Videotaxi
The cultural policy in hamburg, like in many cities, has changed. Budgets for art in public space are increasingly spent only in connection with urban (re-) development projects. In preparation of IBA 2013 – the international building exhibition – artists are asked to develop work to, blandly, gentrify former harbour- and working class areas close to the Elbe river.
In this context we were invited to participate in an exhibition called „Wilhelmsburger Freitag“. As we like perverted situations, we decided to take part – but of course not with a participatory work, which wouldn’t do anything but add to the democratic camouflage of the event.
We had found three places made by inhabitants of the area, which, in our view, featured urban qualities, like: an openness to the outside, (mis-) appropriation of given urban structures, and, most importantly for us, that had a moment of resistance against an all-too-easy integration into a superficially multicultural consensus culture.
To avoid exposing these spaces – and the people who had made them - to the touristic gaze, that exotizes and damages what it stares at, we shot videos of these spaces. They were shown in an intimate, private space: the Videotaxi - a car equipped with monitors and a sound system.
For a month, the Videotaxi offered regular free tours through the neighbourhood. Texts analyzed the shift of paradigm in the globalized powers’ urban planning policy from one that serves industry to one that produces images. These texts were juxtaposed with the videos and interspersed was a secret story of film, desire and technology.
The Videotaxi is one of the plug-ins of maschine machen, the first project of the Park Fiction Institute of Independent Urbanism, that tries to find a more sustainable way, how local and global knowledges, experiences from the fields of art and the everyday, can feed back into each other.
Concept: Margit Czenki, Christoph Schäfer; Video: Margit Czenki; Text: Christoph Schäfer; Music: Ted Gaier; Voices: Nikola Duric, Melissa Logan, Christiane Müller-Lobeck; Driver: Fernando Diosa Veléz