Swimming Backwards by Anthony Antonellis

MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies Bauhaus-University Weimar in cooperation with BĂŠtonsalon, Paris 2010

Contents

What is Public Space?

Constanze Fritzsch

Swimming Backwards

Nadin Reschke

#DFFF00

Anthony Antonellis

A Photograph

Rosa van Goudoever

Li-Shih Chen

Johannes Abendroth and Juan G. Caicedo D.

Alma Alloro

Sally Lee

Olivia Jaques

Jan Uprichard

Juan G. Caicedo D.

Angeliki Makri

Xinglang Guo

Ben Craig

Yvonne Morales Traulsen

C.R.O.P.S. The Way of the Donkey Next Summer Hit Home Remedies Localization Parfum Maison de BĂŠton Pictionary Worldcup Planted Window Searching for the Neighborhood Sexual Railing Urban Traces

Rue des Grands Moulins, Paris 13th BĂŠtonsalon on the right side

What is Public Space? Constanze Fritzsch

This question seems to be particularly interesting in relation to the ZAC1 Rive Gauche quarter in Paris, which is currently under construction. Its new urban structure has been developed on a drawing board by city planners. Should public space be understood as a concept created by city planners? If doubts about this idea of the production of public space were to arise during the project Swimming Backwards, then what alternative models might be proposed? In the theory of relativity, space results from the position and state of the single elements within it. Space is dependent on the relation between the single elements and is constantly being transformed. Based on the relative theory of the concept of space, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the structure of the relationships between objects and the objects themselves (i.e. their material appearance) by using the concept of the field. Through the effects and positioning of the agents, he considers space to be multi-dimensional and social. The single dimensions are fields with specific means of power. In the economic dimension, material possessions play a deciding role, whereas cultural knowledge and education are the means in question in the cultural field. The third field is constituted by the social network, which provides advantages for the organization of individual life, i.e. access to information. The connection and interaction of the different fields is multi-faceted. Therefore, based on the different fields, the position of an individual in the social space can be described through a multi-dimensional coordinate system. This social position gives information about the habitus. Bordieu determines habitus by the social class to which the individual belongs and classifies the various social strata. Due to its basic structural scheme of actions, perceptions and thoughts, habitus structures the behavior of its agents, although it is not deterministic. Space is not to be considered as a physical fact, but as a social fact which is constantly being transformed through the relation and interaction of the single agents who belong to different social strata. How does social space become public? According to John Dewey, the American philosopher and pedagogue, individuals always exist and operate in relation to each other. The acts of each person are influenced by their association with others. Human behavior affects others in two ways which must be differentiated: either the acts or the relation of the individuals only

directly affects themselves, or their behavior affects others and involves them. Dewey draws the line between private and public on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences of acts, which are so important as to need control, whether by inhibition or promotion. The public is made up of all those who are indirectly influenced by the consequences of social transactions, and therefore these consequences must be systematically controlled. The public consists of various communities which interact and are associated with each other. The main goal of a community is the liberation of the potential of its members in harmony with its interests and goals, and the responsible individual shares in the actions of the group. Public space is a social space which is submissive to constant transformations caused by the consequences of the acts and interactions of individuals as well as groups. These theses were a foundation for the artistic interaction of the MFA students and the prerequisite for dealing with the various communities which constitute public space. In this context, Xinglang Guo posed the question »Do you know your neighbor?« and examined the neighborly relations in an apartment building in this quarter. For three days, Li-shih Chen directly surveyed residents with a scientific questionnaire about the environmental health and quality of life in this district. She presented her statistical results in a conference. Juan G. Caicedo D. studied the human relationship between the regulars in a local bar by communicating only through drawings in a notebook. These student projects, of which only a few have been mentioned, throw new light on the various structures, constitutions and interactions of the individuals and groups of this district in order to answer the question »What is public space?« or better put, »Who is public space?«

ZAC = Zone d’Aménagement Concerté (urban development zone) 7

Swimming Backwards Nadin Reschke

Walking around the corner from Bétonsalon it smells of dust. Fine particles of concrete mixed with cigarette butts and a hint of green plants make up this road dust. Then nothingness for a while; my nose seems stuck, smelling nothing. I am walking blindfolded, guided by Jan Uprichard, a student from Belfast in our group who is doing a smell map as part of her project Parfum Maison de Béton. While she holds my hand to guide my steps, we talk about Paris Rive Gauche, this area on the northeastern outskirts of the 13th district that we are walking through. It is an urban zone created first as ZAC—a mixed development zone by Semapa, an urban development company that was tasked by the Paris municipality with the development of a new urban project named Paris Rive Gauche in February 1991. Since then the whole area, which extends from Gare d’Austerlitz to Boulevard du Général Jean-Simon, running along the Seine on one side and Rue du Chevaleret on the other, has been changing constantly. Now I don’t know where I am, because I smell nothing. Modern civilization dictates an olfactory neutral zone.1 Or is it only my nose being oversensitive and tired, now that my experience is isolated to my sense of smell. It is easy to realize the predominance of visuality and sight in moments like this. We keep walking, and I fall back on images in my mind that I collected within the last few days of walking through this vastly changing neighborhood. First I felt like I was walking inside an architectural magazine. As if the 3D rendered imagination had suddenly become a true reality for one to step into, like in a game. Yet someone forgot to press the shadow function in the program, hence there are no real shadows. Space is so perfectly divided into straight lines, squares and angles that light has no chance to make it feel real. It keeps this artificial character. The houses making up the grid of the surrounding have alternating heights but they all appear slightly the same because of their repetitive features. In the middle of this suburban concrete and glass zone, I find myself searching for small irregularities, surprises or faults in the plan, human daily activities that alter and humanize the master vision for a modern urban living environment.

Paris Rive Gauche was originally divided into three different districts, and, to ensure a diversity in architectural styles, the general design of each of these districts has been entrusted to different city-planning architects. For the area around Bétonsalon, the Masséna Nord, the coordinating architect was Christian de Portzamparc. In his masterplan he developed this area based on the principle of the open block, employing a basic rule governing the layout of solid and empty spaces to introduce architectural structures with no shared walls, while at the same time keeping the clear readability of the street.3 It is hard to imagine, that only a few years ago, this part of the 13th district was a sleepy and somewhat forgotten area with ailing industrial facilities. The smells must have been completely different then. Now housing, offices, commercial outlets, schools and universities, public and cultural amenities are gradually constructed and established. Step by step the urban plan becomes reality. In 2003 new rules were adopted by the Council of Paris refocusing on social housing and student accommodation while reducing the space for offices. When the project is completed, around 2015, Paris Rive Gauche is supposed to host almost 15,000 residents, 30,000 students and professors and 50,000 employees day-in and day-out.4 Yet what do these numbers tell us? Do they speak of a social heterogeneity? Do they speak of good community relations? I wonder what it must feel like to live here and be one of the neighbors. Who and what makes this district of the city? Semapa states that they were »anticipating the expectations of future users in order to guarantee them access to all the usual conveniences of a local neighborhood on the day they move in.«5 Yet how does an urban development company know what the neighbors will want? How do they know how the future residents will use and experience their residential environment? Is it enough to construct the usual amenities for everyday life: housing, offices, commercial outlets, schools and universities and to believe this is what makes a city truly alive? If we consider space no longer as a preceding substance, a passive mass that had always existed and upon which the building of society had been erected, but rather see the respective specific structure of space as being theorized as the result of social, economic and political processes, then space itself assumes the role of a social actor,6 then space is an ongoing production of spatial relations.7 If an urban development company controls and structures the design of this district, how can individuals have an impact on the coming into being of this district? How much room is given to people to produce and shape the space according to their own

needs and desires? How can people belong here? And to whom, in the end, does this part of the city belong? It smells of vehicle exhausts or motor oil, and I have completely lost any sense of orientation by now. Maybe we are at the library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the most prominent building here, a huge hulk sitting on a terrace above the Seine. From here you can overlook the whole area and realize how a second ground layer has been created by covering the train tracks—a second reality not yet alive, a neighborhood in trans formation. I wonder if and how people will transform the space? How can they relate to it and appropriate it? For thirteen days the students from the Master of Fine Arts Program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies of the Bauhaus-University Weimar explored this newly constructed part of the city. Invited by Bétonsalon to join Parties Prenantes, a project about collective practices of production and knowledge transmission, using the models of pedagogy and orality, they walked around, met with inhabitants, shop owners and teenagers in the park, experienced and reacted to this neighborhood. To work here in such a condensed period of time is a challenging experience, also considering that there is a language barrier. It means arriving and situating oneself in this new district of the city in a very short period of time. Yet exactly this process of developing temporary interventions enabled the students to interact with their surroundings, to learn and reflect upon the urban developments in this area of the city from a multiplicity of viewpoints. Smelling the same concrete dust again, I recognize that we are back where we started. Scents are interpreted by our limbic system, which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. Bétonsalon, the non-profit art center with which we are working, is situated in one of the only two older buildings, the Grands Moulins and the Halle aux Farines. These buildings have been preserved and renovated, hosting the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7 since 2006. Opening the heavy door of Bétonsalon I return inside, take off the blindfold and come back to an image I had in mind for days: somebody swimming backwards in deep water. Swimming backwards means not being able to see where you are going. Maybe this is exactly what happens —figuratively—in the continuous construction of Paris Rive Gauche?

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Eric Cohen: The Broken Cycle, in: Jim Drobnick, Berg (ed.): The Smell Culture Reader. 2006 Perspective of the Massena neighborhood—Grands moulins in Paris Rive Gauche, © Christian de Portzamparc Taken from http://www.chdeportzamparc.com on 16. 9. 2010 Numbers quoted from http://www.parisrivegauche.com on 15. 9. 2010 Quoted from http://www.parisrivegauche.com on 15. 9. 2010 Doreen Massey: Politics and Space/Time, in: New Left Review, № 196 (Nov./Dec. 1992) Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, 1991

#DFFF00 Anthony Antonellis

Anthony Antonellis began a new project, #DFFF00, as part of an ongoing series of work involving the destruction of the perfect square. In this process, the destruction of an object is necessary for its completion; the ultimate purpose is to end, to have attained a purpose. Highly adhesive neon stickers were produced by the thousands. The neon yellow (hex code #DFFF00) carried over the visual language from earlier experiments in the series. Visiting skate spots around Paris and BĂŠtonsalon, Antonellis placed the neon square stickers onto skateboards. The squares were perfect surfaces screaming to be marked, scratched or otherwise made imperfect while skateboarding. The stickers are destroyed as they become reabsorbed into their surroundings, approaching dĂŠcollage.

A Photograph Rosa van Goudoever Five Polaroid pictures spread on the streets, two Polaroid pictures in the Bétonsalon and a text. Polaroid-photographs by Juan G. Caicedo D.

How do we deal with information that we are not supposed to have but which is imposed upon us? Information we didn’t ask for, but that addresses us personally. And how does this influence our relation to our daily surroundings? On the 30th of July, Rosa van Goudoever left five photographs of herself near the entrances of apartment blocks in Paris Rive Gauche. The photographs depicted staged scenes of her life in the neighbourhood, on the back was her name and a date. On the next day, in Bétonsalon, another photograph was hung in the window of the exhibition space and another one inside the space with a note. Some of the pictures left outside were gone, probably taken away, one was put up on the wall of an entrance block and others were damaged or moved. In this work, two different kinds of audience were addressed: the interested public that came to the exhibition and found a description of the work, and the coincidental public, the people that found the photograph on the street. The first was informed about the action but couldn’t experience it; the second was given an artwork without knowing it. The artwork was the experience of finding a picture. »I tried to make the surroundings mine by putting a picture of me on the streets.« How do we personally relate to the modern street landscape when it is our daily surrounding? Is it possible to personalize the streets, where gates are prominent and access is limited? By trying to personalize the neighborhood as a stranger, van Goudoever puts emphasis on these questions.

C . R.O.P.S. Li-Shih Chen Community-based Research of Public Space

»According to the study by the Institute of Environmental Health, lack of public space, poor sense of community and low aesthetic quality of surroundings are factors that affect our quality of life and might have a negative influence on our physical and mental health. I find it a pity that the importance of these concerns and issues is still underestimated by health care practitioners and artists working in community. For these reasons, I would like to work with Bétonsalon as well as community pharmacists to find out people’s perspectives of the public space and needs.« —Statement of C.R.O.P.S., Li-Shih Chen

What is C.R.O.P. S.? That was the question people asked the entire time. The answers ranged broadly from crop harvesting to crop circles to image-cropping, even to cropped hairstyles. Not denying these possibilities, C.R.O.P.S., Community-based Research of Public Space, is defined as a scientific as well as an artistic process by the artist. Calling herself a cropper and expressing equal concerns for both the truth and its application, Chen took up her past position of a community pharmacist and did research in order to better learn peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opinions and to have access to the conditions of the public space in the 13th district of Paris. In a three-day public survey in front of a pharmacy, side by side with homeless on the street, Chen talked with people from different backgrounds and collected approximately thirty responses to her interview questions. During the final presentation in BĂŠtonsalon, these answers were introduced into the art context in the form of statistical charts and graphic tables to provoke discussions amongst the audience about the problem of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public space and the arts happening therein.

The Way of the Donkey Johannes Abendroth and Juan G. Caicedo D. Public action and video (15 min)1

»La rue courbe est le chemin des ânes, la rue droite le chemin des hommes.«2 The architecture of the 13th district of Paris has a significant connection to Le Corbusier and his theories on modern cities. Two of Le Corbusier’s few buildings in Paris (Maison Paneix and Armee du salut) are located in the 13th district. In the early 1970s, as part of the Italie 13 development, the architects Raymond Lopez and Michel Holley realized a modern high-rise complex (Les Olympiades) based on the urban theories of Le Corbusier.3 Today the city of Paris is developing a new residential area in the 13th district that is intended to follow contemporary conceptions of urban planning. Le Corbusier wrote several books about his modern visions. In the first chapter of Urbanisme (1924), Le Corbusier compares ancient and modern city structures to a donkey and a man, stating: »The curved street is the path of the donkey, the straight street the way of man.« Le Corbusier’s theories on the city are very extreme—often fictitious and nearly ridiculous. However they had a strong impact on modern architecture and city planning that can still be seen in contemporary development. To both experience and question Le Corbusier’s way of thinking as well as to obey the urban language and mechanics of mobility of today, we decided to dress up as a donkey and to follow urban rules and structures.

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Video can be viewed at www.johannes-abendroth.de/donkey, filmed by Rosa van Goudoever Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 1924 Taken from http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italie_13 on 14. 6. 2010 Particular photo by Nadin Reschke, other photos by Rosa van Goudoever

Final presentation of Swimming Backwards with Next Summer Hit, a performance by Alma Alloro outside of BĂŠtonsalon

Home Remedies Sally Lee

Home Remedies is a set of playing cards that incorporates information about home remedies in the scale of a card game. It is a collection of cultural practices that are commonly used in households but which may not generally be known to younger generations. This card game is a compilation of what I have learned from my grandma as well as the people I spoke with in Chinatown in Paris. The intention of the game is to circulate the knowledge of these cultural practices through playing the game, while simultaneously encouraging a discourse on art and domesticity. The information contained in the game is the product of the process of finding and talking to people in the area called Chinatown in the 13th district in Paris. The first two days of immersing myself in this neighborhood were an intense experience, or what one might call a culture shock. After a few days of trial and error, I realized that the area known as Chinatown is mostly composed of Cambodians who relocated to or lived in Hong Kong and/or Chou-Zhou in Mainland China for a short period of time in the late 1960s, as they fled from the aftermath of the Vietnam War. They then immigrated to Paris in the 1970s. Standing in front of these familiar faces, smells, restaurants, shops and even architecture, I felt like a complete stranger. Nonetheless, this realization did not discourage me; rather, it grew on me and pushed me to further my investigation. With the assistance of Agnès Noël from Bétonsalon, we visited the local community centre, the Chinese Catholic Church and the Chinese Buddhist Temple. I found and talked to some Cantonese-speaking residents in one place, and one conversation led to another. At the end, I spoke with about ten Cantonese-speaking people and collected their knowledge about remedies and household trivia. The game was played during the presentation at Bétonsalon at the end of the twelve days. The participants—my fellow classmates, professors and the staff, guests and visitors of Bétonsalon—learned about these home remedies as they played the game, while they shared their knowledge of other home remedies. Sometimes, the game became a method for discussing all sorts of cultural habits. The game continues to grow as players contribute more remedies to the collection. The aim of the project is to propagate cultural knowledge through a playful platform for intercultural learning and exchange.

Localization Olivia Jaques

The work was divided into two processes: Walking—She was walking, letting the 13th district lead her way. Each day starting and ending at Bétonsalon, walking until being exhausted, without specific aim, watching other people and how they use public space, trying to be aware of what leads their and her way (the architecture, the atmosphere, borders in various forms, curiosity, a random person …) while trying to walk no way twice and to cover as much of the district as possible. (In her mind she was spreading out from Bétonsalon, like weaving a net with Bétonsalon as its center.) Getting lost, locating herself and bringing herself in relation to the place, over and over. Being in Bétonsalon—She took the experience of the first process into Bétonsalon and transformed it into a subjective map of the district. To create this floor to ceiling collage she started with orientating and locating herself in the room—where is she in relation to the river, to the borders of the district? She started with the awareness of the two axes resulting from the two doorways (that led her in front of the wall), the rectangular form of the bricks of the wall (geologic realities) and her eye level at the here and now, Bétonsalon, starting point of the map. She covered the bricks with various kinds of paper and tape, copies of archive material of the area, then sketches. Understanding space as a social construction, and therefore constantly produced and dynamic, the layers of paper and tape, the system of putting them in relation to each other changed from a straight form (bricks) into something more and more dynamic and organic—remembering others reactions to the public space and reliving her own experiences of the walking process … Covering recollection and experience with experience and reaction with the next layer of paper and tape, spreading out from Bétonsalon, weaving a net, getting lost, locating and bringing herself in relation to the place, over and over again. Collage, unfinished.

Parfum Maison de Béton Jan Uprichard

Jan Uprichard is an artist who has been working with smell for the past two years. The aim of this project was to recreate the smell of the area around Bétonsalon and brand it as perfume from the House of Béton, mimicking the perfume/fashion houses traditionally linked to Paris. The area of the 13th district, in which Bétonsalon is located, is an almost completely new area of Paris. It has none of the architectural or romantic ideals for which Paris is known. In this work the artist recreated the smell of the district, by taking various people around the area blindfolded, refocusing their experience through their olfactory sense. Taking a different route each time, three people were guided around the neighborhood by the artist, who noted down what they smelled and where. A map of the walk each person took was then made detailing where they had been and what they had smelled at different points along their journey. Samples of the things they had smelled were collected and placed alongside the maps. A list of the different smells of the area was then compiled prioritizing the odors most frequently /strongly smelled. This was sent to Geza Schoen, a perfumer in Berlin, who had agreed to interpret the information into a perfume. The perfume was displayed alongside the other information that had been gathered, and people were invited to smell it and make their own judgment as to whether or not it matched their experience of the area. Through this process, the project offered a way to evaluate this part of the 13th district in context with the older more traditional areas of Paris, by using our sense of smell rather than sight and asking, how much of what we perceive of a place is actually based on our preconceptions of it?

Pictionary Worldcup Juan G. Caicedo D.

Juan G. Caicedo D.’s initial proposal was to make a landmark out of himself in an existing bar by visiting it every day for over a week and getting the bar’s customers to talk with him. Since he speaks no French at all, the vessel of these conversations would be a white paper pad, paralleling the intercontinental game of Pictionary. This pad was to be the sole means of communication between the bar’s regulars, newcomers and Caicedo. It would be a graphic journal and the physical documentation of the work. The work was performed in Paris, a city whose inhabitants have the reputation of being contemptuous towards foreign languages. The goal was to explore possible ways of communicating. The work was devised as an experiment in communication and a graphic collecting exercise in an existing micro-community, precisely the kind of community that forms with randomly grouped individuals, for instance at a bar, an airport during a delay or in the line to the toilette at a football match. Le William Bar was the establishment chosen and visited for slightly more than a week. The graphic conversations between the Le William’s barkeeper, its few regulars and Caicedo are documented in the white paper pad, and they portray the simple yet subtly charged communication efforts between the parties.

Planted Window Angeliki Makri

Rue du Chevaleret is a visible border of the 13th district in Paris, dividing the newly constructed area from the old. A building with no windows on the old side of this street was the starting point for this intervention. Planted Windows was a phrase used for the new plans laid out in this neighborhood. A series of placards were put on the facade of this building with different official decisions about its destiny. The last window was placarded in 2008. This announcement finally permitted its demolition. The demolition of a building could signify a starting point and a necessary process in order to open a platform for the creation of something new. On the other hand, every building in a city has its own life, its own past or history and its own function as a part of the neighborhood it belongs to and the city itself. By making a golden frame and placing it on this placard, another planted window is created, one that creates an obituary for the building itself. Thanks to Juan G. Caicedo D., Ben Craig, Li-Shih Chen, the people at BĂŠtonsalon and Nadin Reschke.

Searching for the Neighborhood Xinglang Guo

In the beginning, I noticed that the houses and flats in Paris usually do not have a doorbell, but can only be entered using a security code. I developed the idea of getting into a typical building in the area of the 13th district. The aim was to get an overview of what the neighborhood looks like in this area. I first contacted a gentleman who had moved into the 13th district just one year earlier. With the help of a translator from Bétonsalon, I interviewed him, asking questions such as »Do you know someone in this building?« or »Do you visit your neighbors sometimes?« Through this talk, I found out that he knows little about his neighbors and has limited connections with other residents in the building.

After this first try, I changed my strategy. Waiting in front of the entrance of the same building, I talked to random people and asked the same questions as above. The outcome was more diverse and more interesting. I learned that there are some connections between people because of children, safety concerns and hobbies. But in general, I got the impression that this neighborhood displayed a phenomena common in France: people retreat into their private space in their spare time; they prefer spending time within their families and engage with neighbors only on special occasions. In the final exhibition at BĂŠtonsalon, I transferred the results of my research into a wall collage of information. Writings, text and drawings were combined with a hand-drawn facade of the building.

Sexual Railing Ben Craig

Due to being penniless in an expensive city, Ben was resigned to spending his third night in Paris in his room at the hostel, but his subdued fun was soon brightened by the sound of rustling coming from the next room. The rustling became a banging and finally a high-pitched moaning, which brought with it the realization of what he was actually listening to. He looked around him, as if he would magically behold the amazing sex he was imagining, and as the moaning continued, his searching became frantic. Then suddenly his penetrating eyes found what they were looking for: through his window, reflected in the window on the opposite side of the street he could see the pinkish blurs of a couple having sex. He couldn’t help himself. He recorded a video of the reflection with his camera. The image was not explicit but implicit, which made it all the more stimulating. The next day he noticed the erotic iconography weaved throughout the Art Nouveau railings in front of all the windows on the street. Does sexy architecture turn people on? In Bétonsalon, Craig exhibited the video of the reflection alongside hand-drawn studies of the railings.

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Sexual railing, video still, 2010 A study of the sexual railings, ink on paper, 16.5 × 20.5 cm, 2010

»Personal well-being and quality of life in our cities depend on architecture satisfying both the mind and the senses in equal measure.« —Christian W. Thomsen, in Sensuous Architecture: The Art of Erotic Building

Urban Traces Yvonne Morales Traulsen

ÂťTraces tell a story, they shout. They whisper. Traces affirm or negate presence, they shape, they identify, they think.ÂŤ What role does the visual language of a neighborhood play? Is there unity in it? Some kind of identity which represents it? Yvonne Morales Traulsen collected the signs, typefaces and taglines that surround BĂŠtonsalon. Using photography as a method, she created an open archive. She started a collection of the visual language that, in her eyes, describes and identifies this specific location in Paris, with the intention of inviting others to add their own perspectives. Morales Traulsen started gathering as much material as possible so that she could grasp an overview and an essence of what she wanted to develop. She classified the images under different categories and formed typologies with the intention of giving emphasis and presence to each sign. To complete the work, each category was named with a title referring to an underlying poetic layer of meaning: The Beauty Spot, The Masquerades or the The Dwelling Boundaries, and each chapter was introduced with a written phrase in which Morales Traulsen projected her thoughts about the poetics of space. The goal of the work was to give life to unanimated objects that pass unnoticed but without doubt have something to tell.

Lecture with Stephen Wright, Paris-based art theorist, writer and former editorial director of the Biennale de Paris

Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar University Publishers, 2010 D-99421 Weimar verlag@uni-weimar.de Publisher MFA-Program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies/Kunst im öffentlichen Raum und neue künstlerische Strategien Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus-University Weimar © Publishers, the artists and the authors, 2010 ISBN 978-86068-424-5 Photography © the artist, unless otherwise stated, except: p. 4, 5, 11, 16, 17, 28, 30, 31 and inside coverpages by Nadin Reschke; p. 20, 21, 38 and 39 by Bétonsalon Design Johannes Abendroth Printing Schöpfel Druckerei Weimar Edition: 500 Editorial Nadin Reschke Lectorate Monica Sheets

The Fachcourse Swimming Backwards was led by Assistant Professors Nadin Reschke and Constanze Fritzsch and organised in cooperation with Bétonsalon, Paris. Contact Bauhaus-University Weimar Faculty of Art and Design MFA-Program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 7 D-99421 Weimar Germany Phone +49 (0) 36 43 . 58 33 92 Fax +49 (0) 36 43 . 58 33 93 Email mfa@gestaltung.uni-weimar.de www.uni-weimar.de/mfa We would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance with the development of the project: Mélanie Bouteloup, Juliette Courtillier, Agnès Noël and Adélaïde Laoufi-Boucher from Bétonsalon, Paris. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the International Office, Bauhaus-University Weimar, the Franco-German Youth Office (Deutsch-Französisches Jugendwerk) and the German-French Cultural Association (Deutsch-Französische Kulturstiftung).