SPAMCONSUMER

Exhibition: BASTARD SPACES, Praterinsel München

July 18th, 2009

Exhibition at the Praterinsel in München / Germany. March 2008.
120qm of visual art. 5 banner sized pillared collages. (5 x 2,1m x 11m)
By SPAMCONSUMER & Stephan Doesinger.

A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral.
Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of aesthetic convalescence.
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object.
I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and
environmental condition. Art, after all, is traditionally displayed against vacancies: paintings on dun
walls, sculptures in empty spaces, music in quiet halls, girls in tight shorts.

Everyone has the right to walk from one end of the city to the other in secure and beautiful spaces.
Everybody has the right to go by public transport. Everybody has the right to an unhampered view
down their street, not full of railings, signs and rubbish.

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I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.

It’s not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots. People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more.

You’re torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that’s really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don’t understand the process?
Sacred spaces can be created in any environment. We call them “Bastard Spaces“!

» Learning from Sim City” is neither a geek’s wet dream about the virtualisation of space, nor is it a techno-phobe’s lamentation of the loss of physical matter. An eye – that of a 21st century critic-tourist – onto the great screen-saver that is our reality, and illuminates the inevitability of an illuminated future that oscillates between the supposedly real and the allegedly virtual. «
Shumon Basar, Architectural editor for Tank Magazine, writer for Blueprint Magazine and curator at The Architectural Association, London