Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis: “Goethe in the Skyways”

Disruptions, Interruptions, Misruptions, Soundruptions

A year-long program of artistic actions, interventions, and manifestations in public, semi-public, and private space in the frame of the “Year of German-American Friendship” initiative in 2018/19 in the US.

“…from now on, it is allowed to dance at demonstrations.” —Heiner Müller, November 4, 1989

For 12 months, the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis: “Goethe in the Skyways” will occupy a space in the city’s futuristic skyway system. Minneapolis’ skyways, an 18-kilometer-long indoor artificial gangway and pedestrian bridge network constructed in the 1960s to connect downtown office buildings and avoid the bitter cold of winter, is still the longest of its kind in the world today.

Perceived and used as public space but completely in private hands, the skyways embody so-called public life in the US, both within politics and economics, as well as within sports and culture.

In the midst of this hybrid skyway situation, Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis: “Goethe in the Skyways” will serve as a platform for a critical consideration of the current culturally and politically contentious situation in the United States, which will be examined and discussed in light of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a renewed rise of the New Right within Europe and the United States, as well as recent global migration movements.

Another focus of the program will be on language and communication, in a time when truth has become hyper-subjective and, in fact, almost entirely irrelevant. As Rudy Guiliani, the former mayor of New York and now President Trump’s lawyer, simply puts it: “Truth isn’t truth”—anymore, one could add.

The invited artists will respond in different ways to this reality-ignoring, though very imaginative, socio-political drama that has dominated US politics and therefore public life since the last elections using spoken-words formats, such as reality TV shows, sound works, concerts, readings, workshops, and posters.

Sandra Teitge, director of the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis: “Goethe in the Skyways,” will invite artists to develop and present works specifically conceived for the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis: “Goethe in the Skyways” space that challenge and question, (inter-)rupt and disturb the site and context-specific conditions of the skyway system, the city of Minneapolis, and the state of Minnesota, always in relation to national and international issues and debates.

“I would like to see a blue shrub, or a pink tree, or a green sky … something out of order, a coconut tree, the Northern lights, sun in the middle of the night.” –Brigitte Reimann, Franziska Linkerhand

With works, interventions, and actions by:
Creamcake, FORT, Thomas Heise, Karl Holmqvist, Anton Kats, Kebap Benzin & FRZNTE, Kinga Kielczynska, Christine Sun Kim, Korpys/Löffler, Liz Magic Laser, Hanne Lippard, Jonas Lund, OOIEE, Pétunia (Valérie Chartrain, Dorothée Dupuis, Lili Reynaud-Dewar), Franziska Pierwoss, Albrecht Pischel, Laure Prouvost, Elske Rosenfeld, Philipp Rupp, Nora Turato, Aaron van Dyke & Kelsey Olson, Annette Wehrmann, Wermke/Leinkauf, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, and Minneapolis-based artists & printmakers