By: Riki Kalbe (Photography), and Wolfgang Kil (Text)
Berlin: Ines Schaber and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, 2013
Pages: 48
Dimensions: 5.8” x 8.3”
Cover: soft cover
Binding: staple bound
Process: offset
Color: b&w
Edition Size: unknown
ISBN: 978-3-944692-05-0

Important note: The special price for this book is only for delivery in Europe. We will drop ship the publication for a fixed rate of $15.00 (includes shipping and handling). This book ships by itself unless you contact us directly to make other arrangements.

This publication is in German & English.

The place, in whose underground the cinema Arsenal is located since 2000, received a multitude of descriptions in the last three hundred years: adornment of the residency (Friedrich Wilhelm I, 1732) – between octagon and square (Friedrich Nicolai, 1786) – a paradise (Bettina von Arnim, 1811) – the political heart of Germany (Eugen Szatmari, 1927) – barren land (Zaha Hadid, 1991) – historically contaminated area (Naturschutzund Grünflächenamt Mitte, 1992) – special building land with a high proportion of green (Flächennutzungsplan, 1992) – a space without footing (Rolf Lautenschläger, 1994) – and – place with a peculiarly sedimented past (Moshe Zuckermann, 2000). Riki Kalbe named the place simply terrain. She photographed it and the divers, often ephemeral uses and appropriations, that happened there between 1989 and 2000. She recorded the rebuilding of the Akademie der Künste and the construction of the Holocaust memorial with her camera and she initiated the exhibition Ministergärten by the ngbk (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst) in 2000. Also Wolfgang Kil, architect, writer, and prominent critic of Berlin’s city development, wrote on the terrain time and again. The conflation of those two voices, who have observed the terrain thoroughly for more than a decade, attempts to recall a time, in which an in-between space gave a promise, for a short moment. (Ines Schaber)

About the KEYwording series this publication is a part of:

KEYwording is a project by Madhusree Dutta and Ines Schaber.

Until the late 80s, the Arsenal, in whose context this project takes place, had used keywords as a search criterion for films in their collection. This practice was later abbandonned because "the standard categorizations used to sort films and make them accessible in a popular form would exclude many films as the given categories do not and cannot be applied to many of the experimental films that Arsenal collects."

Retrospectively though, the terms can be read not as a normative function within an archive, but as a positioning of an organization and its political agenda. The current project is to address, yet again, the space that lies between the possibilities of opening and locking of themes and practices when anchored on keywords. Keeping the Arsenal archive as the immediate context, instead of avoiding the pitfalls of applying words on films we attempt to pluck a few words from the contemporary cultural practices to rethink the ways of archiving and the struggle to keep contemporizing that what is archived.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker and curator based in Bombay. Ines Schaber is an artist and writer based in Berlin.