23 Entryways Into My Mind, Portal 9: When A Home Is Not A House - The 23E Studios Carry-on Office & Portable Morgellon, in Conjunction with The Berlin Office, Presents 
23E Studios April 2010

I have been on the road for almost three years with music and art projects. I carry everything I need to make a living, make art, make music, and live cleanly and happily with me in a small black rolly suitcase and a shoulder bag. Wherever I go I can set up my office and work. This has re-affirmed for me how personal office space is. This is one of the cinematic and historical stereotypes that builds on a deep, shared need.  

The 23E Studios office is a weird amalgam of my psychological needs for a space, what I crave to have around me when traveling (which I'd be willing to bet are nearly identical to the psychological needs of other humans), and what represents "office." That is in large part works and ephemera from family, other 23E members and past shows, musical tools, and an array of digital devices. This office, along with a portable theater that was in development and not on view in Berlin, has become an installation that allows me to simultaneously exhibit a work and be at work. I come, I install, I create. In the coming years, 23E will continue to tour art spaces and galleries. I will arrive in a town, set-up my office, advertise, audition for various scripts sent to me by 23E members, and then shoot the necessary scenes. Evenings I will show works and documentation of other 23E projects as double features in the portable theater. Then, a year later, I will return and show finished versions of the films shot at that locale.

Je suis l’espace oů je suis
I am the space where I am
Ich bin der Raum, in dem ich bin 
Saturday 13th December – Friday 19th December 2008

The Berlin Office holds various functions as a space. It is first and foremost a shelter, providing artists with a domestic environment for the duration of their stay as a resident. It is also a studio, providing space for concepts and projects to be developed and realised. Taking the versatility of function in to consideration, I am the space where I am explores The Berlin Office as a temporary exhibition. The installed works will respond directly to the apartments architecture; examining how a site, with its history and context, resonates as a framework for a collection of artistic responses. 

Each of the artists invited to exhibit have spent a duration of time in The Berlin Office; either as a visitor, invited by the long-term artist in residence, or as a resident themselves. Curator Victoria Lucas is the current long-term resident at The Berlin Office, and will be opening her studio up to the public alongside the exhibition, as well as creating site-responsive work for the show.  

 

The Many Mini Residency
by Sarrita Hunn (US) and Ryan Thayer (US)
July 2008

Residency was held during the first week of July 2008 at The Berlin Office. Many Mini Residency was a one-room residency that was open to applicants from all disciplines and encouraged participants to customize their residency experience. There was no minimum time-limit for their stay at the residency but the maximum stay allowed applicants to use this space for half a day. Therefore, the name 'Many Mini' encompasses two main components of the project. The 'Many' describes the open call for proposals and the resulting multiplicity of responses and participants. Over 7 days 24 participants from 7 countries completed 18 residencies. The 'Mini' component of the residency describes the limited amount of time available and the scale of the room. Some participants defined their residencies by a scheduled block of time or divided their time up over many days. Others responded to The Berlin Office space as a site to be temporarily altered, converted to a stage or meeting point. 

The Participants were Mette Bartholin, Wolfgang Fütterer, Daniela Bustamante, Stephanie Custance, Paul Druecke, Christina Empedocles, Kate Phillimore, Morten Espersen, Louise Schrader, Kate Fulton, Rebecca Goldfarb, Eugene Jho, Jennifer Smith, Kathy Leisen, Alex Wright, Amy Leonard, Cara MacLeod, Kyla Ring, Malin Neuman, Caris Reid, Sabrina Small, Kate Theodore, Rose Umerlik, and Liz Walsh.
More info. about the Many Mini Residency:
www.manymini.org

 

Day / Dym Collision #1
by Melissa Day (CA) and Miriam Dym (US)
June 2008

Using collision rather than collaboration as their modus operandi, Day and Dym have set out to jointly create a video–installation at The Berlin Office. The video-installation incorporates their divergent work processes and ideas about the human world and which is based on their shared conviction of the necessity of engaging with diverse viewpoints, experiences and beliefs.

Dym invents stringent rules in order to make complex, excessively constructed, embellished objects; she buys no art supplies and throws nothing away. Everything Dym makes has a purpose or a function, although typically she undermines or completely undoes any real functionality through choice of materials and construction methods. The things Dym makes are all components of an on-going, ever-evolving installation. Dym believes that thoughts are things.

Day's work is minimal, quiet, and searching. She creates moving video and sound pieces, using members of her family and close friends, which are filled with humming, whistling and chanting. In her latest piece for Collision #1, Day draws on amateur singers, both triumphant and untriumphant, to collectively grapple with the words and lyrics of the Hallelujah! Chorus. Days' work is preoccupied with the idea that two different states can exist simultaneously: something is there and not there, known and not known. For Day, faith and doubt exist at the same time and this radical ambivalence brings with it deepening mystery and unlikely hope. More info. about Melissa Day's work on: www.mmd.ca 

 

The Suitcase Gallery 
by Adele Jackson (UK)
May 2008

The Suitcase Gallery is a portable gallery, which is a hard plastic case on wheels that has been painted white. Whilst Adele Jackson was at The Berlin Office, she held an on-the-street exhibition for a couple of hours called "Unsere Strassen" on the corner of Pflugerstasse and Pannierstrasse - outside the Heil Quelle shop. She documented some aspects of the streets around Pflugerstrasse, and these are some of the artworks from the exhibition: "The Shopkeeper Portraits (Geschaftinhaber Portraten)", which is polaroid photos of people that run shops, services, galleries, cafes and bars in the neighbourhood of The Berlin Office, "Litter birds (Abfall Vogel)", which is made from paper found on the streets, and a framed artwork of small found objects embedded in cast resin, which is called "Ich habe dies auf der Strasse gefunden”.

 

Website
by Jen Delos Reyes (US)
June 2007

At that time, we didn't have a website for The Berlin Office and therefore, Jen Delos Reyes made one for us: www.jendelosreyes.com/theberlinoffice