In the museum area at the Schaustelle-Pinakothek der Moderne in the city of Munich
The PUBLIC COLLECTION is based on a find of 5000 slides with icons of European art history from antiquity to the present. It was discovered at a garbage dump in Munich and had been meticulously sorted and labeled. The slide collection is installed in the transparent mobile cube of the SYNTOPIAN VAGABOND, and temporarily located in urban space. The cube is freely accessible to all in public space and forms a contrast to established museum spaces. A public image collection is created in various urban contexts through a process of collective image sorting with passers-by and protagonists, in which local circumstances and identity constructs are found: How is the pre-sorted archive deconstructed and re-sorted? Under which procedural conventions is the PUBLIC COLLECTION created? Due to its design and the particular type of curation, the project establishes an interface between institutional and public space, producers and viewers as well as between art and its mediation.
Slides have largely been superseded by newer media in their capacity as a form of documentation and as a mediation media. Through “going back to” slides, image inventories from different collections and cultural contexts are brought together in one place, in the glass cube. The slide abandons its position “behind the walls” of the archives and becomes visible in urban space.
The PUBLIC COLLECTION was designed as a collective project by Michaela Rotsch (visual art), Juliane Zellner (urban studies) and Rob Lugo (media).