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Erik Göngrich:
picnic-city*
In which colour would you like to paint your city?, 2001/2004
installation
projection of drawing and texts, 81 slides
Erik Göngrich, Courtesy ZKM |
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Erik Göngrich chose the term »Picnic-City« for his work that is dedicated to Istanbul, the metropolis on the Bosporus. It is a reference to the city’s innovative and flexible nature and the population’s ability to improvise and adapt. At the same time it alludes to the many colourful plastic carpets that are rolled out on the places in front of the mosques on the occasion of friday’s prayer and that, within in short period of time, bathe the city’s grey-brownish image in many colours. Göngrich’s main interest is not the historical centre, the 10% of the city whose images [Hagia Sofia, Topkapi, the Golden Horn] are deeply embedded in our collective memory. The installation Picnic-City directs our attention to the extensive suburbs and locations on the edge of the city’s structure. Erich Göngrich’s pictures originate where scars, cracks, and unevenness characterize an urban landscape with many faces and where different interests clash. The visual questioning by means of projected black&white drawings is confronted with projected texts that give the inhabitants the opportunity to express themselves. Excerpts from publications on the city and fragments from conversations convey background information on Istanbul’s growth and expansion, its building plans and constructions, on speculation and political everyday life.
The corner of a street, a mass of houses, a construction gap, a panorama, a burnt wall, a bus stop - there are thousand of photographies taken by the artist during extensive work-and-study residences. They are part of Göngrich’s almost inexhaustible fund of pictures, his personal archive, from which he arranges his compositions. Only the skilled observer notices the images of other cities and mega-cities [Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Halle, Berlin] mingling with the pictures of Istanbul. The portrait of a city extends to an analysis of the urban as such. Details that were isolated from the city get an almost sculptural character. Göngrich tracks down these human-made objects of an urban situation and therefore provides us with an image of people’s relations to their urban environments. In doing so, he is primarily interested in impressions a city conveys to its inhabitants. What does a city feel like? And, above all, what could or should it feel like? What kind of influence does the arrangement of the urban environment have on the individual?
With his questions he even takes one step forward by opening up a space for the inhabitant’s phantasies in regard to their urban environment. »How would you like to paint your city?« is a question that is left unresolved. Once again the reference to Istanbul comes second to the general interest. The installation’s subtitle refers to the catalogue of questions that Göngrich uses on his surveys in Istanbul. »Do you like street maps or do you prefer asking people passing by for directions?« »Did your favourite architect build something in your favourite city?« or »What is touristic architecture for you?« In many of his questions he expresses his encouragement to more consciously discern the public space and to deal with its creation. His documentation and analysis are in turn very often the departing point for artistic and architectural projects in the public space. In medieval times, descriptions of cities mostly referred to the model of the Biblical Jerusalem, during renaissance painters and architects designed the ideal city for their princes. What do our ideal images and utopias look like today? And by which reality are they inspired?
Text by: Ulrike Havemann
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