CAPRI
an installation by Ina Bierstedt and Bettina Carl and Alena Meier

Aug. 03 - Aug. 18, 2001
open thur/fr/sat 4-8 pm

The atmosphere of present day Berlin is to a high degree the result of quite disparate velocities. Many houses still sport the war's bullet holes on their outsides - and flats without private bathrooms within. Some blocks away, at Potsdamer Platz a huge shopping mall boasts to be the city's new center; yet actually this is a free entry private enclosure which looks and feels like a blown up Lego village, a place where one is surprised to see real water sloshing in the fountain pools (how do they do that?) and people around licking edible icecreams.
The whole of Berlin is a construction site, some streets change completely within weeks, while life is rather slowing down in many other aspects. Brandnew office buildings stay empty for years, a high percentage of the population do not have regular work so they are not in a hurry at all. This city is overcharged as a historical symbol but its general condition is one of voids and relicts, of an all over provisional place.
(The island of) Capri has been the target of northern European bourgeouis nostalgia for two hundred years now. Moreover, the island's name may stand as a synonym of West German postwar escapism, an escapism that was part of the national longing to be reborn as decent, friendly and successful people who were only remotely related to those guys responsible for massmurder and devastation a few years before. For obvious reasons this was easier to pursue in Italy or Spain than, say, in France or in Greece.
On a more trivial level, the word CAPRI evokes kitch and stereotypes cramped in a small place, pleasant dreams and massive projections. It alludes to a mentality that withdraws from a depressing reality by constructing a very nice little place of one's own. After the GDR had been absorbed by West Germany, many people tried to turn from unemployed to entrepreneurs and started their little businesses; only a few succeeded.
One has to admit that to a certain degree the wish to live and survive as an artist derives from a similar attitude, an attitude that feeds of illusions.