TRANSMISSIONS
Open Call for residencies - 2019
The Watch consists of a group of artists and cultural producers that inhabits the former GDR watchtower on Schlesischer Busch (Berlin-Treptow) during the summer months, in the formats of residencies, semi-public events, screenings and talks. The former watchtower has a long tradition of cultural and artistic production ever since Reunification, yet, in recent years, the building has become a place for reflection rather than mere production: artists, writers, choreographers, and other thinkers have been invited to spend time within and around the tower to consider the building’s texture, its history, its future, as well as its present position within Berlin’s cultural and political landscape. More than a remnant from the Cold War, it is a container for the conflicting narratives of the past 30 years, and even serves as a projection surface for the future. The tower appears as quickly as it disappears, squeezed in on the one hand by an area of fast-paced gentrification, and in limbo on the other – its dormant energy therefore carries desires and failures, breathing in, breathing out.
For every two-year cycle, The Watch works with one thematic topic. For the years 2018 and 2019 The Watch has been thinking of the watchtower as a structure that broadcasts, emits and speaks up instead of seeing it only as built for observation and surveillance. Based on a formal analogy between a radio tower and the watchtower and other usages of military buildings for pirate radios (such as the 1960s Radio City in the Channel), the dormant energy of the watchtower is here activated and can be understood as frequencies. Notions of radio broadcasting, wavelengths, disembodied voices or political bodies are at the core of research-based residencies.
In an open call published in December 2018, we were looking for artists, writers, choreographers, producers and others practitioners who are interested in responding to this cycle’s themes for three residency periods in the summer of 2019. They will join a group of invited artists and cultural producers.
The residents of The Watch in 2019 are: Toria Banks, Jan Peters/Marie-Catherine Theiler, Cristina Ramos (Open Call), Adam Knight (Open Call), Sönke Hallmann, Anna Bromley, Julie Sas, Anne Gathmann/Anna-Lena Wenzel/Kirstin Burckhardt (Open Call).
Find here more information about their intended research in the tower.
Here, you can listen to the broadcast from November 8th in collaboration with Cashmere Radio.