Skip to main content

zentrum

zentrum
/7
    • zentrum
  • 2004
  • installation of film projection and 3 poster
"zentrum," based on a neon sign in Leipzig, is a multi-part work created over the course of several years. It was in 2004 that Margreiter discovered this neon lettering, its lighting elements long since burnt out, on the façade of the “brühlzentrum,” a GDR-era cultural center. Her interest was directed at the high quality of the lettering’s design, indicative of Leipzig’s excellent tradition of typography particularly in terms of neon signs, the design of which is also taught at that city’s art academy. For her film "zentrum" (2006), Margreiter reactivated the brühlzentrum’s lettering by wrapping the individual letters in reflective material and making them shine once more by training hand-held lamps on them for the brief period of two minutes, as a sort of final act. But her artistic confrontation with the brühlzentrum sign’s typography also encompasses further creations that revolve methodically around the terms “analog” and “digital”: After constructing 1:1 cardboard models of each letter as an initial step, Margreiter went on to design a poster that, alongside the film, was in turn followed by two other posters and a video. The first poster zentrum (camera) (2004) was devoted to a digital camera by Panasonic that was technically capable of imitating an analog movie camera; she used the depicted camera to shoot the footage for zentrum, which was subsequently transferred to 16 mm film. The second poster "zentrum" (analog) (2006) shows the word “analog” in the typography that Margreiter had reconstructed on the basis of the neon lettering, while the third poster zentrum (typography) (2006) went on to show all the letters of this reconstructed alphabet along with the standard punctuation marks. For the video "zentrum" (alphabeth) (2009), the neon sign’s twelve letters were animated individually and sequenced one after the other, so as to spell out the word “brühlzentrum” letter by letter. "zentrum" is a complex work on questions of spatiality, temporality and technical mediality that Margreiter condenses in light of a specific context of modernism’s history in which the formal went hand in hand with the political. And the melancholy event of the sign’s reanimation, captured for a fleeting moment, also briefly illuminates a utopian aspect that runs throughout this history. S.E.