Nov 18 to Dec 23
Martin Beck
Social Abstraction
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This series of works from 2010 is held together by an interest in the emergence of utopian socialities. An important reference and point of departure for developing this new body of work was research into the history of communal living, in particular rural and ‹dropout› communes throughout the USA in the 1960s. «Directions», «Headlines», and «Irritating Behaviors» do not investigate this history in a mimetic way, but rather try to identify fragments of the communication that went to determine the image of these new communities. Focusing on how these communes interacted and organized themselves via the pages of self-published newsletters, the work examines, how a (non-photographic) image of a new social body was displayed in ephemeral manifestations and instructions. A central interest forms an inquiry into the organization of social, geographic, and architectural spatialities and how a new understanding of spatial organization structured utopian communities. In this context, design and architecture are understood in a broader sense: as a constant that is able to shape a community and mediate it. … >>