Welcome to the blog of Gitte Bohr - Club für Kunst und politisches Denken.
This blog will document our research for the project "Oberfläche und Oberflächlichkeit / Surface and Superficiality". The project will continue through 2012 with events, talks, discussions, exhibitions, film screenings in our rooms in WestGermany in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
The project aims to investigate the relationship between surfaces and superficiality in our contemporary society. It focuses on the surfaces that we interact with in every day life: The design of public space, of user interfaces, the human body, of basic commodities or artworks, of culture and nature. It asks what happens when our relation to the surface turns into superficiality, that is when we stay at the surface instead of going beyond it.
Superficiality seems to increasingly be the keyword for many developments in our late capitalist society. Lack of sustainability, planned obsolescence of industrial products, disappearance of artisanal skills and accelerated consumption are conditions, which today lead to not only ecological problems. The work ethics and modes of production of late capitalism have a wide-ranging influence on our social life. Following an idea of Richard Sennett, we want to investigate the gradual alienation, which affects both the relations between people and between people and things.