Immediate Archeologies Two (or the Children's Crusade)
mixed media, ca. 2500m2, Dresden 2009
by Luis Berríos-Negrón

Materiality and its values, environmental and emotional, load every dimension of production. As an extension of its first iteration in Berlin, 'Immediate Archaeologies Two or The Children's Crusade' triggers a buoyant psychogeography of this abandoned slaughterhouse, former war prison in Dresden. It is an additive excavation that searches to reenact the mindscape of time-warped Trafalmadore, the mythical planet, or haven, constructed years before by Kurt Vonnegut's experience as prisoner of war and ensuing Slaughterhouse Five science fiction novel. Whereas in its first iteration, through spatial and corporeal rituals, the processes took the shape of an unintended greenhouse, a boundary object questioning the subject between history and knowledge, fact and truth, to temporally fabricate a theater whose players could only be activated through an inaccessible world whose only prop the promise of growth and a mirror mobile offering a singular reference of that static past, into a Nöospheric future. Curated by Lukas Feireiss.