We create the world in which we live, in that we observe it. But also that which we do not see is part of our city. Depending on the perspective of the inhabitants or visitors, different views of the city emerge and how it is laid out. These are controlled by structures: districts, roads, public transport networks and cycle routes help us to find our way around. Our localisation in the urban space – and thus a part of our identification – follows the parameters of cartography. Yet in contrast to maps, cities are not flat spaces that can be broken down into a centre and periphery. The centre is in the middle, but the edge is everywhere.
The project “Hors Champ” (French for “beyond the field”) by Kathrina Edinger is concerned with places that are not recorded in our mental maps, but which are rather at the edge of our perception. Such places are residential rooms, workplaces, meeting places, leisure-time venues and points of expression. An underground creek, the stack-room in the State Library, places to sleep and art installations, places underneath bridges and roads. For some people, these locations are the centre of their everyday lives. Yet they remain unknown for many others, they do no want or are not allowed to enter them. Just like the edge beyond our field of vision, these places are subconsciously present, but normally remain beyond our conscious perception.
The documentary film installation in a container at Max-Joseph-Platz transports these places from the periphery to the centre of the city. The different realities at a location are brought together at one level by the simultaneity of reality at the showplace and the virtuality of the projection. The observers are part of the evaluation. Where are they standing? Which connotations, integration or disintegration do they feel?
Kathrina Edinger, born in 1984 in Munich, lives and works in Munich.
