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Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser
The Berlin-based artists Köbberling and Kaltwasser have been collaborators since 1998. Their projects often take the form of makeshift buildings constructed using cast-off, donated, and recycled materials. The buildings, which the artists often inhabit for a brief period upon construction, are designed as critical, adaptive responses to specific environments—usually urban ones. As a key inspiration Köbberling and Kaltwasser often cite the gecekondular of Istanbul. Gecekondu is a Turkish word meaning "built overnight"; gecekondular are shanties erected and inhabited so quickly that Turkish law prohibits their razing. The outskirts of Istanbul have been transformed by gecekondular. These Turkish shanties, sprouting overnight and created from scratch, represent for Köbberling and Kaltwasser a rebuke and counteraction to top-down urban planning, "correct" architecture, and relentless development. Köbberling and Kaltwasser propose new buildings not as glum monoliths but as improvised structures built and activated communally. In them, leftover and reject materials are inventively repurposed. For example, the artists' Hausbau (2004) was a structure illegally erected over the course of three days in a field opposite the Gropiusstadt development in Berlin. Built using materials scavenged from construction sites, Hausbau playfully confronted its solemn high-rise neighbors and quickly became an ad-hoc meeting place (and rec room) for area residents. Köbberling and Kaltwasser have built low-cost, low-tech structures (including kiosks, bus shelters, vehicles, etc.) in a number of cities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, always with an eye toward the particular conditions of a given place and whatever scrap might be at hand. For their Locker Plant exhibition the artists addressed—and attempt to redress—a perennial want in Marfa: the lack of public transportation. Using old wooden shipping containers found at Chinati and other scrap lumber, the artists built a makeshift train station waiting room in the front room of the Locker Plant. During the opening—a cold, blustery Thursday afternoon in December—visitors lounged and waited convincingly on Köbberling and Kaltwasser's benches and studied the official travel info posted on the wall (including a schedule from the days when the Southern Pacific made multiple stops in Marfa). The artists scheduled the opening on a day when two Amtrak trains were due to travel through Marfa. The idea was to "greet" the trains passing through town with a flag-waving procession of hopeful passengers. Could a display of pro-train fervor persuade Amtrak to make an unscheduled stop? The first train whizzed by before anyone had a chance to find out. It was a long, cold wait for the second one. Eventually word came from Alpine to the east: the train was on its way. A small crowd huddled by the tracks. Minutes passed; the wind whipped flags and scarves around. Then: around the bend came the train. The artists jumped, shouted, waved their flag. And the train? The train...shot by (see photos)). A second serio-comic performance, this one enacted solo by Martin Kaltwasser, took place on the Chinati grounds the day after the opening. Inaugurating what he dubbed the Donald Judd Memorial Marathon, Kaltwasser ran the length of Judd's fifteen outdoor concrete works forty-two times (for a marathon-worthy total of twenty-six miles). Kaltwasser conceived the project as a personal homage to Judd and as a way of combining his interest in art and endurance-running. The public was invited to stop by Chinati to see how he was doing. He did fine. Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser live and work in Los Angeles and Berlin. Folke Köbberling studied Fine Arts at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and received her MA from the Academy of Fine Arts (Kassel). Martin Kaltwasser studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (Nürnberg) before receiving a degree in architecture at the Technical University in Berlin. Both are currently guest scholars in the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Köbberling and Kaltwasser have exhibited extensively in Germany and internationally and were recently included in the 2009 Architecture Biennial in São Paulo and in the group exhibition "Pittoresk" at the MARTa Museum in Herford, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Anselm Dreher, Berlin (2009); Ujadowski Castle CSW, Warsaw (2009); Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof, Stuttgart (2009); Lothringer13/Laden, Munich (2008); Simulanhalle, Cologne (2008); and Shedhalle, Zürich (2007). Two books devoted to their work have been published by Jovis: City of resources (2006) and Hold it! (2009).
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