Tunnel below / Skyjacking above: deconstructing the border

Events:

Fri, 25 August 2017, 19h
Opening of the exhibition

Sat, 26 August 2017, from 20h (en)
Filmscreenings
• “The Right of Passage” by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler
• “Ephemeral Manifestations. Producing (Counter) Spaces on the Border” by Ana Andrade and Jesus Guerri
• “Cycling The Frame” by Cynthia Beatt
• “Absent Present” by Angelika Levy

Sun, 27 August 2017
from 14h (en)
Lectures
• Hillary Mushkin “Incendiary Traces”
What color is the EU border? To find out, Incendiary Traces sketched inside Frontex’s surveillance headquarters in Warsaw and at the Hellenic Coast Guard, its key affiliate in Athens. Answer: Blue. Frontex logo blue, corporate office lighting blue, EUROSUR map blue, Mediterranean sea and sky blue.
• Vienne Chan “Tax Management – An Introduction. As part of the project: Legal Disobedience, Or How to Avoid Paying Taxes”
It is sensible and wise to manage your tax obligations. In this lecture, 18884930 Ltd. will discuss how Israeli citizens can optimise their taxes as a legal method for civil disobedience.
• Ellie Frouderaki (Guest) “Amar”
Amar is an ongoing audio project that started in Greece in May 2017. It is based on recordings of a sequence of recitations of a song which represents a random cultural starting point on the map of the most popular immigration routes of the world.
A similar format is going to be used for the project’s presentation, with a real time experimentation on the alteration of oral cultural expressions when they travel through different people sitting in a circle. How is a foreign phrase perceived and how is it transmitted within a sequence of people when it remains foreign to all? Is the incomprehensible resulting phrase legitimate as such or it constitutes a cultural monstrosity? How can we socially interpret this alteration of oral forms?
• Miguel Buenrostro “Heterotopias”(otras utopias)
Heterotopias is a contemplation of the city of Tijuana throughout spaces and places that reflect on the resistance in urban life, the erasure of city memory, and the border’s geopolitical forces manifested in the transformation of the architectural spaces.
18h (en)
Gallery walk with artists of the exhibition and the guests Lucia Sanroman (Curator) and Christian Oxenius (Curator)

Thu, 7 September 2017, 16.30h (en)
Fri, 15 September 2017, 15.30h (en)
Sat, 23 September 2017, 14.30h (en)
Start: nGbK
Walk “Urbanborderland“ with Yann Colonna, Duygu Kaban, Mareike Hornof
Join the free tour „Urbanborderland“ and become part of an unique experience. If you think borders are something distant somewhere in the desert, then let us take you through some of the different Urbanborderlands of everyday life. Starting at nGbk, via Lausitzer-Platz, we will zig-zag the “Görlitzer-Park” and look at its magnificent history, then cross the former GDR Border and have some Mexican Tacos while chatting about administrative zoning at “Wagenburg Lohmühle”. After our little snack we’ll continue our walk towards “Lohmühlenbrücke” while deconstructing Gender, then move on to the “Thielenbrücke” to look at the latest fashion trends and finally get to rest with a picturesque view on “Dreiländereck”. An additional boot trip to the Molecule Man can be booked on demand. Food and drinks will be served all along the tour.

Fri, 29 September 2017
18-20h
Precarious Artistic Researcher (PAR) will attempt to communicate with a Dinosaur (HP DraftPro 750) (Excerpted from Excavations into EDG/Emotional Dumping Ground)
Images and texts are mechanically re-produced, using a plotter from 1988 and printing with human breast milk purchased at the US/Mexican-border.The milk is subsequently ironed, or baked, and thereby burnt onto paper, in order to make it visible. Communicatio with obsolete technology is complicated, and some interruptions may occur: The serial port terminal app CoolTerm is used to send HPGL Plotfiles (Simple ASCII-Files) to a HP DraftPro EXL Pen-Plotter through a USB to Serial Adapter with a Prolific Chip and the relatively new PL2303 Driver from Prolific, using hardware handshake (CTS), since Xon/Xoff seemed unreliable. In general, this works well. The files are typically below 5MB, and they take between one and up to 5 hours to be drawn; since there is practically no buffer, they must be sent very slowly. Normally CoolTerm shows the CTS/DSR lights shortly flashing every 2 seconds or so and sends the next packet. The plotter functions with rapidographs in its carousel. Rapidographs are pens with different
tips that can be refilled, often used by illustrators or architects. If the tip is removed, they can be filled with whatever liquid there is. The carousel then moves with the pen to the position transmitted by the plotter, while the paper is moved back and forth according to the coordinates, tracing and marking cartographic information.
20h (dt/en)
Performative reading “Gute Schleuser, schlechte Fluchthelfer | Good human traffickers, bad escape agents” by Birgit Auf der Lauer and Caspar Pauli
Since graduating in 2011 from the art academies of Berlin Birgit Auf der Lauer & Caspar Pauli work together. The duo’s immediate and culturally diverse neigbourhood of Neukölln (a district in Berlin) is moving the artists and their work, sometimes towards research trips to other cities or countries, sometimes just a few metres down the streets of Neukölln. Their works have been shown at various galleries of the city of Berlin, Depot Istanbul, nGbK, Maxim Gorki Theatre, the Academy of the Arts of the World, Goethe Institute Cairo and Bogota, at the NSU Tribunal in Cologne and National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest.
21h (en)
Filmscreening “Félix: Autoficciones de un traficante / Felix: Self-Fictions Of A Smuggler” by Adriana Trujillo and Jose Inerzia from the Polen Collective

Sat, 30 September 2017
12-17h
Precarious Artistic Researcher (PAR) will attempt to communicate with a Dinosaur (HP DraftPro 750) (Excerpted from Excavations into EDG/Emotional Dumping Ground)
Images and texts are mechanically re-produced, using a plotter from 1988 and printing with human breast milk purchased at the US/Mexican-border.The milk is subsequently ironed, or baked, and thereby burnt onto paper, in order to make it visible. Communicatio with obsolete technology is complicated, and some interruptions may occur: The serial port terminal app CoolTerm is used to send HPGL Plotfiles (Simple ASCII-Files) to a HP DraftPro EXL Pen-Plotter through a USB to Serial Adapter with a Prolific Chip and the relatively new PL2303 Driver from Prolific, using hardware handshake (CTS), since Xon/Xoff seemed unreliable. In general, this works well. The files are typically below 5MB, and they take between one and up to 5 hours to be drawn; since there is practically no buffer, they must be sent very slowly. Normally CoolTerm shows the CTS/DSR lights shortly flashing every 2 seconds or so and sends the next packet. The plotter functions with rapidographs in its carousel. Rapidographs are pens with different
tips that can be refilled, often used by illustrators or architects. If the tip is removed, they can be filled with whatever liquid there is. The carousel then moves with the pen to the position transmitted by the plotter, while the paper is moved back and forth according to the coordinates, tracing and marking cartographic information.
from 18h (en)
Filmscreening “Limina” by Mario Rizzi
Talk with Amy Sara Carroll (Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0) “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and Lisa Groß and Jonas Rudolph “Watch the Med - Alarmphone”
“Limina” by Mario Rizzi (2008, 23 min) was part of the installation “Gefeliciteerd” which is the Dutch expression of congratulations given to new citizens. Comprised of six films that questioned ideas of national identity, the work was installed in three small wooden houses similar to those assigned to asylum seekers. In “Limina”, ‘aliens’ are shown in the process of becoming Dutch citizens and taught to perform new selves. Habits and customs that constitute and hold communities together are exposed as ridiculously empty gestures when reduced to pure performative acts.

Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / BANG LAB: Since the early 1990s, E.D.T. has operated as a collaborative of artists creating critical and provocative work that directly addresses issues of migration. Infamously, the US Department of Defense took exception to the “Transborder Immigrant Tool” which left water and poetry on cell phones in the desert, as signposts and markers for people trying to migrate. Conceived as acts of civil disobedience, principal investigators Amy Sara Carroll & Ricardo Dominguez will discuss their takes on the nexus of art and activism.

“Watch the Med Alarmphone ” was founded in October 2014 to provide a 24/7 emergency network for migrants on vessels in distress in the Mediterranean to work against the rising death toll on the borders of the EU. Lisa Groß and Jonas Rudolph work with the Berlin branch of Alarmphone and will discuss artistic and activist interventions in the Mediterranean and the lethal consequences of the policy of fortress Europe

Sun, 1 October 2017, from 18h (en)
Finissage: Performance Dinner “Re/flecting the Border” by Margarita Certeza Garcia
“Re/flecting the Border” is a performance piece that goes beyond the boundaries, creating a temporary dialectical heterotopia that opens questions around globalization, citizenship and migration. Incorporating sensory modalities often disarticulated into their components in contemporary art (sculpture, performance, food and music) it translates them into the vernacular. Although the elements of a ‘feast’ are included, it does not aim to satisfy corporeal hunger, but rather provoke dialogue, or even engender disgust. Designed to be viewed, handled, inhaled and ingested, food is not only substance but also meaning. The work functions as both a performing object and small reminder of the surfeit of consumption that fuels the exploitation of workers and migrants worldwide.