ACTIVITIES

A green board painted with a two-week calendar was the starting point. We had only a few activities that were planned in advance: the opening and closing festivities with regional food from Bahia and Thuringia respectively, the Searching for Freedom workshop and a lecture on Urban Bodigraphies. All further actions were intentions rather than concrete plans, and they were modified and adapted as time passed and people joined in. Naturally a Samba rhythm came out of clapping hands, table beating and match box shaking; bottles of apple spritzer, Club Mate5 and all kinds of beer would appear with the dwellers who diverted their daily life and stayed for the afternoon. Activities unfolded themselves in affects, as the people engaged with the place. Primarily we ended up living our full everyday life in and with the public. Dynamic quotidian and spontaneous activities merged, one growing out of the other. We observed how certain objects became catalysts for encounters, gathering people from all generations, a myriad of social backgrounds and lifestyles. A set of completely mixed participants shared various amounts of their time with us. Relations and connections became intense. Frontiers were dissolved, even if only for short moments.

People slept overnight in our hammocks; some brought personal objects to mix or exchange with ours. An anonymous baker brought us bread in the morning, while kiosk inhabitants were still asleep. An elderly couple baked waffles; a kid invited to a magic show. The traffic island became a pirate island. We danced in the street. We offered and lived from donations. People left coins and brought packages of coffee, all kinds of ingredients, sometimes a complete meal. Fresh water was taken from a public fountain and from the neighbors. Not to say that everything was flowers; right in the beginning we had a strong reaction from the neighboring hairdresser salon, complaining directly to the City Hall without trying to speak to us. Later on we suffered water-bomb attacks for two consecutive nights. A few people got wet. On the last day a bag got stolen. But all this did not threaten our experience of how kindness generated kindness. Even if in Germany people avoid body contact, starting with avoiding eye contact while walking on the street, there was space for a warm-hearted conviviality and generosity, and more than anything else, there was space for free exchange.

Our first aim was to slightly “mess up” the over-organized and over-controlled public space of Weimar; to push the boundaries of its security and predictability; to question (cultural) consumption and explore the potential of the Art Kiosk as an urban device to trigger active participation. Importing the precarious, improvised and irreverent creativity inherent in the survival and artistic strategies of the tropics, we wanted to create a space for initiatives and encounters. We ended up in an unpredictable social experiment, which pointed out that another society is possible here: people are open, engaging; there is solidarity. There are perhaps not enough spaces being generated for that. The coordinator of the KIOSK09 mentioned that this place of tolerance and horizontality seemed totally utopian to her, yet real. It was a real part of our lives.