PICNIC is a place-specific collaborative working process, open for all fields of art (visual, music, performance, writing, other) and providing an opportunity for experimental work outside of usual field and working space. PICNIC is an excursion into the landscape / urbanscape to find a territory to work at and to establish rituals of interaction with the place, to share ideas, meal and conversation. The programme of PICNIC is developing around the working process and exchange between individual artists, artists groups, projects and schools.

This year PICNIC in Berlin will be as a series of random promenades into the city, search for territories of interest and test field works at found locations in the city. PICNIC will be moving between city's landmarks, open spaces, industrial and housing estates, U-Bahn, S-Bahn, streets, and defining ZONES of the working process, or ZONE's definition can be working process itself. “ZONE” is the theme of this year's PICNIC and open to any possible approaches and interpretations. An initial research and field work in the city will lead to 24hours non-stop working process on selected sites

(ZONE):

If to construct a Zone, first, a few possible models are coming to mind:
- a tree-like structure with defined centre, roots and brunches weakening away towards the limit of growth
- a black hole in the middle of a seemingly familiar environment
- a demarcating zone: Frontiers of the zone which becoming zone itself – zones of mixed qualities, or zones of nothing /zone with no action, or transit and seeing as only possible action/
- a rhizome-like zone. Grass randomly punctuating existing layers and covering, overwhelming, overlayering
- a dreamland may be. Zone inhabited by ghost with no boundaries as they can wonder anywhere
- zone of archaeological excavation
- Zone as an action. Zone-movement with traces of memory behind and endless possibilities of the next step
- Time - Zone. Seasonal. Temporary. Instant flash
- Exhausted zone - where every possibility is exhausted and nothing is possible anymore beside of being there..........

Zone can be constructed by design, observation, becoming, crash, hack, mutation, mistake, accident, - not necessary by doing, but by non-doing too

Zone defined by process and defines the process: the promenade, perambulation in the city, walk, run, language, logic of frontiers and "the war machine". Moving through industrial and housing estates, city landmarks and voids, parks, U-bahn, S-bahn, streets, traffic – with a place-specific choreography - fast, or dead-still – covering, discovering, or leaping across.

Written rules of the city are simple. Red – Stop. Green – Go. What will happen if to introduce “may be”, “not sure” – uncertainty of the traffic light? To rewrite the city user's manual into poetry.

The art work can be a product of zone's observation, fragment of zone, model of zone, process of the search for zone, or zone itself


Related Books:
Georges Perec SPECIES OF SPACES AND OTHER PIECES