Wie ich meine Fluchtwege organisiere

Stephen Willats

Wie ich meine Fluchtwege organisiere, 1979-1980

Artwork text

Stephen Willats is one of the UK’s most important representatives of conceptual art. In contrast to the prevailing norms of an object-oriented art world, in the 1960s he was already developing participatory projects and collaborative works with different social groups who became coauthors of the works produced—a practice that, from the 1990s, found its way into art.1 A key interest for the artist was the life situation of residents in urban areas and modernist high-rise apartment complexes. With interviews and questionnaires using social science methods, he asked the residents of whole neighborhoods about their living environment. He presented the results of these surveys on bulletin boards in a stylistically unique combination of images, text, and graphic reference elements. Here the focus was not on the abstract results of scientific research, but on engaging with the living situation of individual people who, in the process, also had the opportunity to learn more about themselves. The work Wie ich meine Fluchtwege organisiere (Organizing My Means of Escape) was produced in West Berlin in the late 1970s. It addresses the strategies used by an older single woman to escape the metropolitan push for modernization and alienation in a fast-changing, often anonymous urban environment. In a “gloomy, cramped, unchanged room on the fourth floor of a rear tenement,”2 she is completely surrounded by apartment complexes. Her resistance to this situation consists of a daily retreat to an allotment in a garden colony. The garden becomes her “own island,” a “bastion that preserves the past and protects it from the encroachment of the alien value structure of the ‘new Berlin.’”3 (Jürgen Tabor) 1 Nicolaus Bourriaud coined the term “Relational Aesthetics” for this. The term refers to artistic practices whose shared characteristic is that they arise from social relationships and their contexts. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). 2 Stephen Willats, “Wie ich meine Fluchtwege organisiere, 1979–1980,” in Die Gabe. Eine Sammlung, Fünfte Lieferung, ed. Olaf Nicolai (Leipzig: Edition 931, 1993), unpaginated. 3 Ibid.