Repertory of Movements

Constituting the Repertory, step by step in three movements :  A,   B   and   C.

The exploration of urban signs, codes and their implications, coupled with the morphology of a training ground, ignited a dynamic process. It unfolded in three distinct movements as a result of TMML’s immersive engagement with the urban terrain. The central question guiding this venture was: ‘How can we develop a tactic, considering the notion of residue, that would allow our imagination to blossom when faced with the preponderance of those urban signs intended for collective use?’

A – Moving through the city: wondering, collecting, scale 1:1

On the morning of 1 January 2014, Sanders and Noël arrived in Berlin for their residency period. After New Year’s Eve, the city felt deserted. Broken bottles, beer cans and other trash – remnants of fireworks, chips and kebabs – littered the streets. The pair took hundreds of photos and picked up a number of objects lying around, including firework residue, yoghurt pots, flyers, napkins and sticks. These silent witnesses of the celebrations that had just taken place in the German capital provided inspiration. By wandering around the city and by collecting and documenting various situations, constructions, objects, residues, as well as the language and sounds ‘typical’ of Berlin, TMML tried to visualize the city and make its culture their own. TMML decided that from then on they would consider the city mainly from above and from below – i.e. looking down and looking up.

They were also impressed by things that had vanished in the streetscape, developing a fascination for the traces and residues bearing witness to the past, things that were absent and places in the city that had deliberately been left unreconstructed. For example, the half-destroyed Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche with its iconic tower, the cobbles in the streetscape symbolizing the toppled Berlin Wall, and the copper nameplates at the foot of houses that name people deported during WWII. Such things stimulated TMML’s imagination and enabled them to mentally reconstruct that which was no longer there.

B – Archiving as a dynamic process

Continuing the idea of collecting and documenting is the idea of observing and ‘imagining’: conceiving or supposing how static artefacts and urban residues might function ‘in flux’. As an example of this, TMML used an exercise from Geir Kaufmann’s Visual Imagery and Its Relation to Problem Solving (1979). This principle, which belongs to cognitive science, is about seeking a solution to a problem on the basis of visual imagination; the artists reinterpret it and implement it in relation to the observing public. After all, the latter was invited to make full use of the imagination while observing the work. Shapes and volumes should not be touched with the hands in this ‘exercise’, but should be reconstructed mentally or come to life in the mind of the viewer. This principle alludes to children’s games – to puzzles, construction sets, rebuses and, on a larger scale, to playgrounds, city planning and infrastructure.

C – A laboratory as a training field

A platform for exchange with various experts, for testing, experimentation and exploration, including fieldwork in the city, in the workshop and in the context of the exhibition, where collected residues, observations and imagined constructions could be reactivated as material for new situations.