diary

Berlin, some time in march just before the opening: I am on the way to the city district office close to our venue in Schöneberg to deliver some posters. I am going to ask for them to put them up in their store window. After I explained myself to the woman that opened the door for me, she glances at the poster. “And these are only in english?”, she says. In this moment, I realize the slight hypocrisy of sensing the city. During the workshop we agreed on the importance of urban context: Places in cities, especially of art, must not be used in disregard of their context, must not exist as islands in an urban sea. Organizers of events should seek integration and contextualization of everything that happens. This does not mean that no happening can take place without a local audience, but responsibilites concerning movement of attendees though the city and alienation of neighbours from the life in their streets cannot be ignored.

The set up was pretty quiet, actually a library couldn’t be the calmest place to organize an exhibition. As Sofia was working full time, I was mostly the only live connecting point between the artists and the physical space. Sofia, since we chose the artists and separated the teams, ended up being in charge of most of the online part of the project.

Despite a couple of last minute cancellations from some of the artists, and the nervousness of the curatorial pair, the opening was a very inspiring moment. The doors opened at 19h but the artists and the public arrived around one hour later. We got some wine and some cakes and after some hours I gave a very short speech in the name of the curatorial team, thanking the people involved in the whole project and welcoming the new ones.

Due to the location of the exhibition in the surroundings of the city, the events themselves didn’t have much grip from the artistic and academic audience. In fact, most of them ended up having no audience at all… And even though we hung posters around in Marvila a while before the opening of the exhibition, something was lacking to catch the local community...

The unsetting was as peaceful as the setting, but of course way more sad to experience.
Both me and Sofia felt it was a flaw from us not to organize a finissage like they did in Berlin so that we could properly say goodbye to the artists and the whole project.

text by Anna Sofia Meyer, Catarina Marcos, Christian Hörner, Helena Doppelbauer, Nika Grigorian

We are the five curators, artists and urbanists who came together to realise the exhibition "sensing the city - sense of the city" in 2022. Here is our diary, collective, experimental writing about the exhibition process:

Tallinn, Sometime in October: After moving here from Berlin, I receive a message from my old flatmate and friend Nika. She asks if I would be interested in participating in an exhibition project about sensing the city and gentrification. At first, I am confused and a bit skeptical. I am asking myself: Will the framework and concept of the exhibition work together with the urban theory I have been studying here in Tallinn? Will I be able to establish some connection points between Urban Studies and Urban art?

We made an open call on the places we live in and how it was sensed - easy as that, we wanted to exchange the feelings inside the city spaces.

In Berlin some exhibition-spaces agreed to exhibit us, which was a green light to start. No funding - but we have the space.

Both Catarina and Sofia got to the project when its ideation was already in progress. Helena, who was doing an exchange semester in Lisbon at Faculdade de Belas-artes, began her research for someone based in Lisbon to join the team. Catarina joined in October and Sofia in December.

After distributing posters in the city and on the web, we started collecting artworks.

As we are a team living in different parts of Europe, we mainly worked in digital spaces. Miro Board was our "working table" and a kind of archive where we collected our plans, questions and thoughts.

How do we analyze all this work? Hours in front of screens, data and questions.

How do we organise the works? Where are the connections? Where are the references to the questions we asked in our research? Is there a connection to the cities?

First we needed a space to assure the exhibition had space to be. So after agreeing on a possible date, we made a list of spaces in Lisbon and Berlin that could fit for the concept we were nesting. To make them see us was a hard task, since due to Covid their programs were already full for the year of 2022.

After contacting many spaces, we had an answer from Paulo from the Marvila Library at the end of november interested in our project. We had a meeting in the library and confirmed the exhibition space for the dates we needed.

We published the open call in our social media and distributed posters in both cities. Unfortunately after the end of the year we had another covid outbreak in Portugal and the Library was closed for another quarantine.

We prepare the plan for the exhibition. Getting worried - feeling that the works don't have enough space.

Comparing plans, building structures. I look at the gallery spaces, talk to the people, to the artists - try to imagine things

Tallinn, 25th of January: I prepared a workshop for us as a curatorial team. I hope it will provide a platform for us to discuss cities more broadly, but also our individual urban experiences as well as hopes and expectations for the exhibition. I will try my best to not act as some kind of an expert who holds knowledge, but more as a mediator and facilitator, trying to enable conversation and discourse.

We didn’t have answers from Paulo for some weeks until we finally heard from him. Then we found out that during his absence the library booked the exhibition space for another project simultaneously with ours. So, in the end we would have to share the space with another exhibition and our primary idea of space was literally cut in half.

This news were quite hard to process since the exhibition date was getting closer and the space now available was much smaller than what we expected, or at least that was how we felt it. We tried to apply spontaneously to Fabrica Braço de Prata, a cultural space not very far from Biblioteca, but just as before our email was ignored.

Tallinn, 1st of February: I just booked my flight to Berlin. It is exciting to travel to the city I lived in for 5 years before moving to Tallinn in such a “grown-up” manner: To install, open and maintain a real exhibition. I feel motivated and commited.

How can we connect the artists with the city? How can we bring our thoughts out of the comfortable bubble of the exhibition space?

Paulo, from Biblioteca showed himself not so preoccupied about the happening of the month before since we still had a lot of other spaces in the Library to host the artists. And that was in fact true.The second floor walls, the cafeteria, the central down area and three other rooms were the spaces we had available during the exhibitions. Some full time, others in specific time frames. In the end the space was actually just enough for the art works. And we actually had some extra time in the auditorium and didn’t have to use two of the rooms they facilitated for us.