Exterior City is a third city, imagined between Malmö and Vienna, two cities having different histories of socialism, and thus very specific social housing policies. This is where ‘Exterior City’ is located – between these two sets of policies, between their manifestations in housing complexes, between the histories of these two cities, now, in the present. A woman walks around in these cities, putting posters on doors and then passing through them. These doors connect the exterior of Malmö to that of Vienna. The posters she puts on the doors are made up of lists of names. These names do not address individuals, but rather, groups (“Dear workers, bosses, tenants, landlords…”), perhaps individuals as members of groups. Exterior City is a city of flows, it is the set of flows that these two cities set out to channel, to direct, to control through city planning. This figure bearing posters is a carrier of action, in this third city, in the flows, in the exterior, but it is not certain as to whether she is guided by these cities, and thus directed by the planning or if she, as a carrier of action, is offering some kind of resistance to this aspect of being-directed. As she emphatically puts it, at one point in the video, “Mapping is acting!”

Installation:

The video is installed in a diorama that can be entered by the viewer. That is, it is as though the screen were given depth, a kind of penetrable flatness, in which the viewer can walk around, but the closer one gets to the screen where the video is projected, the smaller the cinema becomes, and the less space one has for movement. To get closer to the screen is to become more uncomfortable, more awkward, in one’s body; it is to feel your own body in the space projected from the screen.

An image is projected onto the screen, a video which follows an actor mapping a trajectory between two spaces and thus creating a third space visible only over time. This place is the vanishing point, but it is not a point in space. It is a temporal sequence, an action unfolding: the activity of mapping; mapping a city as a space of action. There is nothing behind this action. Mapping is the ground, it is the place from which space is projected, but it is an activity. It is not the map, but mapping. This is the vanishing point: the point at which visibility stops, the point from which a space is projected. Exterior City is not a map, but rather, a space of action, a city without a map, which requires that map’s production. It is the space of this production, where flows of capital, labor and desire exist before projected onto a grid, before rationalism, before the map.

See the video here. Please send me a short email about who you are, if you are doing research, just curious or are planning to use the video in some context, and I'll send you the password. My email address is in the upper right corner of this page.





Credits:
Actress: Manuela Ammer
Camera, Malmö: Partik Book
Camera, Vienna: Hannes Boeck
Research, production, location: Zach Formwalt
Installation-architecture: Zach Formwalt


Shown in:
Paradox and Praxis, curated by Juli Carson, UC Irvine, Los Angeles, 2006-7.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, CCA Watts Institute, San Francisco. Curated by Will Bradley.
Eine Frage [Nach] Der Geste, A Question[ing] Of The Gesture, organized by Prof. Alba D'Urbano, Prof. Tina Bara und Diana Wesser, In Der Oper, Leipzig, 2006.
Regarding Denmark, Tounta Contemporary Art Centre, Athens, Greece.
The Most Complicated Machines are Made of Words curated by Matthias Michalka, MuMoK / Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2005.
Whatever Happpened to Social Democracy? curated by Charles Esche and Pavel Büchler, Rooseum, Malmö, 2005.
– And a number of screening-programs.