The wall of chipboard that divides the Galerie Plattform, right near the Berlin Volksbühne, in two unequal parts and darkens the room towards the display windows already has a journey behind it.1 It was originally situated in the cellar of the Stuttgart employment exchange (Arbeitsamt), which has recently started calling itself the »Agency for Work« (Agentur für Arbeit). From May 10 to 14, along with other discarded furniture in the corridor on the second floor there, it formed the base camp for an action week by the artists’ duo »bankleer« (Karin Kasböck and Christoph Leitner), a summary of which can now be seen on video on the right-hand wall of the gallery: it begins with a relaxation training session that fuses the feelings of the participants with the fears, restrictions and hopes that are embodied by the Agency.2 While several monitors show videos about illegal immigrants in Berlin, the occupation of a factory in Argentina, a demonstration against cuts in social services and the five-hour opus »La commune« by Peter Watkins, activists from several initiatives representing the unemployed discuss their concepts of work.3 Things start getting spectacular when participants made up as zombies swarm out and force their way into consultations and conference rooms at the Agency.

The paradoxical figure of the living dead is a striking image to represent the situation of the unemployed in the place where their fate is decided: the action was addressed, not to an art public, but to the unemployed themselves. Revealingly, they reacted with empathy to the pale figures that tottered about through the light-brown tiled rooms of the employment agency. In the Berlin gallery, too, the viewers are unable to take up the standpoint of uninvolved observers: a large ball disguised as a head that hangs from the ceiling follows the viewers with its gaze and projects their picture on the front wall of the room, where a door leads to the second, smaller part of the exhibition.

There, as the body belonging to the head, lies another ball, which has now accompanied bankleer through a number of actions. It was first used in 2003 in the Hamburg Spielhaus in »Go for Gemetzel«. There were no onlookers at this group game. A moderator translated the actions of the game into the language of economy.4 In the performance »Teufelsrad«, participants were able to experience for themselves the centrifugal powers of the market in a similar way: this performance at the Oktoberfest in Munich consisted of a disc, sloping up towards the middle, that rotated faster and faster to a commentary made up of quotes from the head of the German Employment Agency. It served as a symbol of the situation of »functionally superfluous subjects«, who were thrown off one by one.5

This disc then provided the model for another, slowly rotating disc that served bankleer as a stage for a number of interviews.6 These interviews can be called up on a screen in the Galerie Plattform: a growing archive on the situation of people who have no permanent job, but who, with a great deal of commitment, engage creatively with their circumstances and try to develop their own life projects – even if this is rarely of their own free will and mostly with uncertain future prospects. This material, which now includes many hours of recordings, forms the core of the project »A-Class«. Here, you can see what is never mentioned in official analyses: »We believe that it is science-fiction to try to gain control over the phenomenon of unemployment by faster finding of jobs, promotion of self-employment or extending subcontracted work. An machine of illusion that is intended to avoid one thing in any case: an income that is independent of work as a basic income. Work is clearing off into special economic zones outside the reach of state intervention.«

There are no uninvolved observers in the work of bankleer. The inclusion of others, however, also means linking up to existing initiatives, whether local self-help groups for the unemployed or internationally active artistic networks. For example, »A-Class« emerged from a joint project with the Berlin idea workshop Workstation, run by Frauke Hehl, which in its turn owes its creation to an intervention of the Viennese artists’ group Wochenklausur.7 Workstation encourages individual and joint forms of activity outside paid employment and is connected with around 40 other artistic and cultural projects.8
Projects aimed at extending the concept of work have been at the focus of bankleer’s work for several years. It moves from place to place and takes along material from earlier events: videos document past actions, various items transfer remnants of meanings into new contexts. Each new venue thus illustrates a particular stage of development that is connected with other places and activities by many threads. In Galerie Plattform, bamboo canes hang from the ceiling. They are a reminder of bankleer’s presence at the World Social Forum in Bombay in 2004. They have long since lost contact with the piles of shredded documents on the floor of the gallery that bear their imprint. One of the canes has been turned into a grotesque maypole with doll’s forearms holding shields with coats of arms: an ironic symbol of the contradictory relationship between the local and the global that inevitably affects the problem of work. A net structure covers one of the coats of arms and the cover of a book published for the exhibition, and finally crystallises in polygonal objects made of corrugated cardboard that lie about on the floor.

In Bombay, bankleer commented on video recordings of demonstrations with sentences from Niklas Luhmann and Slavoj Zizek: »The protesting reflection achieves something that is achieved nowhere else. It takes on topics that none of the function systems, neither politics nor economy, neither religion nor the education system, neither science nor law would recognise as their own. It is at odds with everything that arises in the way of self-description within the function systems.« However, bankleer is not interested in illustrating intellectual theories, but in eloquent images. In a video from the Stuttgart Wilhelm Zoo, cardboard signs written by hand are in a chimpanzee cage. »Be active in a deregulated way« says one of the signs. The chimpanzees demonstrate what this means: after barely ten minutes, all the signs have been taken apart.9

1 bankleer: »where work ends and mission begins«, Galerie Plattform, Berlin, Februar 24 to March 24 2005. A book published by merz & solitude, Stuttgart, has appeared under the same title. See http://www.bankleer.org/.
2 Led by Aurea Ferreres.
3 The videos come from the FrauenLesbenFilmCollectif, from AK Kraak and Kanal B; unemployed groups that participated included: WUT; SALZ, see http://www.arbeitslosenzentrum-salz.de/; lagalo (Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Arbeitsloseninitiativen), http://www.lagalo.de/.
4 In the game installation, bankleer refer to the New Games of the seventies: at the time, strategies like teamwork and the dismantling of rigid hierarchies, which originally arose in the Leftist sphere, were entering the management of big companies.
5 In both cases, the moderator was Frank Weigand.
6 The disc, together with a video of the »Teufelsrad« performance, had been part of the installation »Rotiere! Arbeitssimulation« in Kunstbank Berlin (2003).
7 Since 1993, WochenKlausur has been trying to counter negative developments and implement long-lasting improvements by means of well-directed temporary interventions.; http://wochenklausur.t0.or.at/.
8 http://www.workstation-berlin.org/
9 In a continuation of this action in the venerable Hotel Büyük Londra in Istanbul, bankleer put on the chimpanzee mask themselves. bankleer were in Istanbul at the invitation of Erden Kosova to take part in the second part of the exhibition »Along the Gates of the Urban« (the first part took place in spring 2004 in the K&S Gallery in Berlin). At the same time, bankleer continued the »A-Class« series of interviews in Bombay and Istanbul.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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