• Sabine Maria Schmidt (Museum Folkwang)
• Anna Zaitseva (WINZAVOD)

In the framework of the Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art we have the honor to present the first large-scale exhibition of Atelier Van Lieshout in Russia with the two recent installations SlaveCity (2005—2009) and Cradle to Cradle (2009).

Atelier Van Lieshout was founded at a time when “relational aesthetics” was the predominant trend in art. From the nineties on, Van Lieshout – first by himself and then as the founder of his own atelier – developed projects that pertain to design, architecture, and art and that model experimental situations of social interaction. So, in 2001 AVL became the founders of AVL-Ville, a free state that existed for a year on the territory of the Port of Rotterdam outside of the jurisdiction of Dutch law and subject exclusively to its own constitution.

The SlaveCity project, shown for the first time at Museum Folkwang in 2008, presents a thoroughly planned modern city with extensive infrastructure, service buildings, universities, health and shopping centers, villages, brothels, and museums. It is self-efficient— it produces all the energy it consumes, relying on biogas, solar, and wind energy rather than on imported fuel and electricity. However, SlaveCity’s work force is comprised of slaves that are exploited to accomplish more or less sophisticated chores and whose very bodies are recycled after death.

SlaveCity is a perversion of the modern achievement-oriented society; discarding today’s notions of good and evil, it aims at complete autonomy. It is a dystopia, an urban project designed to maximize rationality, efficiency, and profit. One may say that SlaveCity is a manifesto of the end of anthropocentrism and that its central issue is ethical. Global climatic change, the exhaustibility of natural resources, and other issues to which SlaveCity refers serve as a milieu and an instrument for constructing space in which the ethical question about the human dimension of contemporary rational civilization can be posed in all its depth.

Cradle to Cradle is a new installation by AVL. Its title stems from the world of ecological design. In their recent book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, published in 2002, German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough challenge the notion that human industry necessarily harms the world. Instead, they work on a production system emulating nature’s model to our commercial and environmental advantage, a system in which waste is equivalent to nourishment. They raise “questions of design,” insist on the “respect of diversity,” and claim to “put eco-effectiveness into practice.” The Netherlands, where these ideas circulate a lot more than in other countries, is the leader in the development of products and objects that relate to intelligent, aesthetic, and eco-effective design and thus to a new canon of values.

For Atelier Van Lieshout, the idea of eco-efficiency has become the point of departure for a provocative future trend.
Museum Folkwang and WINZAVOD Centre for Contemporary Art present the first exhibition of Atelier Van Lieshout in Russia thanks to the generous support of RWE AG (Essen, Germany), project’s general sponsor. We greatly value RWE AG’s continuous contribution to the development of cultural dialogue between Western and Eastern Europe.

The project is supported by: