The KIOSK tours through the foyers that one has to pass through as a customer, patient or applicant – ideally it should be located in the waiting room of the employment office, at the train station or in shopping malls, in short: in the controlled safety zones of our public life. Or even in places in intermediate use.

The KIOSK houses an audiovisual archive of conversations: specialists meet practitioners in dialogue, professional knowledge and theory meet the practice of everyday life, unpublished material and remnants of memory. The dialogue partners lay narrative layers over the factual situation and describe routes through their knowledge. The dialogues are shown publicly and live: two screens on which the faces of the dialogue partners are transmitted from a hidden room, a physiognomic theater in gaze and countergaze. Each dialogue is a new entry in the archive on the theme of “narratives of places, cities and territories”.

We refer to the KIOSK at the moment of its revolutionary self-contemplation, when it was conceived with design sobriety by the Russian Constructivists in the 1920s, at a moment when art was emphatically devoted to life. Not a sales booth for information, but a transportable architecture for propagandist speakers.

The archive entries can be found under:
> Space Control (1 / 5 / 6)
> Shadow, Memory, Future (A Life in Four Hours)

Interview Stephen Craig

KIOSK is the mobile research unit of the ErsatzStadt project, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Curation: Hannah Hurtzig and Anselm Franke

KIOSK-concept and design: Stephen Craig

Production management: Katharina von Wilcke

Audiovisual conception: Produktion Eins/ cine plus

Construction: a-mano joinery Karlsruhe

Technical coordination: Jochen Massar