Joachim Stargard

A presumably African village, inhabited by Germans. BURKINA BRANDENBURG KOMPLEX describes a geographical construction that makes use of “our” medial and collective image of Africa and puts it to the test through inaccuracies. An archaeological find is made in a mine: a Ferrari®. We tag along with Joachim on his everyday rounds. He has his heart set on realising a common energy project. The Museum of Prussian Cultural Heritage is run by a woman of color. She presents artefacts from Western consumer culture with a special emphasis on German products. Joachim is involved in the ritualistic production of energy in the village, but gets excluded when the ceremony is nearing its finale, finally catapulting himself out of the “story/history”.

In East Berlin in the late 70s, two boys meet one evening in a disco: Thomas, who is from a working class family and is doing an apprenticeship, and Michael, a 16-year-old school pupil from an educated middle-class family. They both miss the tram home and walk together instead, ending up at Michael’s house where they discuss God and the world into the early hours. Following this encounter the two boys enter into an unusual friendship, united by their mutual desire to get away from the phoniness, the limitations and the restrictions of their parents and of society.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, Ulu Braun re-envisions the structural potentiality of the brick, in this revisionist fable of mankind's urbanization of our planet. Employing playful and visually dense digital collages, Braun's associative tableaux collate an 'alternate' vision of our world, where nature invades the urban (and vice-versa). We're transported by a comforting narrator through post-apocalyptic, post-capitalist habitats, where the material co-exists with the metaphysical, the literal alongside the figurative (soap-bubble buildings stand alongside ruined churches turned car dealerships). Architektura echoes our civilization's childlike ingenuity in creation and destruction, as we question the inheritance we pass on to our future generations.