Performance – conceptual youth hostel

Wendel’s Institution: the live podcast

“Wendel’s Institution: the live podcast” is the storytelling performance recounting the 10-year process of collaborative writing between Michael Eddy and his uncle Alex Kreger, which was called “Wendel’s Institution.”

The live podcast streamed on April 30th, 2020.

Watch or listen to the archived stream here:
Wendel’s Institution: the live podcast

The performance was realized within the frame of Michael Eddy’s exhibition “Je suis,” at Fonderie Darling.
More information about the performance is available here: https://fonderiedarling.org/en/Wendels-Institution-The-Podcast.html

published May 9th, 2020

“Wir meinen: die Selbstrasierer sind die Helden alle Zeiten und Länder”

Photographs and documentation of actions and installation, video

Developed as a commission for the McKinsey & Co. offices in Frankfurt (2006), published in Informal Architectures: space and contemporary culture (Black Dog Publishers, 2008)

Dieter Rams, designer whose domestic furnishings and appliances made the Braun company famous, lives on a mountain on the edge of Frankfurt, in a house he designed which functions like a living museum to his own products. Taking his living/working environment as a kind of role model for collective production, we developed models for co-habitation in the studio as well as in-situ, staking out his house from the woods across the street. Eventually we made it inside to interview him.

Instructions for Open Participation

Performance, text and participation (2012)
As part of the event Under the Fig Tree , Above the Date Tree at HomeShop, July 7th 2012, and installed until August 19th. Another version appeared as part of the project Friends of Freiheit in North Adams, MA, June 2012.

Instructions for Open Participation begins with, as the title suggests, a set of instructions for open participation I had written in advance. Initiating the event, the vinyl-cut lettering is separated out into syllables and/or characters and mixed up.

Working with the resulting fragments, people are invited to participate in the formulation of what they think should constitute instructions for open participation.

The resulting instructions are adhered to the shopfront window.

Some weeks later (on August 4th, 2012), interested passersby inquire about the text on the window. They are invited to reconfigure or add to the instructions for open participation.

I am delighted to participate with them, but I refuse to tell them what my original instructions are. We work on it for several hours on it until we are satisfied that our instructions for open participation are more clear and coherent than the previous version.

Instruction Piece

Performance and vinyl text.
“About Now” Perla Mode, Zürich CH, 2009.

Conceived for an exhibition around the theme of instant photography, my contribution was announced as an instruction piece in which I would not be present for the installation of the text, which would be carried out at the opening by the installers. The installers would try to guess my instruction from a disorder of syllables in a package sent to the gallery weeks earlier. However, as they began to open the package holding the text, I ran into the gallery from outside, interrupting the process, and gave a short spontaneous speech about why I changed my mind, and why it was important to come up with a more meaningful statement. After deciding on a statement to be placed on the window (“handle with care”) the package was then opened, revealing that my speech had been a script.

Top: interrupting the installers; ↑L: the installers opening the package; ↑R: re-reading the script after its revelation; ↓L: installing the decided text on the window; ↓R: the text as it remained on the window.