Screening

Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos. The viewer‘s gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi’s Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians and hotel guests. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private life are on public display. Like the propaganda images of totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city‘s inhabitants from above. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our presentday urban lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in Berlin – but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm’s photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig’s drama Push Up 1– 3, which give the inhabitants of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.