Warming sunbeams penetrate the noise of the still damp streets of Khulna as our excursion group makes its way through the colorful masses. As artists and environmental engineers, we joined forces in an interdisciplinary project in search of aesthetic forms of expression that are capable of adapting views, values and perspectives to a changing world. The inherent urge of all of us to combine artistic formulations with a scientific catalogue of knowledge carried us out into the world and demanded a mutual understanding of working strategies and thought processes. Collective approaches to solutions, prompting questions and highlighting the field of tension of matter, materials, garbage as well as their effects on man and nature became the driving force and the challenge.
»Confrontations and Synergies« does not show the emergence of such a process idea, but winds its way through the streets and bumpy paths of the coming together of so differently educated and thinking people. Thought thought processes, procedures and ideas for interdisciplinary collaboration in the sense of sustainability are discussed and sometimes meticulously, sometimes timidly vibrantly laid down in drawings placed between graphics and technical drawings; the tracing of the invisible, the abstract, so fruitful and yet frustrating, the making visible of the great volition and perhaps also – of failure.
Our journey bore witness to opposites. Warming evening sun, alternating with pulsating fluorescent light. Never completed buildings faced large posters for fast Internet. An ambivalent sense of space, a symbol for catalytic processes, spread and passed on to our senses.
The monsoon season came too early this year.
Biographies
Tonia Schmitz, born 1986 in Luxembourg, lives and works in Erfurt and Weimar
Linda Schumann, born 1988 in Zwickau (Germany), lives and works in Weimar