Skeleton for Future Art Forms

(Part V, distorted notes on a Jeff Wall Lecture, Hamburger Bahnhof  November 12)

Exhibition view, Undecoded Berlin, Scope BLN, Berlin, 2025

We investigate how presence performs cities. Fleeting currents, a person crossing, pausing, or unexpectedly falling, become coordinates in a living score. Each act traces the rhythm of life; when we look away, the city persists, yet subtly altered. Art and life coexist at the same scale, yet art measures, amplifies, and reconfigures the resonance of everyday experience.

Inspired by Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner’s anti-painting gestures, we deploy erasure and absence as generative tools. Censor texts, rewrite form; absence speaks. Maps, images, and instruction-based protocols form open systems, activated by performers, collaborators, and viewers alike.

Wall noted that cinematography begins with a room, a light source, and time. For us, the city itself becomes that room: our camera performs rather than documents. Urban sequences, drifting bodies, sunlit alleys, passing traffic, unfold like choreographies of play, where fiction and documentation exchange roles and ephemeral gestures acquire structure.

At Scope BLN, a color-coded image will be carried back to the street where it was photographed, transforming everyday space into a living stage. Between within and without, we operate not as photographers or filmmakers, but as cartographers of life, translating ephemeral gestures into relational, material, and performative forms.