Room Mapping

When the artist/cartographer Valeska Peschke from Berlin takes up her wanderings through the landscape in her seemingly harmless way, then there are still irreverent and eerie undertones about it. The issue, as André Kubicek writes, always concerns "a goal that must be reached in order to justify the hardship of the endeavor, irrespective of the trivializing snack booths and portable toilets along the way". The upward climb itself - you can already make out the murmur of voices, the gaiety on the peak, the smell of barbecue" - begins to reveal the contours of the abyss.

For one month Peschke swept around her studio in Berlin in the spirit of a situationist in a constructed living situation. During that time, she recorded every path she moved along: from the desk to the couch, from the couch to the TV, from the TV to the bookshelves, from there to the telephone, and so on. A wooden floor the size of the room, spread out for the exhibition, shows all the traces of her psychogeography. The visitor to "Atlas Mapping" may use a map to explore the immediate effect of the things, which have - conschiously or unconsciously - influenced the concept of "sweeping around" as a constructive playful behaviour, which is contrasted with the classic notion of journeying or taking a walk.
In Debord's terms, both urban and private spaces have "a psychogeographical floor profile with constant streams, fixed points and vortices, which make it difficult to access certain zones or to leave them." By mapping her paths through her room, climaxing in the demarcation of the peaks of the furniture (1795 and 2019, for instance), Peschke has realized a romantic movement far removed from familiar cartography.

'Atlas Mapping:artists as cartographers', with Franz Ackermann, Marcel Broodthaers, Ingo Günther, Moshekwa Langa, Carsten/Olaf Nicolai, Georg Nussbaumer, Eva Wohlgemuth, Yukinori Yanagi