Square, Triangle, Circle in Moabit
In 2012 I was assembling videos about architectural panopticon prisons. My interest in Foucault's writings took a tangent into the prison reform projects of the 19th Century. The first site I visited was Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary. It was the first penal institution to design and theorize solitary confinement, based on the Quaker belief that one could be redeem through a direct relationship with God if only one were provided the time for study and reflection, rather than co-mingling with debauchery. Isolation toward penal reform manifested in the architecture of solitary confinement, but also the designs to inhibit prisoners from communicating with each other. Silence was mandated. The role of the central prison guard was to observe not only the cell doors but any communication that occurred in any wing of the prison.
The second prison I visited was in Sài Gòn’s Chi Hoa. The prison is still functional and, at the time, it was alleged some prisoners from the “War of American Aggression” were still housed there. I took a ride around the prison on motorbike to understand its size. Its massive but almost feels invisible in the chaos of Sài Gòn. The prison is bordered by a tall concrete wall and apartment buildings.
The third prison I visited was Moabit during the Sound Development City residency in 2012. Still in operation in 2018, just outside the city center, the prison was part of a criminal justice complex that occupied an entire city block, in which someone can be held, prosecuted, and imprisoned without even crossing the street. Three blocks from the complex was a state park dedicated to the closure of the previous Moabit prison, which sat where the park grounds. Across the street from the Hauptbahnhof was the park memorializing a site-specific punishment of a previous period, but the institution had simply moved to a new is larger location, three blocks away.
Returning to re-record Moabit's panopticon because of superior equipment and knowledge, I found that not much had changed on the prison's exterior. The same strange artwork of a man dangling from the Scales of Justice perched above the main gate, where I recorded two police vans exiting–both in 2012 and in 2018 (this year the female officer in the passenger seat flipped me off)–the same barbed wire at the top of the wall, which kept people in as well as out, and the same sculpture of a lion killing a serpent on the west side of the complex grounds.
On the way to lunch I went to the Daimler Collection and saw the exhibition “Evoking Reality.” Primarily photographs of the state of the world. Gorgeous, high production-value images depicted the world in distress. Although not included, it was really Edward Burtynsky’s exhibition.
Jeff Weber made blotwurst, potato and rotkohl. He gave me a copy of his new book, “An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology,” which amassed his photographs that span the documentation of his project, Kunsthalle Leipzig, document his own artwork, more traditional photographs that would qualify as art photography, travel photography and artists with whom he’d worked. 500 pages, beautiful but too big. It's title came from an earlier work of his in which he used a card catalog to "attempt a personal epistemology." More Foucault. Weber’s apartment looked like a photography studio with mixing tanks an enlargers dominating the visual and physical space. Two book shelves hung, fully stacked, from the walls. He’d lived there since moving back to Europe after our residency at the ISCP. He paid 350€ per month but expected the landlord would try to kick him out soon, renovate the space and rent it to some Americans. Outsiders.
Jeff seemed even more preoccupied with politics than Abraham, Eva and I and just as unqualified to talk about it. Equivocating the rise of the populists in Germany with the pervasion of the corporate agenda of Merkel, I had to ask, if a reaction against Merkel were explained or justified, why not a rise of a Green movement? Or of Anarchists? Outside I found a poster of a march against Neo-Nazis. I rolled it up and carried for historical proof that even in Germany people weren’t studying history well enough.
In the evening I returned to another 2012 project I had started and filmed in Berlin: a meditation on the uses of Olympic Stadia. Thinking about the international status of these high-profile games and the massive urban developments that are created in justification of demonstrating a country's membership in the international community is followed by many of these mega projects creating massive sites of disutility. In 2012 I filmed the parking lot of the stadium, as the space was used for driving school practice. In 2018 the parking lot was still used for driving practice.
[1] Jeff Weber, Berlin Art Link
https://www.berlinartlink.com/2016/09/29/jeff-weber/