BETON Berlin 1
Ida Lennartsson
Location: ehemalige Autobahnbushaltestelle (A113) West-Berlin, Düppelstraße/Joachim-Tiburtius-Brücke, Berlin-Steglitz
Date: June 23, 2022
Tobias Michnik and Leander Nowack recall in their book „Übergangsräume. Die Bushaltestellen auf der Berliner Stadtautobahn“ (published by Urbanophil, ISBN:978-3982-0586-3-4), they recall a forgotten chapter in Berlin's transportation history. The exceedingly apt title „Übergangsräume" (Transitional Spaces) sheds light on 13 former highway bus stops that have long since ceased operation. They have been dismantled, destroyed or converted. The BETON Berlin project used one area of this former infrastructure for its first exhibition in Berlin's public space.
The Swedish artist Ida Lennartsson, who lives in Berlin and was invited for this location, occupied the clearly neglected space under the Joachim Tiburtius Bridge for her work "Avatar Blues." She used a step landing as a stage and a metal girder from the highway as a pedestal.
In the two-part work, Lennartsson's affection for pigeons is evident. Specifically, the artist seems to be concerned here with the animals' food intake and digestion. Next to a sculptural feeding station complete with observation camera, she presents a small mountain of pigeon excrements This is not a useless leftover but a sculptural object that gets an almost surreal-poetic entanglement through the pigeon food that continuously trickles out of the second work - an arm made of white cellan.
Both works seem too ideal for this situation, because like many of these unused and forgotten places in Berlin, this area of "transitional spaces" is visibly populated by pigeons. Lennartsson, however, points with her artistic work to what for many seems invisible and disgusting. She literally pushes us to the traces of pigeon droppings present on site and thus opens up border areas of our perceptual world.
