will be launched in early 2008...in the meantime, updates can be found here.

RE-PLACE BERLIN: A NEW PROJECT BY TRANSIT LOUNGE + PROGRAM

2007-08-19T06:52:00.000+01:00

Commuting to work
Walking the dog around the block
Going to the open air market on sundays
Visiting a family on the weekend

The rituals of everyday life trace regular paths along streets and through buildings, organising the solids and voids of the built environment into narratives and patterns of association. Complicated by memory and social rituals, our experience of the city is of a dynamic place, a stage for public performances and private tragedies, of significant moments and the incredibly mundane. The habits, rituals, and actions of its population, the lived experiences within the city define it as something that is always current, always in constant, random movement.

RE-PLACE BERLIN is a web-based urban project that aims to reveal and celebrate the everyday rituals of Berlin’s inhabitants. For Phase I of the project, residents of Berlin are invited to map out frequent routes from their day-to-day living, recording the regular patterns and particular moments associated with this journey, offering others the opportunity to retrace the city in a way that directly relates to the lived experience of those who dwell there.

While commercially available tour packages tend to reduce a city to a handful of its most famous monuments, RE-PLACE BERLIN invites everyone to become a tourist of someone else's everyday ritual, to document and share some of their observations and discoveries made along the way. These insights, collected in the form of text and images, will be assembled on the website during Phase II – as points of intersection develop between the routes, the city will be remapped as a network of lived experiences.

Through the various stages of the project, RE-PLACE BERLIN seeks to provide a way to understand the city, not only through its built space, but in the way its residents are interacting with it in their daily lives – the routes we follow and the moments where these routes cross, overlap, run parallel or tangent to each other.

Please email us for more information and/or click here to participate.

RE-PLACE BERLIN was initiated by program and transit lounge in the summer of 2007.

CATALOG DVD OUT NOW!

2007-07-22T16:32:00.000+01:00

The DVD presents an overview of all exhibitions from January- June 2007, including videos, photos and sound excerpts. The booklet contains short bios of all participants and a brief intro text. If you would like to order your copy for €5 or $10 AUD please write to: transit@transitlounge.org

THANK YOU

2007-07-22T16:23:00.001+01:00

After 5 months the transit lounge 2007 came to an end. We would like to thank all our participants as well as Kristina Matovic, Benjamin Ducroz, Austrade and Manfred Fox for their efforts in helping to make this an extremely successful event.

Berlin, July 2007 Miriam Mlecek+Katie Hepworth

sous les pavés, la plage

2007-07-08T07:17:00.000+01:00

from Hugo's blog, Informalism, written somewhere in Bangkok.

"S.L.P.L.P! is designed to give anyone who enters it immediate control of a little piece of the public space. Passers by are given the chance to own a space simply by inhabiting it."

sous les pavÃ©s, la plage! in the basement from hugo and Vimeo.

spoken words

2007-06-15T16:10:00.000+01:00

Tell me how many languages you speak, and I'll tell you how many people you are"

Armenian proverb. Told to me by a friend that I met in Italy when I used to live there, remembered now because I'm back. Immersed in Italian after the bubble of English that was the Transit Lounge Berlin (a result of my embarrassingly poor German) I've been thinking a lot about the way in which languages change and evolve and the different possibilities for expression - and the concepts that are impossible to express. In the last week I've moved from the place I used to live in the north, where the language keeps traces of the Napoleonic invasion of Europe, turning its grammar back to front to match the French, to Sicily where half my family is from, and where 500 years of Arab invasion have given us sounds that don't exist on the peninsula.

The words that languages miss say a lot about the culture that speaks it. There is no word for privacy in Italian. Slowly, without much conviction, and a degree of amusement, people are beginning to adopt the English word for this most Anglo-Saxon / northern European of concepts. And these thoughts remind me of why I like German, and Chinese, the sticking together of smaller parts (whether characters or words) to express new thoughts. The precision and expression that comes from that. Kathrin - you mentioned longing in your last post Tibetu that is since buried in the blog - I love that one of the German words is the same as addiction. Its so much stronger than the English.

Na?

1:1 & finissage

2007-06-12T18:13:00.000+01:00

1:1

1:20, little babylons exhibition (23.05.07)

2007-06-12T15:08:00.000+01:00

the photograph is guilty of many miss-deeds, lies and fabrications. as our culture increasingly visualizes, pictures pimp every product imaginable from bikinis to beach houses.

But, the medium is innocent, it is our implicit assumption that the photograph is ‘real’ that leads us astray.

the 1:20 project originated as an open investigation of the possibilities of collaboration between an architect and photographer/artist. a collaboration that attempts to re-frame the typical, linear relationship of

architect > photographer : object > documentation.

into a true collaborative process of:

architect <> photographer: artifice <> real(site)

using each of the collaborator’s familiar techniques; digital and physical model making, image production and manipulation, in unfamiliar ways to establish hybrid methodologies.

the transit lounge gallery was taken as the site of experimentation – the ‘transience’ of the project being the temporary occupation of, focus on and transformation of the ‘site’.

the site was photographically recorded at a variety of scales, physically modeled, transformed via installations and alterations to the model. re-photographed and presented within the site (gallery).

the re-presentation of the ‘artificial’ images of the ‘real’ space, within the real space destabilizes the conventional ‘reality’ of the photograph and in particular the architectural photograph.

2007-06-04T20:52:00.000+01:00

Ben Milbourne
Tanja Kimme
Kristina Matovic
Benjamin Ducroz
Michael Prior

Extending their experiments into new ways of collaboration between photographers and architects, Ben Milbourne and Tanja Kimme are joined by Kristina Matovic, Benjamin Ducroz and Michael Prior, distorting our perception of space and time within the Transit Lounge, through photographic layering and video feedback.

finissage - transit lounge 07

Do. 07.06.2007 19 Uhr

After 4 months in Berlin, the Transit Lounge is having its final show on Thursday 7th June. Come join us for the final show, 1:1 + a review of all of the work created by the (not so) transient Australian and European residents.
Music by Michael Prior following the show.

--
transit lounge
Josetti Höfe
Rungestr.22-24
10179 Berlin-Mitte

entry via riverside path

PLATTENBAU ELEPHANTS

2007-06-02T09:14:00.000+01:00

One of many video artefacts collected by Kenzee Patterson while exploring the centres and extremities of Berlin. This group of lazy elephants was found grazing in front of Plattenbau in the far East of the city, towards Marzhan. The videos uncover particular, unique and often absurd moments in the daily life of the city.

Shown in the (inaccessable) basement of the Josetti Hofe as part of the UNDERSCORE exhibition in conjunction with sound piece by Jodi Rose + Isabelle Cordeiro.

"For UNDERSCORE, the artists worked collaboratively and individually on a series of new works reflecting on their experiences of Berlin...The resulting sound, installation, and video works explore marginalised spaces and discarded objects...The underscore serves to underline the spaces in between, the ignored and the unnoticed..."

HERMAN AND THE PUNKS

2007-06-01T16:53:00.000+01:00

"Sous les pavés... La plage" by Hugo Moline

A rogue beach pavilion takes to the streets to subvert kapital and urbanism`s unholy alliance of socio-spatial control. But will the people listen? Will anyone come out to play?

HERMAN AT GORLITZER

2007-06-01T15:51:00.000+01:00

little babylons opening

2007-05-26T18:41:00.000+01:00

"Sous les pavés... La plage" by Hugo Moline

rogue beach pavilion, monitors, video

________________________________________________________________________

1:20

Tanja Kimme and Benjamin Milbourne

slide projectors, data projector, slides, stop motion animation, props/remnants

Tibebu

2007-05-23T10:30:00.000+01:00

By Jane Haugh

Last Monday I drove 100 miles to a diner in Latham, New York, U.S.A. and sat down to eat with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Luckily, this is not a restaurant review because in the U.S., Diners are places full of deep fried foods and bad coffee. I went to meet these strangers not for the cuisine but because they have all adopted children from Ethiopia, a possibility my family is considering -- but this is not, strictly, an adoption story either.
A year ago, I would not have been able to identify a child as Ethiopian as apposed to African American or Caribe. Most of the darker skinned children at the diner last Monday had come from Addis Ababa by way of an agency called Adoption Advocates International. AAI runs an orphanage in Addis called Layla House, which I visited in December. I spent a week with the waiting children there and I now find it startlingly clear when I see an Ethiopian face – in Latham at the diner I was clearly watching Ethiopia eating, laughing, talking in American voices while looking at me with Ethiopian eyes. I had expected to find out more about adoption but instead, I sat with a silly grin on my face, happy to be back in Addis, glad to hold a baby for his mother, or pretend to steal greasy French fries from a toddler – ignoring the adults completely.
My new ability to identify ethnic origins aside, time in Africa taught me something subtle about our proximity to each other. When human beings travel, we don’t just move through space -- our bodies transiting through the airport to the taxi to the guest house and back again. Each hand shaken and smile exchanged make the world less strange for all of us. In Addis, at Layla House, I often felt at a loss for what to do. I don’t speak Amharic and these children are from a culture alien to me. In Europe, at least, there are people like me, middle class people with similar hopes for their children, attached to similar comforts (like safe drinking water!), and at least the same alphabet if not a common language. Africa is another matter. Africa is an idea, a cradle, a horn, a great and terrible river, an inexhaustible desert. Before I went and saw it for myself, Africa was mostly a place of bugs and disease and famine and war. And orphans.
There are 1.3 million orphans. Today. In Ethiopia. It sounds and feels impossible to comprehend. It is. But having landed in that place with those particular people around me, I watched the workers at Layla House and began to learn from them a new language, one child at a time.
Mentasinot, Leuld, Honi, Tibebu.
On my first day at Layla, I met and fell in love with a five year old with impossibly long eyelashes named Mentasinot. He’s the youngest of four siblings and waiting for someone in the US to give him (together with his siblings) a hug and a bed and some food. He was an excellent flirt, looking at me from under his eyelashes with a shy smile that broke into a huge grin at my slightest encouragement. In despair, that first day, I wondered who could take four children? When I went to say good-bye on my last day, as I stood knee deep in toddlers I had come to know, I wondered who could not. The day after we left, a couple came to pick up a sibling group of five.
Now, even though I live half way around the world, I can still feel Mentasinot waiting. I smile whenever I look at photos of my trip and one of him comes up.
Another little smile I met is called Leuld, a three year old whose mother died just before we arrived. Each time I walked into Layla, he would find me and hold his arms up. I carried him for hours as he cried and cried some more. When he was up for it, I bounced him on my knee and sang silly songs, then he’d dissolve again, his face hot and damp and tucked beneath my chin off and on for days. The only thing that could distract him was laundry. He loved to help the laundresses and, despite an enormous workload, they patiently let him. When I got home it was a shock to hear people debate the downside of interracial adoption. What were they talking about? Sure, I felt inadequate to the task of comforting Leuld. But not to pick him up because our skins are different colors? He has gone home to a family in Seattle, Washington since then and I hope his new room is full of sunshine and... well, laundry.
On my way home, I had the amazing privilege of escorting a seven-month-old named Honi to her new mother in New York City. I scooped her up off a blanket on the floor of the nursery in Addis Ababa late on a Friday night. The woman who had spent the most time feeding and changing and tickling and rocking and feeding her again, was overwhelmed with sudden tears and had to step out of the room while they changed Honi into a “Let’s Go Mets” outfit they had been saving (the Mets baseball team also has its home in New York). I followed the young caregiver out to where she stood breathing hard, just outside the door and gave her my hand. For one still moment, she looked into my eyes and pressed my palm to her heart. Then she ducked her head and tore herself away.
In my house right now, we are waiting for a referral of a single male child, aged 2 to 6 years old. We say we are waiting for “A Tibebu” after another boy I would have put in my suitcase if I could have. That tibebu has since found a home but another tibebu will, I hope, find his way here to mine. He will be my child then, surely, as much as the 6 and 8 year old girls who crawl into bed with me when they have a bad dream and write me gloriously misspelled mothers’ day cards, and happen to have come from my body.
So you see, the world is moving in next door. Not down the street or into the next arrondissement or county or stadt teil. Right next door or even into your very own house. And it’s not just through adoption. Commerce and friendship, and simply travel itself are changing the neighborhood. And the neighborhood is stretching, getting larger and larger -- mine, certainly, encompasses Addis Ababa. I now know a whole bunch of people who aren’t “like” my anglo-european self. And my hope is that each child I held or tickled or fed will be less afraid of their new world, my world, of (mostly white) America. I went to Africa expecting to be overwhelmed, I came home feeling privileged and full of wonder. I didn’t save a single child but I sure hugged a whole bunch of them.
And somewhere on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there’s a little girl growing up as a New Yorker. I handed little Honi over at Kennedy Airport to a single mom who had brought her own mother for support. I asked some questions about her new life and, having grown up myself in New York, I could suddenly see her future spread before me. From a floor in Addis Ababa where women die by the thousands giving birth on street corners and there are no street lights, from the hands of a woman with beautiful black eyes and a huge heart who speaks an ancient language – to New York City and a nutritious diet and good healthcare and a closet full of beautiful clothes, to another woman with a huge heart and a manicure and great hopes and plans – to the possibility of a future.
Because I traveled and met Honi and Leuld and Mentasinot and Tibebu, Africa has moved closer than it was before, certainly as close as the Diner in Latham, New York. I am five months back from Ethiopia and, this past Monday as I drove to eat bad food I didn’t think much about the children that would be there. I wanted mostly to connect with the adults for the advice I’ll need from them in the days after my tibebu comes home. But although I share formative experiences with all the white American adults around that table, I was more pleased, gratified, in fact relaxed by the un-foreignness of the children from Ethiopia. What was exotic, has become domestic. What was so alien, is now conceivable as my own family. I am more deeply at home in the world than I was before my trip and for that, I am indebted to the times we live in with the easy possibility of travel in a shrinking world, and to the children of Addis Ababa.

rawked!

2007-05-22T08:38:00.001+01:00

hay guise!
jarst wanna sei, ewe guise awl rawked sew hurd inn berlin eit TRANZIT LOWNJ! Leik tewtally! eespeschalee jewdee, kristeena, kaytee ant thad hipee go-vindar - sew kuhl!
jarst dewing anutha Awstraylean tewer nau - ant ets rawkin tew!
sew, wurd up yew guise!
rawk arn!
:)r
ps blarg mie tew!
http://outbackfella.blogspot.com/
yar!

23.05.07 19-22:00 LITTLE BABYLONS

2007-05-21T18:24:00.000+01:00

1:20 by Tanja Kimme/Ben Milbourne

An open investigation of new methods of collaboration for photographer/artist and architect, the 1:20 project established a conceptual and practical feedback loop: site-artiface-site.Generating hybrid methodologies and highlighting mis-truths hidden in the image.

herman

2007-05-21T14:57:00.001+01:00

UNGUIDED TOURS - PHOTOS

2007-05-16T08:43:00.000+01:00

MORE PHOTOS

YPSILON 16.05.07, 20:00

2007-05-14T12:55:00.000+01:00

2007-05-07T11:14:00.000+01:00

UNGUIDED TOURS
09.05.07 19-22h

an exhibition in transit by

ISABEL CORDEIRO
HUGO MOLINE
KENZEE PATTERSON

transit lounge
Josetti Höfe
Rungestr 22-24
Berlin-Mitte
entry via riverside path

26 surf street

2007-05-05T17:15:00.000+01:00

I was recently involved documenting this ephemeral intervention project.
A group of 8 artists had the rare opportunity to do whatever they wished with a house, located at 26 Surf Street at Merrick’s Beach in Victoria Australia, only a week before it got demolished. The group had met a few times, and had loosely discussed possible ideas, but there was no common project that necessarily united them. Some members knew the owners of the house, others came to the house as strangers, armed with tools and industrial equipment..

http://26surfstreet.blogspot.com/

UNDERSCORE - PHOTOS

2007-05-04T11:31:00.000+01:00

MORE PHOTOS

RE CONSTRUCTION DECONSTRUCTION RECONSTRUCTION

2007-05-03T09:46:00.000+01:00

2007-04-23T13:33:00.000+01:00

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.

in transit...oz..

2007-04-22T04:48:00.000+01:00

26.04.07 19-22:00 UNDERSCORE

2007-04-20T15:16:00.000+01:00

12.04.07 19-22:00 1/2

2007-04-19T11:11:00.000+01:00

INTERIM WORK BY KENZEE PATTERSON, JASPER KNIGHT + ISABELLE TOLAND

in conjunction with

PLACES OUT OF PURPOSE

RE

2007-04-12T14:36:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-12T14:28:00.000+01:00

"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?

2007-04-12T14:03:00.000+01:00

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

Zwischenpausen

2007-04-10T17:36:00.000+01:00

"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'

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

2007-04-09T22:30:00.000+01:00

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

TRANSIT LOUNGE RADIO CONVERSATIONS

2007-03-30T15:44:00.000+01:00

TRANSIT LOUNGE RADIO

every conversation is an invitation

A hyper-local, transnational, hybrid radio: collecting and
transmitting conversations with people who
pass through the transit lounge.

Start a conversation; tell a story about the places in
between - what inspires and keeps life interesting, adventures,
dreams, failures, the Future...

Radio in Transit
Receiving and transmitting from wherever you are.

To converse, visit the transit lounge on:
April 4 + 5, 14 - 18:00

To listen, visit the transit lounge on:
April 12, 19 - 22:00
or online:
http://transitradio.wordpress.com/

ZWISCHENRAUME (19 - 22:00, 29.03.07)

2007-03-26T16:41:00.000+01:00

Donnerstag 29 MÄrz . 20.00 – 22.00
Transit Lounge . Josetti Hofe . Rungestraße 22 – 24 . Jannowitzbruke entry via Rungestr and Spree
"With regards to the theme of space, the transit space serves as
place of origin of a new reality.
It is the niche from which new places can grow. The transit space is
also something primary and third."
Franz Xaver Baier

Spacial interventions at the Josetti Höfe exteriors. Transformation
of passages into sequences.
Internal and external border determination. Threshold and passage.
Image and image-copy.

"Auf das Thema Raum bezogen ist Zwischenraum der Ursprungsort neuer
Wirklichkeit.

Er ist die `Nische´aus der neue Räume wachsen. Der Zwischenraum ist
auch etwas Erstes und Drittes zugleich."
Franz Xaver Baier

Räumliche Interventionen im Aussenraum der Josetti-Gewerbehöfe;
Transformation der Durchgänge als Raumsequenz;

Grenzfindung von Außen und Innen – Schwelle und Durchlass – Bild undAbbild.

Installation: Kathrin Zöller (D), Thomas Brüggemann (D), DetlefJunkers (D), Kristina Matovic (Aus)
Sound: Robert Curgenven (Aus)
Perfomance: Angelika Hofstetter (D)

2007-03-23T10:57:00.000+01:00

ETERNAL WAIT

opposed(or connected?) to the perpetual nomad: the eternal wait. a train that never stops, leaves you in a continuous loop of transitory time and space, transforms the station into a "place out of purpose" with a reference to the former "ghost stations" in east Berlin where the west train wouldnt stop......

Miriam + Anna

r e set

2007-03-20T17:01:00.000+01:00

In keeping with the recent run of mad Thursdays...
we kick out the kunst and boots up the live improv

thursday 22nd march from 20Uhr

with a unique and spontaneous meeting of rhythm and musiq concrete, two drummers, two guys with boxes, three sets and everything, from soft to loud and all points in-between

featuring:
robbert van hulzen (NL) drums;
oori shalev (Israel) drums;
ludovic fresse (France) toys and tools;
robert curgenven (Aus) harmonics/field recordings

DJ for the night is Govinda Lange (Disfunkt/Australia) in his final Berlin and Transit Lounge appearance (well for this time anyway) before leaving for Paris.
Films from the DotMov archive will also be presented by Kristina Matovic (Australia). Entry is free! and from the Spree gate by Bruckenstr, opposite Jannowitzbrucke.
Bar open from 19uhr

Ahmedabad

2007-03-19T08:39:00.000+01:00

After nearly two weeks in India, I arrived in Ahmedabad, Gujarat this morning.
Now I'm sitting in "Super Cyber Cafe." In between replying to emails and keeping abreast of Transit Lounge blog posts, I keep looking at the wall next to the computer.
It looks like any wall, scuffed and discoloured, covered with torn remnants of once important notices.
It's the hand-written URLs that keep distracting me: nextdoornikki.com, lovetgp.com, xxxdessert.com, to name a few. It seems that Internet pornography isn't just an escape for white, middle-class teenagers and their parents.
Thoughts of global connections are racing around in my head, as I try very hard to reconcile all the feelings I have about my experiences in India in an effort to frame them in relation to my upcoming stint at Transit Lounge.
I am observing first-hand the informalist architecture and way of life that Hugo writes of, and at this stage I am attempting to balance the sensation of being an ignorant outsider, while focusing towards making artwork that may or may not address what I have seen and done here.
I am interested in other people's thoughts about how they approached/are thinking of approaching making work at Transit Lounge.
Right now I feel that my ponderous state of mind can only be grounded through physical interaction and presence in Berlin.
Like printing out emails to better understand them. Is that old-fashioned?

Places_Out_Of_Purpose_02

2007-03-16T14:12:00.000+01:00

MOMENT: RAISED (19 - 22:00, 15.03.07)

2007-03-13T16:41:00.000+01:00

Bringing a new perspective to the transit lounge space - moment: raised - is a collaboration between Silvia Marzall + Govinda Lange. moment: raised is an installation of intertwined, broken, and arrested audiovisual elements.

VERNISSAGE 19 - 22:00, 15.03.07 @ TRANSIT LOUNGE

OPEN 16 - 19:00, 16.03.07 @ TRANSIT LOUNGE

Elusive Places

2007-03-12T13:01:00.000+01:00

At the instant of the explosion, the building becomes a Place_Out_Of_Purpose.
Sometimes Places_Out_Of_Purpose can last only few instants.

perpetual re.blog.framing

2007-03-12T12:20:00.000+01:00

How could be possible to recompose the linear vertical direction of the blog?

perpetual traveller...

2007-03-12T10:15:00.000+01:00

to all the loungers on one-way tickets, and those that are trying to work out if they are going to use their return...

I liked this phrase from the upcoming exhibition at Artspace.

Having returned home to Japan after years of living abroad, Hiroharu Mori often confesses to feeling like a stranger in his native country without ever really having adjusted to being anywhere else. He is the perpetual traveller, through life as much as the world, rootless and detached, but with a keen critical eye, a marked sense of economy and a healthy taste for the absurd...

http://www.artspace.org.au/2007/03/mori.html

Reframing the blog?

2007-03-09T12:10:00.000+01:00

According to Vassilieas's idea it would be nice to re-frame the blog continuously.
Maybe we could try to develop step by step a kind of "cyclopedia of transit" by using constantly the possibility of "labeling" our posts. Finally the rhizomatic structure of the transit-network and transit-ideas would be reflected in that kind of "cyclopedia" (anyway it will be like that, but I suggest to reflect that reflection).
What do you think about it? And what do you think about the blog as a of tool for communication and "representation"?

serial reframing

2007-03-08T14:52:00.000+01:00

After asking myself questions about which personal form of blog contributions would create a flexible space of thinking, searching and at the same time opening up a place of intervention for others who would receive such contributions, I did not actually come up with answer but with words.
I have invented an expression for this personal form.
I call them serial reframing.
And because I do believe in words and in their power to deceive, I have deceived my self by starting blogging.

Places_Out_Of_Purpose

2007-03-07T17:23:00.000+01:00

If I assume that transit spaces in public sphere (all spaces of transfer, movement and changing) are always spaces with a purpose, rules, regulations and control (recognizable or unrecognizable one, even illegal), I attribute to my self the task to find places without a task, without a function.
I name them Places_Out_Of_Purpose.

These are abandoned places.
Places abandoned by their rulers, by their function.

Every place within the borders of a city is always under control. Even if this control is only the definition of its size by the size of the buildings around them.

Nevertheless, there are Places_Out_Of_Purpose in a city.

22.05.07 TALK: INFORMAL DESIGN

2007-03-07T12:00:00.000+01:00

Title: Informal Design

Introduction: Katie Hepworth(AUS)

Speakers: Hugo Moline(AUS), Ben Milbourne(AUS)

Location: Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Köpenicker Straße 48/49 Aufgang A, 10179 Berlin-Mitte

Time: 19H, 22.05.07

Are infrastructures of informality possible? Can the informalism of the 3rd world mega-city be applied to the 1st world city?

Ben Milbourne and Hugo Moline are young, up and coming Australian architects, working in a global context. While their approach to architecture differs significantly, dealing with First world desires and Third world needs respectively, they share an approach to urbanism which embraces the informal and the chaotic in order to create and maintain dynamic, vibrant and changing communities and urbanisms. This focus marks a dramatic shift from that traditionally associated with Australian architecture and urban design, as represented in the DAZ exhibition in September. Ben and Hugo will discuss their own work in the context of contemporary Australian architecture and a wider global context.

24.04.07 TALK: ‘ADAPTIVE REUSE’ AND TRANSIT IN AUSTRALIAN ART + ARCHITECTURE

2007-03-07T11:56:00.000+01:00

Title: ‘Adaptive Reuse’ and Transit in Australian Art + Architecture

Introduction: Katie Hepworth(AUS)

Speakers: Miriam Mlecek(DE/AUS), Isabelle Toland(AUS) and Jasper Knight(AUS)

Location: Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Köpenicker Straße 48/49 Aufgang A, 10179 Berlin-Mitte

Time: 19H, 24.04.07

The Transit Lounge is an artist-in-residence program for Australian + Berlin-based artists and architects, which aims to blur the boundaries between the disciplines through a focus on short, process-focused, interdisciplinary collaborations. 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.

Isabelle Toland, Jasper Knight and Miriam Mlecek are all artists-in-residence at the Transit Lounge. They will discuss their own work in reference to the process of the Transit Lounge, and to the broader context of contemporary Australian art and architecture.

03.04.07 TALK: PLACE + MEMORY

2007-03-07T11:48:00.000+01:00

Place and Memory

Introduction: Miriam Mlecek(DE/AUS)

Speakers: Katie Hepworth (AUS), Detlef Junkers(DE), Kathrin Zöller(DE) and Thomas Brüggemann(DE)

Location: Deutsches Architektur Zentrum, Köpenicker Straße 48/49 Aufgang A, 10179 Berlin-Mitte

Time: 19H, 03.04.07

Challenging the accepted paradigm that defines transit places as non-places, Australian curator and architect Katie Hepworth will discuss nomadic trajectories and the temporary creation of place in marginal spaces, with Berlin-based Detlef Junkers and Kathrin Zöller from Junkers+Partner and artist Thomas Brüggemann. The conversation will focus on collective memory and the city, and the way in which associations are layered, imprinted and erased from its spaces.

(image from subtopia)

2007-03-06T14:13:00.000+01:00

perception vs physicality

SUSPENDED PATHS - THE FIRST LEG OF THE JOURNEY

2007-03-03T19:03:00.000+01:00

more photos of the exhibition here

SUSPENDED PATHS (01.03.07 19-22H)

2007-02-25T13:16:00.000+01:00

Movement reveals a layered and unfolding passage. Landscapes overlap, intersect and diverge. Formations emerge; clarity is exposed. With a destination in mind the in between is certain; the transit compulsory.

Rob Curgenven(AUS), Govinda Lange(AUS), Silvia Marzall(DE/BRA) and Kristina Matovic(AUS) transform the spaces of the Transit Lounge into an immersive landscape. A 14-channel soundscape leads you along the path, changing in response to the movement of the audience.

VERNISSAGE 01.03.07 19-22H @ TRANSIT LOUNGE
OPEN 02.03.07 16-19H

08.03.07 VOLLKONTAKT BERLIN + VIDEOS BY YANDELL WALTON

2007-02-23T17:33:00.000+01:00

On the 8th March, Vollkontakt Berlin will hold its first event. An international electro-acoustic ensemble will play across 2 rooms. In addition to percussion instrumets, double bass and flutes, there will be a group of musicians playing self-made instruments.Interacting with the sound, two video artists will create a visual experience. The unique ambience of the Vollkontakt Bar is created through the combination the industrial character of the Josetti Hoefe with Electronic, IDM and Ambient sounds. The bar will open at 6pm, and the performance begins at 9pm.

YANDELL WALTON

Yandell Walton’s work explores representations of the contained figure. She is interested in the interaction between the projected image and three-dimensional spaces to help blur the boundaries between the real and unreal. By working with reality and combining this with the use of technology, it creates a crossover of the real and the virtual allowing for the viewer to experience the actual and fantastic. The nature of her work reflects inner thoughts and emotion, challenging the audience to delve into fantasy, imagination as well as desperation.

Behind the window of an inner city building, passers by discover a virtual figure approaching from behind the glass. In the increasing desperation to escape from the building the figure captures the audiences attention by pounding on the glass, then disappearing into the darkness, leaving them haunted by the experience.

Yandell Walton has been exploring through projection and video installation the contained body, this containment being a metaphor for the interior space of the psyche. Walton’s latest projection installation Inside utilises a window of the Transit Lounge gallery space to comment on human emotion and the feelings associated with being in different spaces. The projection installation reflects how the city can affect the human psyche in a negative way. Her fascination in blurring the boundaries between the actual and illusional is again created using video projection.

Yandell is visiting Berlin from Australia and completed her Masters Of Fine Art at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2005. She has a growing profile in Melbourne exhibiting regularly in galleries and installation spaces both nationally and internationally as well as involving herself in arts based festivals. You can view more of her work at www.yandellwalton.com

[1] In Different Spaces, Place and Memory in Visual Culture, Victor Burgin pg29

on representation vs. reality

2007-02-17T12:34:00.000+01:00

before anything, a short text that inspired me to participate in the Transit Lounge:

"In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a Single Province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."

Jorge Luis Borges, From "Of Exactitude In Science", A Universal History of Infamy.

my thoughts come next.

INFORMALISM: ARCHITECTURE LEARNING FROM AND WORKING WITH THE SPONTANEOUS CITY

2007-02-16T15:19:00.000+01:00

By Hugo Moline

Informalism is the online presence of an international research project, 'working with the informal, learning from the informal', which seeks to explore the way architects and other urban practioners engage with the the informal city, the city as built by people themselves
....
According to recent international estimates more than 900 million people are living in informal settlements (slums, shantytowns, favelas, poblaciones etc.) worldwide . That translates to almost 1 in 3 city dwellers who are housing themselves without access to basic services or secure ownership of land. These informal settlements are a massive and growing urban phenomenon that architects must come to terms with if we hope to be of relevance to the city and its inhabitants. We must acknowledge and seek to ameliorate the hardship and exclusion faced by people living in these conditions. We must also recognise and learn from the ingenuity, resourcefulness and cooperation manifested in the building of such environments.
...
Through the project I will seek both to contribute to the practices and communities with which I will work and to gain skills and knowledge to be incorporated in my practice as an architect and shared with others. I will use the techniques learned in all my work as an architect, especially in the service of marginalized communities, both abroad and particularly at home in Australia. I will share my experience at the 2008 Global Studio in the People Building Better Cities forum. I will work with universities and professional organisations to organize talks and workshops which seek to encourage others, particularly students, to become interested in the global urban condition and active in exploring the social potential of architecture and its practice.

Throughout the duration of my research I will be continuously documenting and displaying my experiences (primarily through text and photographs) on this blog. The contents of which will be the raw material from which the final report will be drawn. I hope that the blog will significantly broaden the numbers of people who have access to the research and will allow mentors, advisors and colleagues to comment and contribute throughout the process.

http://www.informalism.blogspot.com/

hello berlin

2007-02-14T00:08:00.000+01:00

I'm listening to a Lee Hazelwood song 'nothing' on 2SER, a duet half in german, and only understanding one word in ten. Better get those four language courses I borrowed from the library onto the CD player now. Hope that immersion will bring back some of the forgotten deutsche from high school. It was great having a chance to meet some of the transit loungers in newtown before they headed off to various places on the way to berlin, and I'm looking forward to receiving the image/text/video/sound from our exquisite corpse to play with when I arrive.

Thinking a lot about the nature of connection, how ephemeral or lasting that moment can be, and becoming intrigued by the missed connections section of craigslist. Such incredible yearning and poetry expressed for someone glimpsed on the subway, usually a moment of eye contact taking place, but neither person having the courage to step forward and speak, or a short conversation but no further details to meet or reconnect. So the dreams and hopes are posted in this anonymous forum, where they become a hymn to longing (and hotties).

Wondering, in a life of constant transit, when do you decide to stay?
When is the pull of gravity or desire or stability stronger than the pull of adventure, the unknown... and desire? Where have you traveled to for a kiss? asked a friend in Slovakia last year 'hmmmm; Glasgow, Helsinki, New York'.
Happy Valentines Day!

I took myself on a lovely sonic adventure courtesy of soundtransit, taking me from a stormy night in sydney to bubbling mud in karosta via Tibetan roof thatching, old factories along the canals of montreal, crows in cuba, and woodcutters in latvia who kept our friends warm during their stay. Completely fantastic, design your own itinerary and book a flight around the world through the sonographic contributions of an international community of sound artists.

Maybe I'm jaded and weary, but I'd like to talk to friends in the same place and time zone. Preferably the same room.
I've developed an insatiable craving for embodied interaction rather than virtual.

This is what I'd like to explore during my time in berlin at the transit lounge.

An open invitation to conversation. Who knows where it will lead, or what we might uncover or discover? People tell you all kinds of things, if you just listen. And keep asking questions.

Unlike the wonderful dropping knowledge project in berlin last year, I won't be talking to experts or seeking answers to important questions. I'll just be talking to people - on the streets, in the gallery, in bars, cafes, bookshops, grocery stores - listening to their experiences, ideas, take on life, moments of transition and change where they willingly leapt into the unknown; and sharing some of their favourite music. (copyright issues depending)

People often ask me: why bridges? And I think it's largely the simple reason that they are points of connection and departure. Not in one place or another.

They offer the possibility of change, and then there's always the river, flowing away beneath you, to and from somewhere else. I have a pathological fear of being stuck or trapped, I like to be near an open window or the aisle seat so I can always get out quickly if necessary. The bridge between one place and another lets you leave, and it lets you arrive/return.

I've noticed in the course of my adjunct career as a gonzo radio journalist making out-there cultural features, that when you talk to someone with a microphone in hand, it creates another level of intimacy and purpose to the conversation. Often allowing you to go deeper, somehow people just open up to you and often you can ask pretty much anything and get an honest answer. I was always frustrated having to edit these long conversations into false brevity, keeping only two or three sentences and cutting the rest.

So now I've decided to take control, I'm not editing anything in or out; they can be heard in all their rambling, messy, meandering, incoherent glory of a freeform verbal dance - no time limit or structure, it was going to be fifteen minutes but I decided against imposing an artificial structure or limit. Although maybe I will. Maybe fifteen minutes of fame is the right amount. Or see what happens naturally.

Conversations with three friends simulataneously adrift in the world, one in london (then melbourne via st petersberg and berlin); another in Delhi (choosing between helsinki, sydney and delhi for the next few years), and another one trying to leave helsinki but not sure where he's going next. Apparently you need at least three conversations a day to avoid isolation and insanity. The conversations I crave take place over time zones and electronic pulses.

Philosopher Michael Oakshot describes good conversation as "an unrehearsed intellectual adventure," and "a boundless sea with no destination."

I'm looking forward to exploring the way different places have different conversational styles.
Berlin, New York, Helsinki, Glasgow, Sydney - as Lou Reed said, just a New York conversation.

TRANSIT LOUNGE RADIO

2007-02-08T13:31:00.000+01:00

Transit Lounge Radio

Every Conversation is an Invitation

I spend my life in transit. Writing festival proposals in internet cafes from Paris to Christchurch, keeping art projects and life administration under control using wireless access in airports, cafes and libraries, and working creatively on the run wherever and whenever I find a moment to focus. Amidst the constant travel and participation in cultural activities, engaging with new people and developing projects; having the time and place to ground yourself in a daily practice, be part of a community and undertake rituals in everyday life is very attractive. In response to this moment of transit overload, I am interested in exploring the possibility of being ‘at home’ somewhere in the world. Setting up a comfortable lounge space in the Transit Lounge studio, creating a warm inviting corner to share with friends and visitors with the conversational ‘Transit Lounge Radio’ show recorded in the space for exhibition, installation and podcast.

The Transit Lounge Radio offers a transparent process of socially engaged and networked community interaction with an experimental form of hybrid radio. The project has grown out of my freelance cultural feature programs for ABC Radio, and aims to create an alternative space for highly specialised explorations of ideas, culture and philosophy which does not have to fit into any prescribed format or listener demographic.

There is a particular quality to Berlin conversations which I am eager to explore, and will provide a contrast to ongoing development of the project in Helsinki, Australia and beyond.

In a physically embodied iteration of social networking and peer-to-peer interaction, I will invite artists and audiences into the Transit Lounge Studio to talk with me about life in general, transition, participation, networks, experimental interactions, art and technology. Each conversation is recorded, uploaded to the website and podcast, with a photo and text about that person. This forms an online archive, documenting the ephemeral transactions of communication with a variety of artists, musicians, writers and local businesses, passersby and residents.

The result is a hyper-local community radio broadcast, transmitting conversations with people who pass through the Transit Radio Lounge. It offers a respite from transit, in a fast-paced world. Collecting conversations instead of frequent flier points. As people pass through the studio and my life, they leave something of themselves and share my ‘home’ space with a focused interaction that can be traced online.

http://transitradio.wordpress.com/transit-lounge-radio/

TL3101

2007-02-05T19:32:00.001+01:00

Some images from the opening of the Transit Lounge

step 6

2007-02-04T23:00:00.000+01:00

We are still in transit ... and think about authentic places.

Our visual introduction of the last days shows different perspectives of a historic place: „Dreilinden Raststätte“, designed by Rainer G. Rümmler (1929-2004) in the end of the sixties. Today the ensemble stands under conservation of monuments and historic buildings.

A short review on a transit route:

Dreilinden was an important official inspection point. Here the highway connected West-Berlin with West-Germany. Dreilinden was also named Checkpoint Bravo (by the Nato phonetic alphabet). Here was the entrance to the GDR.
One left near Helmstedt (Checkpoint Alpha) only then again the area of GDR. Dreilinden – Helmstedt was the shortest street connection between Berlin-West and the area of the federal republic and accordingly frequented. A distance of about 200 kilometers transit route.
Dreilinden is situated in the southwest of Berlin. The service area was a very important stop. A meeting place for tramper usually students who wanted westward. A place with a big bustle and a special atmosphere of anxiety and departure.

Today Dreilinden service station is a point which one can reach neither by the car nor officially on foot. Here the highway still goes past, but there is no exit. So this historic place has lost its function. An abandoned, a recollection place.

It is nonetheless an authentic location, certainly, not a museum, but it admits as a real point of contact reflections about past, present and future. A space, a vacuum which is in the middle of a movement network. Round this area, something happens, something is in movement. The driving past cars were already mentioned, but not yet the official place for Sinti and Roma on the ground of the former traffic jam space near by the border inspection point.
This camping facility for Roma and Sinti, travelling in Germany as seasonal workers in the month of May through October is the result of a gesture by the Berlin Senate. Still a provisional arrangement with minimal infrastructure. At least they pursue a school, accommodated in containers which is used obviously gladly by the children. To us very much sympathetically is the indication that Sinti and Roma are called outside of the German-speaking countries „Rom“. This term stands for human being and leads us to an abstracter view which is not necessarily bound to the direct place. Favour also has to us the poignant statement of a Sinti residing there, the freedom flows in his blood.
Perhaps this place is a metaphor which stands for the variability of not changeable believed political settlements, just as to be for the movement in the life without purposeful determination.

The whole areal seems to be a setting for the discourse on who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.

So much for today

FOUND TAPES EXHIBITION

2007-02-04T14:38:00.000+01:00

The Found Tapes Exhibition is an evolving online documentary audio project. It has been accessible on the web since late 2002, and has continuously been expanding since. Due to its 'evolving' character, the Found Tapes Exhibition is not really a 'completed' production; nor is it a 'project to be realized'. In fact, it is a mix of both. The Found Tapes Exhibition's URL is http://www.harsmedia.com/Chronson/FT/. To listen to the Exhibition as a continuous stream of chronological montages, use the following playlist URI: http://www.harsmedia.com/Chronson/Playlists/magmig.m3u All soundfiles are 128kbps 44.1KHz stereo mp3, and hosted by PARK4DTV, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The FOUND TAPES EXHIBITION will be taking place in the Transit Lounge as part of the Kleine Field Recording Festival.

step 5

2007-02-02T23:48:00.000+01:00

step 4

2007-02-01T22:02:00.000+01:00

step 3

2007-01-31T17:01:00.000+01:00

step 2

2007-01-30T18:54:00.000+01:00

We hope to see all `berlin-bloggers´ tomorrow....

GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

2007-01-22T17:01:00.000+01:00

PHOTOS OF GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

IN TRANSIT

2007-01-15T23:00:00.000+01:00

sitting in changi airport, almost back in berlin. Sitting in the transit lounge of the worlds biggest transit lounge, this is the worlds most generic city. full of shopping malls of tourists buying things that aren't really that cheap, longing for some lost tax free day.

In the midst of all of this are moments of intense localness, usually related somehow to food. Places that recall the rest of south east asia. Hawker stalls and plastic chairs, big chilli crabs and steaming bowls of katong laksa. beef kway teow in the redlight district.

I love airports though. After days of trying to work out a strange city, the airport feels like home. Like a decompression chamber getting you ready to enter your old/new world.

time to board.

Greetings from Jasper and Isabelle

2007-01-09T14:45:00.000+01:00

This is a project Izzy and I did together in September last year. You might remember these hot pink dinosaurs when they were small wooden toys . This installation was of six works that sat outside Customs House in Sydney for Art and About 06. They are made out of marine plywood, perspex and metal and sit on 280kg steel plates.

First "Hello" from Alma in Berlin

2007-01-09T12:07:00.000+01:00

Hello to everybody,

my name is Alma, I live in Berlin and will be one of the blog moderators, though I'm still wondering, what a "blog moderator"really IS - but as we all are more or less dealing with "floating subjects and identities" (and what is THAT?) I'm sure that I will find a way how to generate a floating moderator...

I'm very happy to take part in the Transitlounge 2007 - in 2006 I was a visitor and I liked the way how Miriam and Katie managed it to focus more on processes than on products (everybody is speaking about that - but only a few people are able to realize it).

Apart from my interest in processes I'm also linked with Transitlounge by my research project on tourism and art. In my opinion every artist that takes part in an "artist-in-residence-program" is a kind of tourist - so most of you will soon follow some of the tourist's paths in Berlin. As your steps are led by images and imaginations about Berlin I'm interested in the way how you now create your "mental map" of Berlin (before you go there), how you will realize that map and how you will surely always change and re-create it (when you're here) and last but not least how you'll reconstruct "Berlin" when you're back in Australia.

That's why I don't plan to be your guide - I suggest that it'll be better the other way round: Maybe I could follow you and your steps and you will be my guide. I want to be a kind of shadow - but an active one who speaks to you, who asks some questions, who collects your images and words and who tries to connect them a little bit. So that's my first step in trying to be a moderator: to create a visible and unvisible shadow.
Hope you'll like it.

Happy to see you soon
and best wishes from Berlin

Alma

feet up in the lounge?

2007-01-09T04:01:00.000+01:00

After a bit of a warm-up on the winter chill in Japan, a few weeks in Sydney's not-so-summer paves the way for a return to doonas and beanies in Berlin. Got some new sounds from the back of beyond and a yen for collaborating 'round the Transmediale melee and through February's return to the great indoors. Das Kleine Fieldrecording festival should be a hoot and some abstract sound action for the month in the Lounge should rattle the rafters a little.
Was good to get the low-down and put some faces to the virtual identities at the meet-up in Newtown last night and looking forward to discovering the Berlin contingent's ideas.
More words presently when I'm not in a room full of adolescent network wargamers letting one another's avatar-blood. $%@# internet cafes....

first post from hugo

2007-01-08T01:48:00.000+01:00

For me Transit Lounge will be the launching point for a travelling scholarship through which I will be learning from informal settlers (people building their own pieces of the city, usually out of desperation and without official recognition) and the urban professionals who are working with them. After Berlin I will spend the next 18 months in Bangkok, Tijuana/San Diego and Caracas (Venezuela) working with and learning from architects, community organisations, artists, urbanists and the communities of informal settlers themselves.

I will be interested in how informal processes are at work in Berlin. Due to the short period of stay and lack of language skills this is bound to be relatively superficial and naive, a situation i am looking forward to exploring...

Kenzee, I am also very excited about the potential for collaboration and cross-pollenation. I always loved Katie and Miriam's idea of taking up where your predecessor left off, drawing the feet from someone elses legs...

Good luck to those starting off, can't wait to see all that you do.

h

2006-12-20T09:28:00.000+01:00

Trained both as an architect (graduated from Architecture University of Lisbon, 2000) and as an artist (finished MA Fine Arts, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, 2006) the works I produce are investigations on the possibility of enhancing hidden dimensions of space.

This means to acknowledge the relation between the potential embedded in physical space to arouse different/multiple/infinite perceptions of the same space, and our inbuilt mechanisms of perception and assessment of reality; the intricate interaction between both is, in my view, responsible for the emergence of those recondite territories. In other words, I work with the principles of intuition and discourses, which act upon the body in actual space.

Within this framework I have developed the notion of constructive paintings to investigate the potential of painterly representations to challenge architecture, by mobilizing its strength to construct and deconstruct space, both physical space and represented space. Painting has the power to alter/subvert the properties of the built environment: a wall, which is known to be a solid element can be liquefied by means of painting. I work with both painting and constructive materials as media that allow from embodied, to fluid, to barely visible existences; from explicit presence to invisibility.

At the same time I approach painting as a constructive process similar to building architecture, from a two-dimensional design to an object. I explore this issue by defining a process of building images by layering. The layering process starts by defining representations of space (computer 3D images, topographic maps, etc.), developing further until it becomes tactile (painterly surfaces), achieving the character of substance (objecthood).

Painting, more then a form of mimicking reality, renders visible potential realities. It does so in a logic of its own but not disconnected from reality. I see painting as a form of legitimizing the existence of spaces beyond the physical spatiality we might inhabit. The surface of the picture plane works as an independent ontological territory that attests for the credibility of the places I ‘build’.

BIOGRAPHY: KRISTINA MATOVIC

2006-12-13T16:09:00.000+01:00

Perpetually seduced by the 4 dimensional and captivated by light; immersive environments have evolved. Concerned with the conception and representation of the future - projects investigate the social and psychological ramifications of the evolution of technology and aspire to assist in the positive reconstruction there of. Environments exist and are experienced in the threshold between the external and internal, real and virtual.

Having studied as a graphic designer at Monash University Melbourne, Kristina Matovic devoted her 4^th year to the research and development of META_ME, or later know as ISTGAMN (inflatable seat that glows and makes noise). This project was concerned with the negotiation of duel realities and manifest as a seating ‘device’ that utilized methods of physical isolation. META_ME was shown at Technikunst: Flesh vs Machine and further exhibitions and collaborations developed including: Two Point Two, Nextwave – Containers Project and the opening of Liquid Architecture 7.

Color Change

2006-12-13T11:28:00.000+01:00

first step: to be continued ......

In Between

2006-12-03T23:48:00.000+01:00

This is my official start into the transitlounge season. I quit Tzannes Associates last Friday to start concentrating on ideas and organizing the move. Interestingly I had to give a short talk at my firm before I left focussing on what inspires me- I chose the topic of the in-between and showed images of works by Rachel Whiteread(negation of space-see image above), Rebecca Horn(installation between art and space), Zaha Hadid(translating painting into architecture), Peter Zumthor(combining sensuality and spaces), Daniel Libeskind(in between the lines), Sydney(in between sea and land) and Berlin(the perfect space, environment and frame for everyone in-between). These inspirations are vital for my works and I gain my energy from being in between two places and disciplines and a constant change. Exploring this situation further will hopefully lead me to a more specific theme for next year.....

The lead-up to Transit Lounge

2006-11-24T02:19:00.000+01:00

With this first post, I would like to give a bit of a background to who I am, and what I am looking forward to most about being involved in Transit Lounge.
I'll start with where I am at the moment. I'm currently living in Sydney, Redfern to be exact, and working four days a week to earn enough money to get a plane ticket and live overseas for a few months next year.
With the rest of my time I try to work on my art. It's not an ideal set-up, which makes the incentive of next year's residency even more enticing.
I have deferred a Master's degree in visual arts so I have the possibility of working, thinking and writing in my own time.
I am looking forward to the learning experience that I expect working on Transit Lounge will provide me. What interests me most about this, is the collaborative process, and working with people who might have a totally different approach to thinking about and creating art.
I think that Berlin is the perfect backdrop for a project looking at transit in a virtual and physical sense: its itinerant population has transformed it into one big transit lounge.

INTRODUCTION

2006-11-07T10:28:00.000+01:00

Tickets booked, final grant applications in, all artists confirmed. Looks like we are all set to go for Transit Lounge Berlin 2007. A few changes from last year - we now have 16 participants, including 8 Germans. And this year, half the participants are architects.

Like last year, the blog is the virtual lounge; a place for all of us participants to discuss the themes, record observations and develop work in public. Its here that we can exchange words and images with the people we'll eventually be working with. But we're keen to take the blog beyond this - delving into topics somehow related to the theme Transit Lounge. To help us with that, Sarah Thompson + Alma-Elisa Kittner will take over the moderation of the blog for a month each. Sarah is keen to focus on the process of collaboration, while Alma will delve into issues of tourism, and in between , I want to develop my current obsession: transnational identities, migrations and nomadic lives.

BIOGRAPHY: GOVINDA LANGE

2006-10-18T12:25:00.000+01:00

Govinda Lange is a composer, producer, DJ and audiovisual artist based in Canberra, Australia, who works under the pseudonym of Defunkt. His projects have included soundtracks for short films, animations, contemporary dance pieces, and live audiovisual performances. He is frequently found carting AV equipment into unusual spaces at odd times.

Govinda incorporates a mixture of organic rhythms, coupled with snatches of live field recordings, creating evolving soundscapes that conspire to bring listeners into a nostalgic and evocative headspace.

He has performed at many festivals and events in Australia, including Loud Is Boring, Canberra in 2006; Electrofringe, Newcastle in 2005; Canberra Fringe Festival in 2004; eXXentricity, Canberra in 2003; St Kilda Festival, Melbourne in 2002; going as far back as the Panopticon Conspiracy, Canberra in 1995. As an event supervisor, he has assisted in the coordination of the Collabrador space at Electrofringe in 2005; and the Melbourne Big Day Out, since 2002.

Recent work includes Gnostalgia, a collaborative improvised AV performance with the RTFM visual artists, presented at The Front Gallery in Canberra, as part of Loud Is Boring; field recordings of, and synthesis of, insect sounds for an animation work by Neville Black; and the development of a networked audiovisual piece with Tim O'Loghlin, incorporating live video feeds from around the globe.

BIOGRAPHY: BEN MILBOURNE

2006-10-08T08:43:00.000+01:00

ben is an urbanist, and for better or worse a globalist. he is not convinced it is a good idea, but he masterplans large and small parts of cities for cultures not his own, quite often for people he has never met and places he has never been.

the ever expanding international design competition system, a decade or more of foreign architect urban experimentation in china and increasingly the middle-east, local urban design for larger projects has been superseded in favor of google-earth urbanism.

ben has worked in europe and australia on projects in beijing, moscow, st petersberg, chang-sha, dubai, paris, jeddah, the hague, nanjing, hamburg, lausanne, the cape verde islands, goa, london, sydney and claims no definitive approach for intervening in contemporary urban conditions, rather argues for urban design strategy rich with programmatic complexity and juxtaposition, flexibility for organic growth, change and local invention during implementation.

ben is currently employed at lab architecture studio as a design architect working on a variety of projects in china, india and the middle east. prior to joining lab ben worked for the office for metropolitan architecture/rem koolhaas in rotterdam. ben graduated from sydney university's bachelor of architecture program with first class honors in 2002 and has been working in architectural practice since 2000.

BIOGRAPHY: ANNA TAUFEST

2006-10-08T08:11:00.001+01:00

Anna is a young architect from Berlin. She began studies at the Technical University of Munich in 1998 and was part of the curators and directors team for the multimedia project Kino24 from 1999 - 2001 at the Gloria Filmpalast at Stachus in Munich. Her studies were continued at the Berlin University of the Arts and the ETSAV in Barcelona. Anna graduated in 2005 with a project called `Conexiòn –Barcelonas connection to the sea´ aiming to re-establish the connection between city and sea at a historical site through an urban intervention. Anna worked for varions architecture firms in Germany as well as for the archplus magazine in Berlin. She co-founded the studio workshop Atelier Ohlauerstr.36. in 2006.

BIOGRAPHY: JODI ROSE

2006-10-08T08:09:00.000+01:00

Jodi Rose is a nomadic sound artist, writer and freelance cultural commentator originally from Australia, who works producing audiovisual performance, sound installations, experimental music, radio programs and sonic art events around the world. Jodi trained in Sculpture, Performance and Installation at Sydney College of the Arts, and was the fourth Bridge Guard at the Art and Science Bridge Guard residential centre in Sturovo, Slovakia 2005-2006; and Australia Council New Media Arts - ABC Radio: Radiophonic Artist in Residence at ABC Radio National, Sydney in 2004.

Jodi's major work and reason for traversing the globe so thoroughly in recent years is Singing Bridges, a worldwide networked performance and series of compositions based on the sound of vibrations in bridge cables. Jodi released Singing Bridges: Vibrations and Variations, a CD of bridge compositions with remixes by widely renowned international and local artists working in experimental sound and electronic music; and won ‘Best Australian Blog’ for Singing Bridges Travel Diary in 2005. Her work featured in Pixelache Electronic Arts Festival in 2004 & 2005; Overgaden Sound Art Festival - Copenhagen; Sound States Uncertain Destinations, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; and Sound in Space Audiotheque, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Jodi’s radio projects include Radiophonic Features: Bridge Songs and Stories, a Trip Across Australia broadcast on ABC Radio National Radio Eye in 2004; Archipelago, a 90 minute sonic seascape about ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Arts; and Bridge Guard Radio Diary from her experience in Slovakia, broadcast on ABC Radio National The Night Air; a series on Musique Concrete for Classic FM, and recently hosting a nightly program on TiN Radio for the National Young Writers Festival, she developed the idea for an ongoing series of conversations starting in the Transit Lounge.

BIOGRAPHY: DETLEF JUNKERS, KATHRIN ZöLLER THOMAS BRÜGGEMANN

2006-10-08T08:08:00.001+01:00

Detlef Junkers and Kathrin Zöller are both involved in different roles with Junkers & Partners Architects, Berlin since 2003. Their Prices and projects include: State Court, Frankfurt (Oder) 2005, School in Eschbachtal, Bad Homburg v.d. Höhe 2004, Legal Center Magdeburg, in planning, State Consulate of Brbg/ Meckl.-Vorpommern, Berlin commendation, Museum for Fine Arts, Leipzig 2.Price, Holocaust-Memorial Site, Aspang-Wien 2.Price, 1. Price „archi-europe Facade design 2005“, Special commendation „Bauen im Bestand, Hessen 2005“.Thomas Brüggemann was born 1959 in Münster, lives and works in Berlin. Thomas studied at the Kunstakademie Münster with professors Jochen Zellmann and Ulrich Erben, he graduated with his masters in 2006. Examples of solo exhibitions: “in situ“, Stadsgalerij Heerlen, Glaspaleis –“Luz mala“, 2002 Galerie Juliane Wellerdiek, Berlin, 2001 Kunst- und Kulturkreis Berkelkraftwerk, Vreden – “Kulturlandschaft“, Geologisch-Paläontologisches Museum, Münster – “ Von on oben gesehen“

BIOGRAPHY: LARA O'REILLY

2006-10-08T08:04:00.000+01:00

Lara O’Reilly’s marked predilection for the sublime and the paradoxical is expressed in a very diverse body of work that has its roots in performance but emphasizes the sculptural and everyday environments of architecture and landscape. Her achievements as a young artist include winning the 2005 National Marten Bequest Travel Scholarship, the 2004 Basil and Muriel Hooper Scholarship from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the recent 2006 National Australian Visual Art emerging artist award.

O’Reilly’s interests in landscape and architecture inform an experience-oriented oeuvre that is cause for reconsidering our relationship with nature. Her work encompasses sculpture, photography, performance, architecture, sound and video. Through her experience both of the places she has seen and the people she has met, and her aim to unearth common ground between extremely diverse groups lies at the base of much of her projects.

O’Reilly’s work is interesting as she dissolves the mediums of art, architecture and film into something that is difficult to title. The cities, places, sceneries that she subjects the viewer to are layered with her body, a ghostly movement through a timeless, slowed stilled landscape of abstracted and layered fragments of dissolved experiences of the body and of architecture. Her works are beautiful, evocative, timeless and interactive in the way they are composed. They resonate spatial qualities of slowed, filmic, moving installations of translucent layered veils suspended within the interiors of galleries or site-specific sites.

BIOGRAPHY: MIRIAM MLECEK

2006-10-07T04:24:00.000+01:00

Miriam Mlecek started studying architecture at the Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany where she received the bachelor after two years.During that time she also worked as coordinator and curator at the EXPO 2000 world exhibition in Hanover and for Alsop+Störmer Architects in Hamburg.

Postgraduate studies followed in Sydney, partly architecture at the University of Sydney, partly arts at the Sydney College Of the Arts. During her time overseas she started to be more and more involved in multimedia and installation art.The Advanced Art Student Exhibition at the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney, featured her web design work “public/private” in 1999. She participated at several art workshops supervised by local artists to become tutor herself for the interdisciplinary workshop “superstudio” which took part at the University of Sydney in 1999. Outcome was the performance “The Australian Oasis”.

In 2000 she decided to continue with a master program at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. During her time in Berlin she won the first prize in an art in context competition in Frankfurt/O. with a light installation work , planned an audio installation for the Vitra Design Museum, Berlin, took part in several exhibitions representing the University of the Arts in 2001/2002 and finished her education with the final project “in Transit” in the art class of Rebecca Horn in 2003. She won a first prize in a art in context competition inpublic space/Berlin and a third prize for a town planning competition of the city of Berlin.In 2004 she worked for Utz-Sanby architects in Sydney,being the project architect for several residential projects and an interior design for a Paddington restaurant.She won the 5^th price for her essay “In Transit” at the Wilhelm-Braun-Feldweg Price for designcritical texts and founded Exquisite Corpse Inc. with Katie Hepworth in 2005.Their first exhibition was held in the “blank space” gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney in April 2005.Together with Katie Hepworth she founded the “transitlounge” studio and gallery, an artist-in-residency project in Berlin in 2006, which she curated and took part in the exhibition with her work “zwei räume”. She currently works with Tzannes Associates in Sydney.

BIOGRAPHY: KATIE HEPWORTH

2006-10-06T12:57:00.000+01:00

Based in Sydney, Berlin and…Katie is an artist and architect. She is interested in our interactions in public and private space, and the ways in which the disruption of these everyday behaviours can lead to a reappraisal of the urban experience. Her work aims to expose the latent conditions in the environment, the things that are taken for granted, something which is achieved by staging events and insertions, both small and large.

She is currently working on a research project, looking at how temporary art events and installations can be used as a catalyst for urban development and renewal. She is interested in ways in which spaces are transformed into identifiable places.

For the last 6 years Katie has been traversing the globe. Leaving behind and finding old friends again. This transnational existance, was the inspiration for the Transit Lounge, which she is currenlty curating with Miriam Mlecek.

BIOGRAPHY: SARAH THOMPSON

2006-10-04T14:11:00.001+01:00

Sarah Thompson is Development Manager for Enter_, a creative network that brings together artists, researchers and businesses working at the intersection of art and new technology in the East of England. From April 25-29 2007, Sarah will be involved in producing Enter_Unknown Territories, a new international conference and festival celebrating new technology art, which will take place in public areas in and around Cambridge.

Sarah has previously worked at the British Film Institute, London, and the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology [FA CT], Liverpool, where she held roles within the Exhibitions and Events teams.

Before leaving Sydney in 2004, Sarah worked as a freelance arts and design journalist whilst completing a BA Communications [Hons] at the University of Technology, Sydney. Sarah currently lives in London.

BIOGRAPHY: ALMA-ELISA KITTNER

2006-10-04T14:10:00.000+01:00

Alma-Elisa Kittner is an arts historian from Berlin, Germany. After studying art history, communication and Modern German Literature in Munich and Rome she continued with art history and Modern German Literature in Bochum, Germany.

In 2005 she wrote the concept for a congress on “Topology Of Travel” in Trier at the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies (CePoG), was published in the “Volksbühne Berlin” brochure on “Utopic Body Concepts” and did research work in Paris with Harald Szeeman. She is also a writer and lector for the Westerweide Publishing Company and was chief editor of the k&m magazine (‘art and material’).

She is currently curating Contest of the Arts, a series of talks in Berlin on media, event-strategies and tourism involving artists + theorists from various European countries.

She has a long-standing interest in tourism, and is currently working on a project on art and tourism in Berlin while she has a stipend at the International Research Training Group “Interart Studies” as a post-doc academic at the Free University Berlin.

BIOGRAPHY: SILVIA MARZALL

2006-10-04T14:09:00.002+01:00

Installation/Video

Silvia Marzall, born 1980 in Brasília, grew up in Brasil and Italy. She lives and works in Germany and Brasil. Study:2000-06 Fine Arts Master Class with Prof. Christiane Möbus, UdK Berlin.1998-2000 Fine Arts, Universidade Brasília.Grants: 2006-08 Studio grant Karl-Hofer-Gesellschaft, Berlin,2003 „Network Baltic”, work-and travel grant, Grafikens Hus, Schweden. Solo exhibitions e.g. „relatio chu chu“, Galeria de Arte Espaço,Brasilien. Group exhibitions u.a. „material world“, Schmidt Galerie, Berlin „Off Copa“, Galerie Berlin Am Meer, „CortaCurtas“, Video- and Filmfestival, São Paulo, Brasilien 2005 „Külakost”, Art Academy, Tallinn, Estland, 2003 „Poesiefestival”, Backfabrik, Berlin. Workshops 2005„Teaching Arts and Gender“ on Baltic Europe, „gender und kultur. das fakultätennetz“.

BIOGRAPHY: VASSILIEA STYLIANIDOU

2006-10-04T14:09:00.001+01:00

Vassiliea Stylianidou was born in 1967,in Thessaloniki, Greece. She lives and works in Berlin and Athens.

Following studies of literature and linguistics at the University of Jannina, Greece from 1985-89, she became a student of fine arts at the University of the Arts, Berlin, focussing on new media, video and photography. Her prizes include the AT Kearney video prize and the Meisterschuelerprize of the UdK Berlin in 1999, the Goldrausch 11 Artistproject, Berlin 1999-2001, NaFöG - Postgraduate grant from the University of the Arts Berlin, 2001 DAAD supplementary grant for NYC within the scope of the NaFOEG-postgraduate grant, and several Artist-in-Residence Programs in Europe. Her solo exhibitions include 2005 perpetuum mobile, Galerie Françoise Heitsch, Munich, Playcities Gallery Kappatos, Athens; 2002 Heroes & Co. CAPRI, Berlin; and more recently exhibitions in Germany, Italy and Greece. Amongst numerous international group exhibitions was the 2005 Old Habits Die Hard as part of the exhibition Situation at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, Australia; the Prague Biennale; the CHIANGMAI FIRST NEW MEDIA ART FESTIVAL, CMU ART MUSEUM, Thailand; 2002 and familistère 1 at Kunst-Werke Berlin, Institute for Contemporary Art (C).

BIOGRAPHY: ISABELLE TOLAND

2006-10-04T14:08:00.002+01:00

Isabelle completed a Bachelor of Science (Architecture) (Hons.) and Bachelor of Architecture (Hons.) at the University of Sydney. In 2000, she was awarded the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship which she used to undertake a year of research in social housing developments in France, receiving the University Medal for her Honours thesis that resulted from this research.

She is currently working in Paris for Shigeru Ban Architects Europe on a temporary museum constructed from cardboard tubes and shipping containers to be built on a former industrial site.

Isabelle has exhibited installation and design work in numerous galleries both in Australia and overseas. Her installation work Super Cocoon was exhibited in November 2005 as part of the Canberra Biennial of Architecture and Design, and installation Study for a Transportable Room, was exhibited in May 2006 at the Pickled Art Centre in Beijing. Isabelle’s installation works focuses on the idea of temporary /transient /transportable dwelling spaces.

BIOGRAPHY: KENZEE PATTERSON

2006-10-04T14:08:00.001+01:00

Kenzee Patterson is an artist from Sydney, Australia. His art practice often incorporates sculpture, photography, video, performance, and installation.

He uses this interdisciplinary approach to examine our relationship to everyday objects and experiences. Through a process of interaction, the seemingly mundane is transformed, revealing a beauty and wondrousness which is rarely noticed.

He has exhibited extensively in Sydney’s artist-run galleries, as well as regional galleries. He has also had work shown in various galleries and festivals in Melbourne, Japan, Iceland, and Paris.

In the first half of 2006, Kenzee undertook an International Exchange at L’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, in Paris, for which he received the Dyason Bequest from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Exchange Scholarship from Sydney College of the Arts.

In April and May 2007, Kenzee will be participating in the Transit Lounge residency in Berlin. For this, he has been awarded a RUN_WAY Young and Emerging Professional Development grant from the Inter-Arts Office of the Australia Council for the Arts, as well as a Professional Development Travel Grant from the Australian Network for Art and Technology.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Supported by ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) through the Professional Development Travel Fund. ANAT is assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

BIOGRAPHY: HUGO MOLINE

2006-10-04T14:07:00.002+01:00

Hugo Moline is a recent architecture graduate who lives in Sydney. In 2003 Hugo went to the Philippines to work with the Tabaco City Urban and Rural Poor Federation on two collaboratively designed community plans. In 2005 Hugo was awarded the Ethel M Chettle Prize in Architecture from the University of Sydney and went to Istanbul on a Global Studio scholarship to participate in a conference on how designers and the urban poor can work together more effectively. On the way back home he worked with the Homeless People's Federation of the Philippines on the collaborative design of some prototype housing for a community of railway squatters in Manila.

In Australia Hugo has worked together with others on a number of projects that patch together, make good and celebrate the thrown away objects and unwanted spaces of Australian cities. This includes 'what happened to my friends' (Wedding Circle, Sydney), 'All my eye and Biddy Martin' (ChangeX design exhibition, Sydney), and 'warren' (NextWave container village, Melbourne).

BIOGRPAHY: JASPER KNIGHT

2006-10-04T14:07:00.001+01:00

Jasper completed a BVA at Sydney College of the Arts(SCA) in 1999 and a Master of Art in 2002 at College of Fine Art (COFA). He has shown since 2001 in every major artist run space in Sydney and is the Director of the Half Dozen ARI (Artist run initiative) that exhibits and supports of 50 emerging artists every year. This year’s festival was held at Gallery 4A, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, The Museum of Sydney, Firstdraft Gallery and the Mckell Building. Jasper’s last Sydney show was painting and installation at Phatspace ARI, Darlinghurst. His first Melbourne show was at Metro 5 Gallery earlier this year and his first solo London show is at the end of 2006. In 2005 and 2006 Jasper has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize, The Wynne Prize, The Abn-Amro Prize and has won the Rocks Emerging Art Prize, The Freedman Foundation Scholarship, the OZCO new work grant, the NAVA Marketing grant and was appointed to the board of the Asia-Australia Art Association earlier this year. Jasper’s main work is enamel mixed-media painting and secondly sculptural installation.

BIOGRAPHY: TANJA KIMME

2006-10-04T14:06:00.000+01:00

Tanja is a German photographic and multi-media artist, based in Melbourne, Australia. She grew up in Africa, Indonesia, Peru and Germany. In 1997 Tanja immigrated to Australia, where she studied visual arts, and has consequently lived and worked in Sydney, Berlin, Rotterdam and Melbourne. During the past three years Tanja has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Sydney, Rotterdam, Paris, Chennai and Berlin.

BIOGRAPHY: ROB CURGENVEN

2006-10-04T14:05:00.000+01:00

Working with harmonics and resonance as articulated not only through instruments/objects, in space and place, but also in time and the dislocation of the remote, Robert's sound explores slowly shifting layers in the fabric of what surrounds us. He has released one solo CD for privatelektro, "cichaczem" (2005), which was described by "disquiet" magazine as "absolutely beautiful distillations of sound mixing the familiar textures of field recordings, including falling snow and the period after a thunderstorm, with hyper-sensitive recordings of a grand piano that suggest the open spaces only alluded to by most synthesizers". He has completed two commissions for ABC's Radiophonic Unit (2003, 2006), is included on the recent "recorded in the fields by..." compilation by "gruenrekorder" (2006) and his soundtrack to Lezsek Paul's "Terrain der Zeit" has has been included in screenings at Filmfest Dresden, Germany (2006) and Experyment V Internation Art Meeting Zbaszyn,Poland (2005). He organised the inaugural Sounds Unusual Festival of New Music in Darwin this year, has had installations/group exhibtions in Darwin, Fremantle, Koln and Berlin and performed at the Darwin Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, 24HR Art (NT Centro for Contemporary Art), in Alice Springs, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Brussels, Amsterdam, Leipzig and recently at Electrofringe Festival (Newcastle) as well as Tokyo, Gihu and Nagano (Japan).