Future Mobility And Other Ghosts From The Past

FMAOGFTP. The Ship Edition, review It’s quiet on the exhibition ship of the University of the Arts Bremen. No noise, no rocking, not even a gentle swaying can be felt. The MS Dauerwelle is lashed down at the Bürgermeister-Smidt dock opposite the Weserburg. It doesn’t feel like it is moving an inch. The late summer season is characterized by mild weather, and the Weser is exhibiting minimal wave activity today. The setting is further enhanced by the sun’s rays, which cast golden reflections through the windows, illuminating the works of art inside the ship and contributing to the romantic seascape. The scene is so idyllic that it evokes a sense of irritation. It is actually about mobility. One associates movement, speed, even a little noise. It is certainly not a niche topic that the exhibition Future Mobility and Other Ghosts from the Past. The Ship Edition (FMAOGFTP in short) deals with. Hardly anything is currently as highly charged as transportation, travel, online shopping and vacations, the global circulation of goods, people and ideas — and the consequences for nature and society. Aspects of consumption, communication and peaceful coexistence follow on directly from this. This makes the topic both highly contemporary and controversial. In recent years, mobility has become a moral arena for debate, politically long seized upon from the most diverse directions and always hotly debated. It has also always been the subject of fast-paced utopias as well as melancholy dystopias in art, film and pop culture. And didn't Yael Bartana recently have a spacy multi-generational spaceship float into the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which deals with the really big questions? How can it be that it is so quiet on the MS Dauerwelle, almost contemplative? What may seem paradoxical at first opens up a new perspective on the topic. Pause for thought is the order of the day. Berlin-based artists and graphic designers Mathias Lempart and Sascia Reibel, together with curator Christina Scheib, have slowed things down. This finally leaves time to think about mobility from its flip side — standstill. This allows things to come into focus that are usually drowned out by the background noise of the incessantly running gear of everyday life. The work Evergreen is programmatic for this approach and catches the eye when entering the unusual exhibition space due to its size and placement. Alluding to the container ship Ever Given, which blocked the Suez Canal in 2021 and hindered the global movement of goods for days, Reibel and Lempart have created a reenactment on a small scale. The replica of a green overseas container was placed diagonally in the narrow exhibition space, requiring visitors to take a small detour on their tour. Pictures of the stranded container ship went around the world at the time. The captain’s risky maneuver forced the consumer society, spoiled by express deliveries, into waiting mode for a short time — a perceived eternity! — into waiting mode. How great is the loss when ordered tennis rackets, car doors and flip-flops are delayed by a few days? (1) Satirizing the absurdities of intercontinental trade, Reibel and Lempart open the doors of their container. Inside you can see: AI-generated interior views. A baffled hybrid creature resembling a brown bear looks out of its cave. On the other side, the view opens onto a mountain of fresh apples — presumably Pink Lady, as the omnipresent heart-shaped sticker reveals, which also forms the logo of Lempart and Reibel's design studio Shortnotice in a slightly modified form. How can an exhibition on the subject of mobility succeed? Only with a crucial twist: in a discourse dominated by clear answers and hard-hitting opinions, it is important to raise questions and describe gray areas. The exhibition is neither a politically motivated retrospective nor a dreamy vision of the future. Instead, the works deal with personal experiences, memories, nostalgic perspectives, they process what has been seen and personally experienced. There is no curtain to lift, nothing hidden to reveal and no magic to unmask. Instead: condensed observations. In this way, the huge topic becomes a clearly defined field of investigation: “The exhibition is like a journey through time that examines the former promise of unlimited global mobility. [...] We consciously refer to personal memories and travel — sometimes from our childhood, sometimes from the news,” (2) write the artists. The best way to explain how this works is to look at the many significant trivialities that can be discovered here. One of these awaits visitors up on the deck of the ship. A car stands here, obviously parked and abandoned, its headlights still switched on. However, it does not appear to be roadworthy, mainly due to the fact that it is covered by a silver-colored tarpaulin. A symbolic swan song to individual mobility? The foil cannot be lifted; what is supposedly covered does not appear, although one would like to know what is hidden here. But this is not about imagination, but, as I said, about precise observation. The work is called Back to the Future. The silver tarpaulin itself comes into focus. Usually stowed away in the garage cupboard, it only reveals its specific function when its protégé — the car — has come to a standstill. And all of a sudden we become aware of the aesthetic potential for transformation that outstanding graphic designers notice - and that everyone else unfortunately has to struggle to understand. The duality of the foils, “oscillating between formlessness and definite form” (3), is not simply an aesthetic game, but an expression and carrier of meaning of a mobile society in a state of permanent change. The car on the deck is no longer going anywhere, but the view is sharpened for what is waiting inside the ship. It is bursting with more significant trivialities. Napcaps negotiates uncomfortably tight sleeping pods at airports, which can be booked like luggage lockers — for the short power nap between two flights. Hold on Tight consists of rows of yellow plastic handles familiar from subway trains. Everything seems to be normal. The objects here are installed like ready-mades, as they are products of a mobility industry designed to ensure smooth processes and pleasant travel conditions. Functionality paired with unobtrusive, user-friendly design. However, these things are not on display here as aesthetically pleasing glitz or faux pas. In FMAOGFTP, Lempart and Reibel take a broader angle: their function is critically examined in an exaggerated, detached and distorted way — in terms of how they structure our journey, what behavior they evoke, what encounters they enable, in short: what role these things play in our everyday lives and what all this says about us as a mobile society. No small undertaking. Especially not when you add the aspect of communication. The work *hdgggdl* sends us on a journey back to a time when text messages still had to be carefully typed out letter by letter using keyboard shortcuts, which meant that speaking abbreviations were a thing of the past. *hdgggdl* is displayed — letter by letter — on the windows along the entire length of the ship. Almost every surface is used in this unusual exhibition space — the interior of the ship is filled to the brim, yet the ensemble is balanced, with no work overshadowing another, which speaks for the careful curation. Windows, stairs and ceilings are used, the entire ship is included, transforming the MS Dauerwelle from a passive exhibition venue into an integral part of the exhibition. And as *hdgggdl* makes clear, there is low-threshold access to almost every work. Because that is what the works are designed for: There is no underlying statement, no interpretative core that you have to laboriously work your way to. On the contrary, people are encouraged to make vague references to their own lives, experiences, and memories: “The artistic and creative works invite interested parties to be nostalgic, angry, happy and sometimes even disgusted.” (4) Despite all the associative accessibility, the accompanying catalog texts demonstrate the extensive research undertaken here. Connoisseurs such as Marc Augé are consulted for an analysis of the site, and literature on the topics of souvenirs and the development of tourism is cited. Interdisciplinary research approaches to the history and theory of mobility are introduced without getting bogged down in intellectual litany. Of course, the bibliography could be expanded in many directions — think of David Foster Wallace’s drastically humorous cruise experiences, for example, which take the absurdities of travel to the extreme. (5) However, this is by no means evidence of gaps in the research, but rather of the many ways in which the topics can be further linked. Lempart and Reibel received the first scholarship from the Peter Jacobi Foundation for Design in 2023. Initially shown at the Pforzheim Galerie, the MS Dauerwelle in Bremen is the second station of the resulting exhibition, which has been expanded and activated here by works by HfK Bremen students Freddy Adelmann, Aleksandra Faradzheva, Sina Güllü Gießner, Janne Hecker, Yonca Jakubowski and Lena Porath. — (1) Just under 10 billion US dollars per day, according to official calculations: https://www.spiegel.de/auto/ever-given-im-suezkanal-was-wird-aus-dem-stau-a-3ee3b48b-a382-4a23-bc9f-a87a7834e6da (13.10.24). (2) FMAOGFTP, p. 17. (3) FMAOGFTP, p. 147. (4) FMAOGFTP, p. 17. (5) David Foster Wallace: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997).