The Builder’s Daughter is a one day intervention at the entrance door of the public gallery weisser elefant in Berlin. It was made with the help of construction workers and gallery staff.
The installation blocks the doorway using construction materials and creates a second entrance to the gallery space through the window. It expands on new possibilities of seeing and approaching the structures of institutions, thus avoiding established forms of critical discourses on the character of the latter. The work focuses on the specificity of a temporary structure, namely the scaffolding. In its deployment, scaffolding implies a self-referentiality to the working force connected with an open institution for it to perform. This intervention’s underlying motivation is a personal connection to the community of construction workers from eastern Europe and former Yugoslavia.
The performance exercises the institution’s willingness to accept new workers, while at the same time accentuating the disparities between different pluralities of groups. The performance does not plead for visibility or the celebration of emerging minorities, it instead aims to imagine cultural institutions as a fluid space, in constant need of supplementation. The work reflects on bending and challenging the interconnectedness between openness, boundaries, and institutional logic.
*”The Builder’s Daughter” is a project within the open call “take the space” and takes place in the programme “institutions extended” (2019 – 2022). The programme “institutions extended” is led by the artist Marina Naprushkina and financed by the “Netzwerkfonds -Zukunftsinitiative Stadtteil II (ZI II), Programm Sozialer Zusammenhalt”.
Photography: Yero Adugna Eticha