An afternoon with Mark Curran

Artist and educator Mark Curran spent an afternoon sharing his work with us on Monday. Focused around issues of labor, his photographs, interviews, journals and the resulting installations speak directly to many of the issues we’re wrestling with in our course. He took us through the process of utilizing ethnographic techniques to document and participate in various environments, as well as how he presents his work in a multi-media format. Mark’s work is gripping in its own right, but since I’m asking the class to document their own experience of Berlin using media-based methods informed by ethnography, his talk was very applicable to their work for the course. Several of them expressed how moved, inspired and encouraged they were by his presentation.

Mark’s most recent project centers around the strip mining industry in Cottbus in former East Germany. You can read more about the project here. And here’s a clip showing the installation of the project in a recent exhibition in Portugal:

an installation of EXTRACTS FROM EDEN/AUSSCHNITTE AUS EDEN a project by Mark Curran from Mark Curran on Vimeo.

the German conversation group gets going

Chance met with several of the students this past Friday for the first informal German conversation group. The point of the group is to provide a resource for the students on the program who either haven’t had German before, or who want to practice the basics. The hit this week: Chance’s impression of the Hausmeister’s Berliner Schnauze – his Berlin dialect!

Welcome to Germany! Now fill out ten forms.

After a whirlwind beginning of the week, the students are all nicely settled into their apartments in Kreuzberg, where they tell me they have been getting to know each other through potlucks and group explorations of the neighborhood. They’ve also been great about helping each other adjust to new technological challenges (getting cell phones and internet).

As of yesterday, class has officially begun! Our first activity: introducing everyone (as slowly and gracefully as possible) to the idiosyncrasies of the German legal and school system. The result? Filling out a LOT of forms …

Hopefully by Tuesday we’ll have all the registration stuff taken care of, and we’ll be free to concentrate on the fun stuff: Berlin history and media theory!