Aushang

Daniel Hölzl

Daniel Hölzl‘s object AUSHANG, based on the interior of a living room, is made from parachute silk on a 1:1 scale. Inflated out of its own window, the volume of this room is made visible. The installation creates space not only for a discourse on issues confined to one‘s own four walls, but also for everything that extends beyond them. In the New Normal, which has been affected by the pandemic, even this most private of retreats is under extreme tension. For many, one‘s own living space has become a place of isolation. Thus, previous, mostly positive, associations have now often turned into the opposite. AUSHANG oscillates between approach and distance, public and private, fullness and emptiness, freedom of movement and anchoring. Despite it‘s constant respiration, there is still a concurrent sense of standstill and isolation.The shift to the outside results in free space. On the 7th of November 1962, the then Governing Mayor Willy Brandt ceremoniously laid the foundation stone for the first construction phase of the large housing estate „Berlin-Gropiusstadt“ in the presence of Walter Gropius. Almost 30 years later, the documentary „Gropiusstadt - Ist alles Kacke hier! (1990) by Eberhard Weißbart appeared, which deals with gang wars in the satellite town. At a similar time interval, the artist Jonas Höschl is now reacting to the documentary, using the film as the basis for his work. In collaboration with the audio film author Petra Schielke and the narrator Christian Bergmann, he created a sound piece with the use of audio description. A sound framework freed from narration, consisting of descriptions of the protagonists and locations of the short film, which interrogates the visual material itself. The producer Philipp Dittmar (Red On) reacts to this with sound documents of the 1960s from Neukölln`s museum archive, which accompanied the building process and the inauguration of Gropiusstadt. The result is a melodious radio play between German officialese, the subcultural sounds of Berlin at the time of reunification and contemporary, experimental electronics. Among other things, this addresses the development and history of social conflicts that the political discussions of housing entail. The temporal and spatial shift from Berlin to Denmark creates a cross-distance comparison of our political and media present.