Komplex BA 1

Christoph Liepach’s diploma project ›Komplex BA 1‹ takes up the idea of architecture as a medium for the expression of memory. This notion, which goes back to antiquity, presupposes a spatial memory: the connection between space and memory confronts physical spaces and objects with human recollections. The works in the exhibition attempt to equate memory with a construction – or rather a re-construction. A complete picture based on facts alone is out of the question, since memory is made up of several factors: stored knowledge (in physical form, for instance), emotionally charged personal knowledge, the sharpness of detail in the memory fragments of others, and the state of the person remembering at the moment of recollection.

›Komplex BA 1‹ explores these connections. Here, too, re-construction is a decisive attempt to link them to places and to the history inscribed in them – in this case a built history that points to the GDR and the years after reunification, to the experiences of others and one’s own. A quotation from the documentary ›Platte mit Aussicht‹ by Uta Hergert and Marcel Raabe captures this uniformity:

“Everything the same, everything square. The houses, the panels, the windows, the light switches, the floor mosaics in the bathroom. Ventilation shafts and heating pipes form acoustic networks that connect us. We live in a square, together. Celebrating in the drying room, queuing at the supermarket, lining up for roll call in the schoolyard. But does the same wallpaper make the same people?” (Hergert / Raabe 2005/2006: min. 13:50–14:21)

The quotation describes a built environment that is entirely constructed and standardised. The film is about the Dresden-Gorbitz housing estate. The diploma exhibition, too, takes up surfaces, volumes and image fragments from this new-build environment erected in GDR times. The exhibition title ›Komplex BA 1‹ (BA = Bauabschnitt, construction phase) contains references – as does the exhibition itself – that take up orientation by way of real or fictitious places. The individual works are titled with street names and point to the regional and urban planning of the GDR. The spatial planning of large housing estates at the time also included an ordered nature, so that plantings shaped entire streets, both in their appearance and in their names.