Day Two: Thurs. June 5th -Leipzig

For the second day of our trip we were in Leipzig.



Everyone who has ever been to Leipzig tells you how run-down it is...but, it is really hard to actual comprehend the extent of what they were talking about until you are there yourself. Leipzig at one time was definitely a really beautiful city with amazing, ornate buildings...but now...since WWII and especially since German re-unification...the town is largely desolute and literally crumbling down. I would estimate that at least 1/3 of the entire city is vacant...and falling into disrepair. At the same time...many parts reminded us of areas of St. Louis...where the exact same thing is happening...to a bunch of beautiful old brick houses.

Among other things, Leipzig also seems to be a center of dark metal/goth culture. When researching the city we learned of a large yearly music and arts festival called Wave-Gotik-Treffen. (somebody's Flickr page with pics from 2007) There was definitely a scene for that here...as seen in the way people dressed as we walked around the city.


We spent the first half of the day going through an enormous former cotton mill and textile factory-turned artist's studios and galleries called Spinnerei. From what we could gather, it became the center of the Leipzig art scene after the success of Neo Rauch and other Leipzig painters, who all have/had studios there.


All of the exhibition spaces were rough but really huge.


A video piece and a Pia Frieze painting.


One of the side courtyards with an exhibition space built out.


Some random graffiti.


R and a mirrored florescent light piece.

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We spent the rest of the afternoon at the Stasi Museum. Stasi is short for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security) who were the official secret police of East Germany. Leipzig was the city where Fall 1989 protesting eventually lead to the fall of the East and the Berlin Wall, so this museum has a special place in that history.


An intact former Stasi office.

According to the museum, immediately following the fall of the East displays were created which informed the public of what had happened there. These displays were so popular that they were soon moved to the old headquarters of the Stasi, where the museum is located to this day. So in a fascinating way, the museum displays were archives of themselves.



Cases housed Stasi uniforms, stamps, and surveillance devices. This cabinet shows confiscated cassette tapes, many of which were of American and British pop stars.

The amount of information that the Stasi collected on individuals is really mind blowing...everything from when and where people went to their scent (yes, literally on a swab in jars). I believe that the statistic is...by the end of their existence there was one Stasi officer for every 3 citizens.

What happened to the files they kept on so many people is an amazing story itself. There was a great article about it in WIRED a few months ago:
"In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper."

"Citizens of Berlin, Citizens of the World..."

We attended Barack Obama's public address in Berlin on Thursday. Over 200,000 people came from all over Europe to hear what he had to say and lined the street from the Siegessäule Column all the way to the Brandenburg Gates.

Here is a link to a video of the speech if you want to watch, click here.

I am posting some of our photos and hope to update with captions later.
[S adds the following captions.]



On Wed. we volunteered with the Obama campaign and Democrats Abroad to pass out flyers for the speech the following day. We picked up the flyers in Tiergarten and then decided to go to the nearby Hauptbahnhof to pass them out.



On Thursday, we got to the event location a little after 1pm. The gates did not open until 4pm and Obama was not speaking until 7pm but there was about 100 people already there. This is a picture from the entrance gates toward the Siegessäule.





After the gates opened everyone had to go through an additional security clearance area. We were near up front though and position ourselves right behind the front barricades to the left of the podium. In the foreground of this pic you can see R, the column base to the left and blue platform where the podium in positioned on the right.



Once through the security gates we still had about 3 hours to wait...over which time the entire area filled with people behind us. A tall German man in white was behind us with an American flag and waved it consistently the whole time. He was pictured in the press photo below...



I don't know why you can't see us in this pic. I think we were behind the guy with the Berkeley shirt on....Like that is R's ear the left of his head and my head is the dark shape to the right or something....



A German woman next to us brought this sign she made to show around. She had made it awhile back to encourage her son (who was there and also happens to be bi-racial) that wearing a bike helmet was an important thing to do....Obama YEAH!...a role model for children worldwide.



A little later, here is me, SS and R cut off on the left.



Obama came out right at 7pm with no introduction (except the PA announcer that basically said 'Introducing Barack Obama').



It might look cheesy, but because the sun was behind him this is the closest good press picture I have seen of what he actually looked like from our angle. We were about 18 feet away.



What you can only get a taste of on the video broadcasts is the behind us were speaker columns most of the way down the street toward Brandenberg Tor, which is about a mile in total....so as he spoke the time delay caused his voice to sort of roll/echo back behind us, as did the clapping responses (as they heard what he said). That aural effect gave you a real sense of the scale of the whole thing...even though you couldn't actually see it all except from the air.



After his speech, Obama came down and shook hands with the people in the very front...I didn't get to shake his hands (the girl in front of me did), but I took this picture as he went by.

Guess who is coming for Lunch?

Well, not really. Obama is expected to visit Berlin this week and we are excited to attend Obama's only public speech in Europe at the Victory Tower in Tiergarten this Thursday.


Official Poster


More pictures to come...

Day One: Wed. June 4th -Dessau

Before we even came to Germany we bought a Germany train pass that would give us 5 days of travel within in a month period...so we plotted for awhile on how we wanted to spent at least some of that traveling time. We finalized our plans in the late spring and embarked on a nine day trip on Wed. June 4th.

On the first day we got on a train early in Berlin and made our way toward Leipzig via Dessau. Our main destination during our day stop is Dessau (about 2 hours outside of Berlin) was the Bauhaus, a famous art and design school started by architect Walter Gropius and based there in the late 20's. This school is possibly the most influential force behind subsequential developments in everything from architecture to typography throughout the 20th century, both in Europe and the US.







After touring the in-house Bauhaus Museum, we made our way around to the 'Master's Houses' designed by Gropius and others and stopped by the building below across from the train station, Umweltbundesamt...a government building that houses the library, an exhibition space, and offices. It is possibly my new favorite building.





We then got back on the train and headed the rest of the way (another hour or so) to Leipzig.

Berlin Right Now

almost 10pm...and still light out...

Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings)

There is only about 45 minutes left of our Many Mini Residency project. My friend from SF, LW is here finishing up a project...and she will be staying with us for a couple of more days. Tomorrow (weather permitting) we will be having the 'after-party' BBQ in Görlitzer Park and hope to give a fuller update after that.

I wanted to go back to something we did right before we took off on our vacation. On May 24th I took R to go see the seminal (Berlin based) industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten for his birthday (May 25th). It was a fantastic show so I wanted to show some of the videos I took with our little Canon Elph. The audio isn't great of course but you can get a pretty good sense of it if you are wearing headphones.

For those of you who do not know of this band...I don't feel any explanation I could give would do justice...so here is excerpt from their website...
"The Wall was of crucial importance to the founding of Einstürzende Neubauten. The Wall encircling West Berlin transformed that city into a state-subsidized near-paradisiacal freak-enclave for artists and the maladjusted of every sort including Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh and FM Einheit. The trio declared war on every conventional way of listening with the release of their debut-album Kollaps in November 1981. In grey time in which "normalcy" included the threat that minor incidents in the ongoing Cold War could at any time develop into a Third World War, Einstürzende Neubauten reacted with almost un-listenable cathartic cascades of noise.

This was their reaction to the omnipresent political madness and the ever-increasing flood of meaningless pop-songs on radio and TV propagated by the "Neue Deutsche Welle" scene. Einstürzende Neubauten offered the anxiety ridden, paralyzed and media sedated masses noise-mighty, rhythm-ritualistic anti-Pop as an antidote, made by instruments carefully stolen from building sites, junkyards and Do-It-Yourself-Hardware stores. They employed steel parts, tin drums, drills, hammers, saws and an untuned electric guitar, all crowned by Bargeld's bloodcurdling screams und feverish apocalyptic texts. Kollaps, with its atonal essence, embodied exactly what the title suggested: decay and destruction, illness, doom and death. Ironically its release had the exact opposite effect, being the dawning and cornerstone of a completely new understanding of music which came to influence countless popular bands including Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein."

Also, here is some less poetic info on wikipedia.
If I have peaked your interest...I suggest starting out with the easier listening 1993 release Tabula Rasa. It is also still my favorite.

It was a little odd to see Blixa looking pretty old and with a bit of gut...but man, can he still scream like melodic banshee!

Many Mini Residency

Today was the first day of our Many Mini Residency program. We had two residencies today (one is still going on) and we have started posted these on the website. I still am planning on getting our trip pics up but also this week we will continue to update the residency info on the manymini.org site.

Last week I worked on a public art proposal that was really fun so I thought I would share it. It was for Portland, ME and involved designing a paint job for these surface tanks.


Here is the pic of the tanks before my design.


Here is the tank with my design added.

Here are the other three:




The thing that they emphasized about these tanks was that you can see them from the water (it on the shore), air (there is a nearby airport), and land (they are by a couple of major highways) so I went with a water cycle theme when I developed my designs. I guess that I will hear back about this in a couple of weeks, at least if I make it to the next round...but mostly it was just a fun thing to do.

Spain won the Euro 2008, btw...but, every agreed they were the better team so there was not a lot of bitterness about it.