[resource-net] INVITATION FOR A WALK TOMORROW ...

[Margarita Novikova]

Hey all,

Many thanks for your invitation for a walk! I hope, there there will be a
walk in London too. Once)) Wish to join you then!
Very good luck tomorrow!

Best,
Margarita Novikova


On Jan 22, 2018 19:45, <info at i-a-m.tk> wrote:

>
> You are warmly welcome to join us for a walk …
>
>
> JOIN US FOR A WALK:
> Tuesday, Jan 23: WHITE WALK
> Start: 11h at S-Bahnhof Berlin Heerstraße, 14055 Berlin
> END: ~ 13H same place
>
>
> … which is part of the current exhibition …
>
>
> DAVID EVANS / COLOR WALKS
> January 22 - 27 2018
> OPENING/CLOSING: Friday, Jan 26/18h
> @ Abteilung für Alles Andere / Ackerstr. 18 / Berlin-Mitte
>
>
> … more …
>
>
> David Evans / Color Walks ... The idea of ‘color walks’ is usually
> associated with American writer William Burroughs. In 1960 he recalled
> taking a ‘color walk’ in Paris, seeing all the blues in the street in front
> of me, blue on a foulard … blue on a young workman’s ass … his blue jeans …
> a girl’s blue sweater … blue neon … the sky … all the blues. When I looked
> again I saw nothing but all the reds of traffic lights … car lights … a
> café sign … a man’s nose. The quotation is from a conversation between the
> writer and the American painter Brion Gysin, tape recorded in the Beat
> Hotel, Paris. In addition, Burroughs discerned close links between the
> colors he observed in the street and the colors ‘shooting out’ through the
> canvases of Gysin. Gysin and Burroughs were close friends. They were also
> creative allies across several decades in various locations, most notably
> Tangiers and Paris. A joint preoccupation was a war of attrition against
> the routine ways of acting and thinking that sustained, they believed, an
> unacceptable status quo. How do you break through what Burroughs memorably
> called the ‘grey room’? One now famous tactic was the ‘cut up’.
> Conventionally, the ‘cut up’ is treated as an exclusively literary
> operation, involving scissors, paste and printed matter, chopped up and
> re-arranged in various ways to create new and unexpected associations that
> ‘free’ the word. However, it can also be assumed that Gysin and Burroughs
> would have treated the ‘color walk’ as another type of ‘cut up’,
> encouraging the pedestrian to think outside of the ‘grey room’. Burroughs
> studied anthropology as an undergraduate. Nevertheless, he – and Gysin –
> would probably have been surprised to discover that their ‘color walks’ are
> foregrounded in a fairly recent book devoted to the anthropology of color.
> What Color Is the Sacred? was published by the University of Chicago Press
> in 2009. Its author is Australian Michael Taussig who is currently a
> professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York. Taussig’s
> academic credentials are impeccable, but his writing is not what one would
> expect, to say the least. To be sure, he can confidently handle a wide
> range of scholarship, traversing the entire history of anthropology.
> However, his prose is also permeated by literary figures like Marcel
> Proust, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin – and Burroughs. The end result is
> wild or estranged anthropology, perhaps another way of reminding the novice
> fieldworker that she should assume nothing. Typical of Taussig’s
> extravagant writing is a passage in which he imagines two of his heroes
> (Burroughs and Benjamin) in Paris together, undertaking a ‘color walk’: I
> can see them now – in my mind’s eye – William and Walter, as if in a
> blackand-white photograph of Gisèle Freund or Man Ray. It looks like
> Benjamin has actually gotten Burroughs – normally so aloof – to bend
> forwards with the intensity of the conversation while Burroughs points out
> to him the colors shooting out on the street, not to mention the blue on a
> young workman’s ass which, I am sure, both Freund and Man Ray would have
> been quick to include, along with the sudden cool wind on that warm day.
> Taussig is the first to concede that the two writers never met and were
> very different in many ways, but he notes their shared passion for color.
> In one purple passage he fancifully imagines Benjamin writing an essay
> based on their joint walk called ‘Lost in Color’: getting lost whilst
> walking the city streets is compared to the jerkiness of cinematic montage
> (Benjamin); colors encountered on the walk encourage reflections on the
> historical layering that informs the city (Burroughs); and the consumption
> of hashish further enhances the hallucinatory qualities of the walk (both
> of them). Burroughs, Gysin and Taussig were the starting point for my own
> ‘color walks’, undertaken in Berlin and often recorded with a camera phone.
> ‘White Walks’ was my first project, centering on Teufelsberg - a
> forest-covered hill on the western edge of Berlin that abounds with
> animals, especially wild boar. Yet Teufelsberg is by no means natural. In
> fact, it is a human construct, made from the debris generated by Allied
> bombing during the Second World War that was subsequently moved from city
> center to periphery by teams of Trümmerfrauen or rubble women. You don’t
> have to look too far to find evidence of the violent, unnatural origins of
> the hill. Industrial and domestic detritus is scattered everywhere, and
> during my frequent walks in the area I started collecting the white ceramic
> fragments that had once been household crockery. Teufelsberg is also the
> name of the (now abandoned) spy station built by the Americans on top of
> the hill during the Cold War. White too, and another regular destination
> for my ‘color walks’. En route, I began to notice the white mushrooms that
> grow profusely nearby, often having shapes that seemed to replicate the
> geodesic domes of the spy station. The affinities encouraged associational
> thinking: the work of Berlin-based photographer Karl Blossfeldt, for
> example, whose well-known images of plant details seem to evoke varying
> architectural styles; and more obviously, one of the dominant images from
> the Cold War era - the mushroom cloud generated by the atomic bomb. In
> contrast, my ‘Red Walks’ took place on the busy streets of the city center.
> Guided by the color, my starting point was a young woman at a bus stop with
> vivid red hair extensions. Women with dyed red hair going about their
> business became one theme. Another was how a color traditionally associated
> with love and eroticism has become vulgarized in the sex shops of Berlin.
> In addition, I began to think about a type of politics in Berlin that is
> often designated red. Fresh and promising if one concentrates on the
> revolutionary challenge of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and the
> Spartacists in Berlin at the end of the First World War. Less so if the
> focus is on the institutionalization of revolution, including the legacy of
> the Spartacists, that quickly characterized the authoritarian regime known
> as the German Democratic Republic, with its capital in East Berlin. Each
> series has a different emphasis. Retrospectively, the ‘White Walks’ deal
> with time, corroding a familiar distinction between the long duration of
> natural history and the short duration of political history. And the ‘Red
> Walks’ encourage reflection on the multiple, often contradictory,
> associations generated by colors.
>
>
> … more more …
>
>
> http://www.i-a-m.tk/coming-soon.html <http://www.i-a-m.tk/coming-soon.html
> >
>
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