93 Postcards to Dessau
catalystas collective
Artists are looking for contact!
From May onwards, the catalystas collective will take part in the Bauhaus Residency Programme for three months. The women artists' collective is looking for new narratives for Dessau-Roßlau.
Anyone who is interested in exchanging with the catalystas collective by postcard can send their name and postal address to the following email address by 24 May 2020: catalystas.collective@gmail.com. The first sixty mailings can look forward to receiving mail.
The answers they ask the recipients for will then form the basis for their further work on site. Those who wish can follow the artists as they write the postcards on Instagram: Every day they film themselves there while writing, in order to connect the local with the global and to start a personal exchange despite the contact ban.
catalystas collective on the project:
"To work with postcards is first of all a reaction to the current crisis situation: This way we can get in contact with the people in Dessau-Roßlau without meeting them in person. At the same time, the postcard is also a medium with very specific conditions: It is already based on a certain fictionality. We will therefore ask the questions on our postcards in a way that stimulates the imagination of the recipients and hope for many answers. The whole project is an experiment, and with the results we want to continue working on site and create a kind of city guide that is fed by the ideas, wishes and visions of the Dessau-Roßlauers.”
Like so many things, the Bauhaus Residency Programme was forced to rethink by the corona virus and its consequences. Due to the regulations, it will not be possible for the catalystas collective to take up their residence in the Masters' Houses in Dessau as originally planned on 1 May. Therefore they will contact residents of Dessau-Roßlau from afar by postcard. From 1 May 2020, the three artists will each send a postcard for 31 days and ask the recipients about places in the city, so that they can get to know the city and its inhabitants from a distance.
catalystas collective are three young women who have been working together as a collective since September 2019: Carla Kienz, Maroua Krout and Johanna Richter. They work at the interface of architecture, urban research and performative artistic strategies. For their actions they always relate to the respective city and its inhabitants in a very concrete way, approaching places and people in order to enable new forms of encounter and knowledge transfer. catalystas collective is one of two collectives that were selected for a stay in the Masters' House Ensemble as part of the open call of the Bauhaus Residency 2020 Gropius House || Fictional.
A cooperation with the Gallery for Contemporary Art, Leipzig