ESCAPING THE GRID

A city is a collection of rules and agreements. Meant to make things
safe, clear and structured. You drive on the right side of the street,
shops have opening hours, pavement-tiles are ordered in a system.
Garbage is collected at certain moments in a week, on agreed places.

Assignment

Find examples in the city of Kassel that escape these every-day rules.
The grass that tries to find its way up in between pavement-tiles, the
smell of the bakery, the sounds of cars, autumn-leaves that do not fall
in the grid of the pavement, a side walk that is interrupted by a building
site, (improvised) numbers on houses that are put there by the owners,
graffiti on the walls, a homeless-person that is asking for money, a bird
nesting in the middle of the city.
Find your own topic within the city and make an inventory of this topic.
Start a (large) collection about this topic. Make this collection as precise
as possible. If you photograph it, then do this with extreme patience
and accuracy (look at the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher). But you can
also collect by making photocopies, texts, drawings. Or you can collect
audio, or conversations, …
The only rule you can not escape is that you make this collection very
accurate, and precise. The creativity is not in the way of registrating
your collection, but in finding it and –later on– representing it during the
workshop!
This collections are brought with you the first day of the workshop.
What we will do from then, is told then.
Good luck (and have fun)

Associative readings

- Auke de Vries / Photo Archives (book)
– Daniel Eatock / Picture Of The Week (website)
– Superstudio: Life Without Objects (book)
– Bernd & Hilla Becher / Basic Forms of industrial Buildings (book)
– Serendipity / Hans Gremmen (book)
– The work of Gordon Matta Clark
– The work of Daniel Buren