Editors: Jennifer Sigler, Leah Whitman Salkin
Publisher: Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Pages: 208

“Run for Cover!”
No. 42
S/S 2016

Table of Contents:
Editor’s note: Dreadful Design
Jennifer Sigler
Wide Open
Nancy Etcoff
Fortress London: The New US Embassy and the Rise of Counter-Terror Urbanism
Oliver Wainwright
Feeling Invaded
John Kuo Wei Tchen
Gimme Shelter: Refugee Architecture in Germany
Niklas Maak
Phobia and the City: Rome
Lars Lerup
Holding Fear
Sonja Dümpelmann
Unsettling Unsettlements
Marianne F. Potvin
Anthropocenophobia: The Stone Falls on the City
Renata Tyszczuk
Solitary in Solidarity
Daniel D’Oca
Fear Ebbs on the Skyline but Rises on the Ground
Blair Kamin
Get Me Out of Here: The Solemn Geography of Women in Horror Film
Caryn Coleman
Reading Jane Jabobs in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter
Stuart Schrader
Un-War
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Animal Eyes & Invisible Hunters
Eugénie Shinkle
Fearful Asymmetry: Insurgency and the Architectures of Terror
Joshua Comaroff
Die Noctuque
Enrique Ramirez
A Certain Darkness
Demdike Stare & Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Who’s Afraid of the Covered Face?
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Artifacts of Exclusion
Interboro Partners
Fear Is in the Detail
Francesca Hughes & Gergely Kovács
The Iconic Ghetto and the Stigma of Blackness
Elijah Anderson
A Toxic Patrimony
Dan Borelli
The Green Zone: Architectures of Precarious Politics
Amin Alsaden
How to Draw Medellín
Alejandro Echeverri & Alejandro Valdivieso
Mortal Cities
Arna Mačkić
Bringing Back the Front: Relieving the Great War
Justin Fowler
Home Safe
Geoff Manaugh
The Fall of Postmodernism and the New Empowerment
Michael Murphy
Building for the Total Breakdown
Jacob Lillemose
A State of Emergency
Léopold Lambert
Conflict Urbanism, Aleppo
Laura Kurgan
Nuclear Pillowcases
Andrew Wasserman
The Real Move
Elizabeth Streb & Chelsea Spencer
Fear, Faith, and Disaster Preparedness
Arif Khan
The House of One: Facing Fear
Lara Schrijver
Pastiche of Ghosts
Metahaven
Second Nature
Ralph Ghoche
Suspunk: Thinking with Suspicious Packages
Javier Arbona, Bryan Finocki, Nick Sowers
The Horror, the Horror
Bart Lootsma
Robert Smithson, Evel Knievel, and the Landscape of Reclamation
Edward Eigen
Kites
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Feared Spaces, Feared Bodies
Toni L. Griffin
Fear, Fire, and Forty-One Snakes: Notes on the Burning Theater
Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen
Ambiguous Thresholds
Nuttinee Karnchanaporn

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zweikommasieben #13 deals with questions about the professional and social proximity of the featured artists (among many other things). Featured are Aïsha Devi & Tianzhuo Chen, Helm, Heatsick, Dean Blunt, Lumisokea, Thug Entrancer, Mathew Dryhurst, Nick Klein, Lane Stewart & Rabit, Butter Sessions, Don’t DJ, Felix Kubin, Phase Fatale, Lustmord, etc. Co-published with Motto Books.

Language: English/German
Edition: 1600
Pages: 176
Size: 175 x 260mm

zweikommasieben is a Swiss magazine that has been devoted to the documentation of contemporary club culture since the summer of 2011. The magazine features artist interviews, essays and columns as well as photography, illustration and graphics. In addition, zweikommasieben organizes concerts, parties, club nights, matinees, raves and other fun events in various cities.

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There is a strikingly conspicuous high-rise building behind the Leipzig Central Station that contrasts with the city horizon. The 96 meters high tower, in a dignified shining pearl color, was first called Interhotel Merkur and is now The Westin Leipzig. With 27 floors it hosts more that 400 rooms with event and seminar spaces on separate floors, shops, restaurants. It’s a little city within the city.

In 2008, shortly after starting to study at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, I learnt that it is one of the few buildings that a Japanese construction company has build in German Democratic Republic in the late 1970s (there is two other constructions to be find in Dresden and Berlin). Something around and in this building triggered me to feel at home. When I saw it, I thought of the World Trade Center in Tokyo, from the top of which I enjoyed the Summer Festival of fireworks one day before my departure to Leipzig. So at that time I started to project my personal conflicts of a stranger in a new city on this huge building which became both a symbol of my hometown (even if, to be honest, there is nothing Japanese in its architecture) and of my frustrations.

With the celebrations of the 25 year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of GDR, I wanted to know more about this building. Until then I had just looked at it from a distance and I finally decided to enter the Interhotel Merkur after 6 years of observation. I booked a room for one night there, took my camera and opened the door.

The Four-star hotel was deserted. Its Japanese restaurant which was once the best in Leipzig had no guests. And a cleaning man said to me: « I have been working here since the opening of the hotel, it was full of business people from all over the world in the 1980s ». He also explained me that the hotel was a hotbed of “illegal” prostitution (however this prostitution took roll as the espionage). I went to the reception and asked: « I heard that this hotel was build by a Japanese company. Is that right ? » A young man answered: « never heard about that » but the next morning I found a letter in my room with that simple sentence : This hotel was built by the Kajima Corporation.

In the summer 2014 I visited the library of Kajima Corporation in Tokyo. The librarian, Ms. Oda, prepared for me archive photos of construction, company’s monthly report, and even confidential documents. She also introduced me to Mr. Shimazu who was in charge of the architectural design team and lived in Leipzig from 1978 to 1981. I got the opportunity to hear their anecdotes, like the event that happened on January 12th, 1979 when the construction office was robed and all the money (GDR-Mark) from the safe was stolen. Additionally one roll of 35mm film that was in the camera of Mr. Sako, a colleague of Mr. Shimazu, had been gone as well. The camera was still in the office, but it had been opened and the negative had vanished. What was photographed in Mr. Sako’s camera must be normally the hotel’s construction process but that disparition had something from a spy movie. They went to the police but neither cash nor the film have ever been back.

I have been photographing modern architecture in Germany since 2008 and I am continuing to shoot similar buildings depending on my trips. In the process of creation, there is always a logical decision on positioning three bodies: the architectural body, the machinal body (camera) and my own body (photographer). But with Interhotel Merkur, I was strangely so excited that I could not measure the distances between the different « actors ». This architecture has, for me, the presence of a real and existing body that contains its story and its emotion. The building has its own life (which I am probably projecting on it) and, therefore, is reluctant to my photographs. But, for the History it represents, for its architecture (between classical Plattenbau and Japanese brutalism), for its role in my personal life, I decided to give it a try, again and again, until I obtain the right portrait of that motionless character of concrete.

When I left the archive of Kajima Corporation after my third visit, the librarian said to me: « Thank you, you shed light on our work, which has been forgotten ». This made me understand the real meaning of my obsession for the Interhotel Merkur: I sensed a Japanese spirit (or a soul?) in Leipzig. And I need to follow it before it flies too far away.

*This essay was originally written by the artist, and edited by Thibaut de Ruyter, for the publication「Stadt Bild / Image of City」(Cooperation by Berlinische Galerie, Deusche Bank Kunsthalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Nationalgalerie-Staatlische Museen zu Berlin)

Japan in der DDR – Tamami Iinuma – Exhibition Opening 28.05.16 @ Motto Berlin at 6pm.

This book is an attempt at grasping an important part of Květa Fulierová’s archive, which holds a selection of negatives and printed black and white photographs stowed away in envelopes, marked according to themes and sorted chronologically in chocolate boxes. These photographs pertain to the everyday of a family; of her shared household with Július Koller from the period starting in the eighties, when Květa’s grandsons were born, and ending in their adulthood and the passing away of Július Koller in 2007.

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Published on the occasion of the show Amputee Love at Motto Berlin, April 2016

Translated by Lucile Dupraz
Published by Villette Editions and Motto Books

Price: €15.00

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Guy Meldem
AMPUTEE LOVE

+

Maximage
NO NEIN NU! NIET

28.04.2016
from 6pm

Exhibition runs from 19.04 until 25.05, 2016

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
D-10997 Berlin

Martin Zet: NEKROLOG / OBITUARY – Book Launch
Saturday, April 16 at 7pm in Motto Berlin

Accompanied by

KINO TIC – video compilation

COVER PAINTINGS – vitrines installation

BOOK MANIA – a complete survey on the author’s book production.

—

NEKROLOG / OBITUARY
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Nobody Owns The Beach
David Horvitz

White tote bag with inside pocket
38 x 42 x 12 cm

20€
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The novella “One Helluva Hole” by Jérémie Gindre is one of the outcomes of a residency that artist Jérémie Gindre undertook in 2011, at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, where he studied the effects of brain damage in Neuroscience. Focusing on the emotional side of experiences and how this affects human behaviour and society, this short fictional writing describes the vicissitudes of Bill Ronson, whose life changed dramatically after a terrible accident that perforated his brain

It is this inexplicable mix of feelings, together with the occasion of an extra day – extra chance – in the year, that gave motion to the exhibition, where different artists present works somehow connected with the idea of emotions, experiences, sensitivity and personal perceptions.

€6.00

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edition of 300
includes an A2 poster

€10.00

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