back to the overview I deutschsprachige Version des Textes Does a subway station have a rhythm of its own? Do the movements of the people using Berlin’s public transportation system follow a choreography? And what relationships actually emerge between the architectures of these stations, their semiotic systems and the people who frequent these places? British artist Poppy French developed a project during her Fresh A.I.R. residency that might be able to answer these questions. Poppy French – „The anatomy of space“ (2020/21) | Video: YES, AND… productions GmbH & Co. KG French’s artistic practice is not one that emerges exclusively within the seclusion of a studio. The artist makes her way through the city like an ethnologist, occupying herself with concrete spaces and the people that bring them to life. She utilizes techniques like drawing, photography, etc. to investigate urban places and to make their defining characteristics visible. In this context, she is not just interested in the geometric forms of the buildings, nor does she focus solely on profiling the passengers’ movements. Instead, French searches for perceptible patterns and the resulting relational connections between buildings, the semiotic elements existing there, and their users. She analyzes the given space as a network made up of diverse elements. In Berlin, she selected subway stations as the subject of her research. Subway stations are very obviously functional places. We do not pause to pass time in them, instead, they are temporarily used in order to get from there to somewhere else. They are thus examples of so-called transitory or transit places. The French anthropologist Marc Augé has referred to places like these as “non-places” and stimulated thinking about how they could be analyzed.* French has studied his ideas and pushes them further with her art. She has now drawn the floor plans of every subway station in Berlin, their prescribed paths, and their stairways as well as the movements of passengers. In a film, French has brought her drawings together with photographs of tiled station walls, signs providing information or place names, and snapshots of legs hurriedly striding away. In this way, she has used her artistic notes to create a wild film collage, whose elements move, overlap, and alternate. The sound we hear is a medley made up of familiar noises from Berlin’s subways and tones that sound like heartbeats. When the schematic drawings of the stations are filled in with photos of tiled walls in the video—or when the walking routes drawn in with arrows inscribe themselves into the photos of walking legs—ordering systems and prescribed structures come into view. Then the neatly grouted tiles of the station walls take on a strange similarity to the angular silhouettes of the buildings. And the directional symbols of the signs resemble those of the drawn-in walking routes. Everything is oriented towards moving people and keeping them in movement—the arrows, the smooth walls, the station buildings that are open on multiple sides. Even illegally posted stickers seem to imitate the official symbols and thus to remain in rhythm. This rhythm is fast, orderly, mostly linear, not always straight, and only sometimes—more or less rarely—crossed by intersections. French calls her project Anatomy of Space and makes reference to the widespread metaphorical treatment of the urban space with bodily metaphors. Subway stations are accordingly to be understood as organisms. French has not just taken their pulse, traced their circulation systems, and reconstructed their anatomical structure. Her project also makes us think about the passengers: They seem restless, manipulated, always provided with a destination and individuated, but somehow also all the same. The subway station certainly does not reveal itself to be an object of longing in this way, but this place remains oddly familiar all the same. Perhaps it is precisely this paradox that, according to French’s anatomical analysis, defines the essence of the subway station as a non-place. * Marc Augé, Non-Places (London and New York, 2009) [orig.: Non-Lieux (Paris, 1991)]. Text: Kea Wienand Studio view of 150 drawings of Berlin underground U-Bahn station layouts and of the film screening of “The anatomy of space” (left) (all 2021) | Photo: Victoria Tomaschko Studio view of “High exposure” (right) and a slide show of scanned tiles from selected Berlin U-Bahn stations (left) (both 2021) | Photo: Victoria Tomaschko “High exposure“ – 35 mm photographs of people in transit (2021) | Photo: Victoria Tomaschko Studio view of 150 drawings of Berlin underground U-Bahn station layouts (2021) | Photo: Victoria Tomaschko Development work for „The anatomy of space“ (2021) | Photo: Poppy French Studio view of 150 drawings of Berlin underground U-Bahn station layouts (2021) | Photo: Victoria Tomaschko Final film for the project „The anatomy of space“ (2020/21) | Video: Poppy French About Poppy French Poppy French is a moving image-maker who grew up in London, UK. She studied BA Illustration where she discovered using film as a research tool to further her understanding of action, rhythm and space. Her work takes an investigative approach using diagrammatic drawings, photography and scans to visualize observations and to capture the essence of a place. For more information: Instagram I Vimeo I Flickr Fresh A.I.R. #4 Online-Showcase The Online-Showcase offers an opportunity to get an overview of the highly diverse projects of the fourth class of Fresh A.I.R. artists with their different kinds of media and aesthetics. On view are video and photographic materials about the individual projects, each of which is accompanied by an explanatory text that aims to offer insights into the work’s aesthetic experience. learn more about the Online-Showcase
