New Public Sculpture Project in Frankfurt on Main:
Tomás Saraceno first artist for ROSSMARKT3
6 December 2010 – 30 April 2011
The new international sculpture project ROSSMARKT3 for Frankfurt’s main square in the city center, proudly announces the presentation of the first site specific work by artist Tomás Saraceno. On December 6., the artwork will be inaugurated on the plaza, and will be shown there until spring 2011.
In Frankfurt the citizens support their historical city square with courage and become commissioners of art in the public area. Thus in the spring of 2010, acting as representatives of the civil society, 25 young people from Frankfurt chose the international artist Tomás Saraceno to create an artwork for the Rossmarkt.
The Rossmarkt in Frankfurt is a site that has been torn out of the inner city context through the bombings of the 2nd World War; its century old history no longer readable following many reconstructions. The citizens of Frankfurt could never quite rebuild this lost connection, do not know the past of this site, and see in it a large empty surface to which they cannot form an emotional connection.
This is where the work of Juliane von Herz, art curator from Frankfurt, begins. In the large stony square, the art curator sees a surface waiting to be revitalised – following the last non-citizen-friendly reconstruction, apart from the solitary monuments of Gutenberg and Goethe, as well a few rows of trees, the square is almost completely emptied. In the process, von Herz is not only concerned with the art of the square’s design, but rather in awakening the desire of the people of Frankfurt to take possession of this square again, to revitalise it: revitalisation through an artistic work, which brings the people of this city to this place in a dialogue and closeness to one another, and revitalisation in a citizen’s project in which the civilian society itself conducts urban development, driven by its own sustainable needs.
Closeness and dialogue amongst each other already arose in the run-up: through the analysis of the square by the jury, and in the selection of the artist. The jury consists of young adults who stand before their school leaving examination and who voluntarily decided to participate. Here they practice taking responsibility in a citizen’s project. In the run-up, workshops took place with the curator and various experts from the field of art, architecture and urban development, and collectively an interdisciplinary detailed study of the Rossmarkt was devised.
But also important to the curator is the real aspect of this project.” The network project ROSSMARKT3 is not virtual, on the contrary.
The participant’s meetings take place “live” on the urban square, in the artist’s studio, in the schools with the sponsors, the city representatives, and the project team – this is extremely important for the work”.
Tomás Saraceno, the first ROSSMARKT3 artist, thinks in cross-border categories, as do the initiators of the project. Art, architecture, physics, arachnology, ecology and many other disciplines are led into a symbiosis within his works, in order to achieve an interdisciplinary maximisation of their individual possibilities. Visions become three-dimensional. What Saraceno creates for the Rossmarkt—which is for a German city unusually embedded in a sky-reaching architecture—goes into a direct dialogue with its surroundings. Meteorite or flying object?
His commissioned work opens up the citizen’s dialogue on the square.
It is planned to install a new artwork every year for a period of up to six months. So the square should once again find its way back into the collective memory of the city.
The project ROSSMARKT3 is financed through the sponsorship of large national foundations and those from Frankfurt, who in particular promote education and sponsorship of young people from Frankfurt. Together with the project’s participants, they send out a signal of urban citizen’s strength.
Exhibition:
6th of December 2010 – 30th of April 2011
