Cabrio 2021

„Eines Tages werden die Wünsche die Wohnung verlassen und auf die Strasse gehen“ (Park Fiction Post, 1998, "One day the aspirations will leave the apartment and take to the streets.")

CABRIO 2021 creates a dialogue between current artistic questions and socially relevant issues. This year, CABRIO takes as its subject the city, public space, and urban sociability. Our main focus will be on changing perceptions of this space-between-us-all. What impact has the pandemic had on this sphere? How can we assess this change? This year’s events will be a collective dive into urban space: as a playground of democracy, as the possibility of appearance, and as action that is inevitably collective. Our program of evening events showcases various ways of dealing with public space. At the same time, our program can be understood as an experiment: what is (not) possible in shared space? Given the pandemic, the question of what constitutes public space is particularly complicated and multi-layered. Covid-19 has, at times, made publicly accessible space a place of retreat. Research into urban space has distinguished functional, legal, social, material, and symbolic dimensions of the public sphere. We are all familiar with examples of “art in public space.” But what is far more important is the question of what is considered “public,” and how and by what public space is controlled. Social and political conflicts are fought over within public space, meaning the public sphere is subject to constant change. The Kunstverein Bielefeld wants CABRIO 2021 to investigate different formats in public space, so as to collectively sharpen our understanding of conflicts within that space. It is all about participation and emancipation, sharing and appropriation, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. As a democratically-structured institution, the Kunstverein will stage eight public events where you are invited to test your own ideas of public space and experience the city in which we (want to) live anew, and to think about together. A varied program invites interested audiences to performatively approach their own limits. As well as various discussion formats, empirical and ephemeral events will also take place in shared space.

"Our public spaces are as profound as we allow them to be."
(Candy Chang)

CABRIO 2021 is curated by Leonore Spemann.