"Transit Spaces: Bauhaus Kolleg Presents Investigations and Scenarios"
2005-08-17 until 2005-10-02
Center for Contemporary Art
Warsaw, , PL Poland

The "Transit Spaces 2004" exhibition focuses on the process of post-socialist urbanization currently taking place in Eastern Europe. ?Transit space' is a metaphor for those complex social and spatial dynamics that coincided with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. The simultaneity of social transformations taking place in countries of the former Eastern Bloc one the one hand and global structural changes on the other is bringing about radical change within urban space.

The corridor between Berlin and Moscow is one example of the new spatial order within Eastern Europe, and the flow of capital and goods, migration streams, EU expansion, communication networks and infrastructure development hold it together. A new type of capitalism has emerged in this place where modernization took the shape of marketization dictated by the global market and where privatization occurred without the corresponding institutional framework. The ?post' in the term post-socialism refers less to a past than to new spatial juxtapositions: post-industrial agglomerations of space and medieval agriculture, gated communities and derelict micro-regions, or Escada stores and statues of Lenin. The subject of the investigations and scenarios of the Bauhaus Kolleg's "Transit Spaces" was the transformation of the urban. Twenty-eight participants from sixteen countries pursued case studies related to seven sites/subjects located along the corridor: German-Polish border space, the public urban sphere in Minsk, kiosk-based trade in Smolensk, the global soccer culture in Moscow. What new patterns influence the shaping of urban space and what driving forces and dynamics can be identified? What actually constitutes this corridor and what kinds of conflicts emerge from the simultaneity of global space and forgotten hinterland?

For more information about the Bauhaus Kolleg visit: http://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/

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