The memories of the new man

Teodora Cosman

37 international artists worked and lived during August 2008 in anabandoned apartmentblock in Hoyerswerda, Eastern Germany

Teodora Cosman

EUROPEAN POSTGRADUATE RESIDENCYArtblock, Hoyersweda, 3 - 31 August 2008

Otto Dix Strasse, 9-11www.art-block.blogspot.com

The Erinnerungen des neuen Menschen

The memories of the new man

THE MEMORIES OF THE NEW MAN

The four walls of a room have witnessed all the joys and sorrows of the people who were living there. They are impregnated with memories. The memories will be there long after the people have left or died. But when the building is no more, what might be the last remaining trace of their existence is gone too.

I traveled to Hoyerswerda, Eastern Germany, to find such a building. It is a typical socialist apartment block, very similar to those in my own country, Romania. Because of unemployment, the city has lost its inhabitants and many of these blocks were abandoned. The area where it's located looks like a ghost town: deserted streets (strangely, each of them has a painter's name), playgrounds where children no longer play, second hand stores with the merchandise locked inside, just the wind gently moving the trees and the long grass. An unidentified, annoying buzz in the background is there to remind you that what seems to be a peaceful, melancholic death - civilization turning back to nature - is in fact the result of a toxic ideology.

The communists' grand project was the creation of a “new man”, whose existence was “prefabricated” like the dwellings made for him: the job, the social relations even the family. In spite of this control, people still managed to live their lives and be profoundly human, finding an escape perhaps in the simplest gestures, like eating, playing, celebrating birthdays, and mourning their dead. The traces they left behind, the cheap, humble objects: a piece of furniture or a lampshade, wallpaper, toys or photographs show that their gestures are the same, regardless the time and place, certainly not brand “new”, but universal.

Without their inhabitants, these prefabricated block buildings look like, in fact, they lost their souls. Their decay isn't grand like that of the beautiful ruins of the nearby Dresden. The concrete walls seem like memory proof.

The authorities have taken a pragmatic decision with a poetic outcome: the area will be demolished and given back to nature. (Something yet unthinkable in Romania where only the old, beautiful houses are being demolished to make room for huge corporate buildings.)

I went to Hoyerswerda to paint the “new man's” memories. But, like I said, those walls could keep no memories. The wohncomplex's whole history was locked inside a second hand store. I had to borrow my own family memories and to paste them onto the walls, to give them back a (not so long) forgotten life. The idea to let my original works being demolished along with the building comes from that of the singularity of a work of art. Like a particular human existence, a work of art (made in a traditional manner) has an “aura” of uniqueness, and when it's lost it's lost forever. This is the tribute I bring to my parents' and my grandparents' most beautiful years, and to my own childhood, an inscription I wrote on the wall : “These are the memories of the New Man, ghost like images haunting an abandoned apartment block, coming to surface for the last time before the building is gone. And, like a captain who wouldn't leave his ship, they will stay here until the end…”

Teodora CosmanCluj, October 2008

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Room 1The prolongation of a thought

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The prolongation of a thought, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Room 2Ah, Mamaia!

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Ah Mamaia!, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Ah Mamaia!, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Ah Mamaia!, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Ah Mamaia!, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Room 3 The last New Year's Eve

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The last New Year's Eve, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008 The last New Year's Eve, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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The last New Year's Eve, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008 The last New Year's Eve, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Room 4 Hors d'œuvre

Child with shadows, tempera and acrylic on fabric, pasted on the wall, 2008

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Spatial intervention – interventional space

Although doing art “spatially”, the artists of/in the Artblock 2008 in Hoyerswerda, Germany, also intervene temporally. First, their works fill the temporal space between the period of the block's slow decay and it's certain demolishment – without preventing the later. Secondly, the artists come between the way they themselves, as well as the people from Hoyerswerda think about this particular space “before” and “after” the event these spatial practices themselves constituted. Thereby, the artists' works perhaps change the way we relate to an empty, soon-to-be-demolished formerly socialist apartment block. These changes are thus brought about by actually modifying both, space proper and the meaning that is attached to it, and result from tensions between the space and the artist. But who is intervening in whose existence? Do the artists living and working in the Artblock know which space they initially entered? Should they know that? Similarly, is the space prepared for this kind of practices? Does it have to be? Most probably not. It's the tension between them that counts, and facilitates art.

The Artblock might have been found accidentally, but it was well chosen, not only because the street in front of it carries the name of Otto Dix, a German artist who himself problematised modern spaces and urban life. It is a stereotypical socialist apartment block

thin the 10 and youngest WK (Wohnkomplex/Living Complex) of Hoyerswerda's New City. This New City, built from scratch in the late

nd1950s up to the mid-1980s, was the GDR's 2 attempt to build a “real” socialist city, enlarging the formerly existing small old city by approximately 70000 people to provide living space specifically for the workers of the surrounding brown coal industry. With the changes in 1989 and the following collapse of the coal industry, the city finds itself without its initial function. Nowadays, it became the symbol of demographic changes and the deconstruction of urban space. How can art intervene in such a space? How can such a space intervene in the artist's work/life?

Art needs space. Both for being inspired and for finding an actual place where to “do art”. In that regard, the artists coming to Hoyerswerda haven't simply left their studios, reaching out to the people try to make art more prominent, (spatially) central part of life. Rather, they came to a space that has its own history. In an most intimate way, this space was slowly appropriated by both living and working with and in it. Many traces remind the artists of the life that took place here before: items left behind in the basement,

wallpapers from earlier decades, posters from previous inhabitants. These previous inhabitants mostly did not leave voluntarily. They had to leave searching for new jobs in other, more prospering areas of the world. The space, therefore, is not a simply abandoned place. The abandonment has a history, the Artblock's intervention just being yet another step in it. This particular space, nonetheless, is now appropriated in many different ways. Artists from very different contexts, with very different ways of expressing themselves take over this space and modify it – most playfully and most seriously at the same time. As the initial work that has been invested by the people who built these flats and the people who lived in them on an everyday basis, the artist's investment does shape the space, too. But their work is knowingly temporary: the block will soon be appropriated by machines to un-build it.

The artistic change in space will thus only become a change in time, thought and social relations. By living and working in the Artblock as “residents” proper, the artists depended on the help of the people from Hoyerswerda. And they did help a lot, providing any support thinkable, starting with the most welcomed huge amount of space, ending with the organization of fridges and mattresses. Living in and with the space, then, becomes also a living with the people around and in it. It will be these relations, tough slowly built up, which will remain. The space and the art that is being done in and with it is, then, only a medium for multiple forms of exchanging space and thought.

The block will be demolished; the art in it, too. But temporally, art itself will have transcended space. Not only in the personal relations that were built up in progress of work and residency and the way that made everyone involved change her/his thoughts about the issues at stake. Also, this catalogue might spread the news to the world about an apartment block in Hoyerswerda that had been subject to/of art, intense and creative thought, and newly emerging social relations. It will thus hopefully open up new spaces, indeed new worlds of meaning – interventions in and with other spaces.

Felix RingelPhD candidate in Social Antropology

University of Cambridge

From the Artblock Hoyerswerdaexhibition catalogue

BIOGRAPHY

Teodora Cosman was born in 1978 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She graduated from the Painting Department of the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca in 2001 and got her master's degree in 2006. Currently she's a doctoral candidate at the University of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, doing a research on Memory and Representation. Photographic sources in contemporary art, coordinating professor: Prof. Dr. Ioan Sbârciu.She lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 11 Andrei Muresanu, 400071 E-mail: teocosman@yahoo.com

EXHIBITIONS2007 “Photograms”(painting), Passe-Partout Galleries, Sibiu, Romania – solo

exhibition“Free style digital” (video) –video/photography, X Future Gallery, Sibiu, Romania“Metamorphosis of reality” (painting), U.A.P.R. Gallery, Alba-Iulia, Romania “Painting”, Biblioteca Astra, Sibiu, Romania

2006 The annual exhibition of the Fine Artists Union, National Art MuseumCluj-Napoca, RomaniaGraduates Exhibition from the U.A.D., Expo Transilvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

2003 “Re:location 4”, CASINO DE LUXEMBOURG – Forum d'art contemporain, Luxembourg (video, installaþion)

2002 “The Window”(painting), Roland Garros Club, Cluj-Napoca - solo exhibitionThe winter exhibition of painting and sculpture, U.A.P. Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

2001 „The Way”, Veritas Gallery, Cheltenham, Great Britain - painting2001 “Calea”, Delta Gallery, Arad - painting

VIDEO2004 „The Jewish Community in the City of Cluj”, docummentary, Ed. Risoprint, Cluj-

Napoca 2001 “Needs More Colour”, video, 6'45”

MONUMENTAL ART2003 „Three kings”-mosaic, Orthodox Church, Bucea, Romania1998 „The Holy Spirit”-mosaic, Baptist Church, Viiºoara, Romania1997-1998 Mosaic „Communication”, Romtelecom, Deva

GRANTS2007 – 2009 Reasearch grant for young doctoral candidates

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