For the CityLeaks Festival, the project shows Chargesheimer’s photographs oversized in a walk-in installation. They serve as a visual and substantive slide that interweaves past and future. In a lively staging, a space is created for an evening to linger, to get together and to explore – a journey through time. “Unter Krahnenbäumen” was a street like many in Cologne (…). It was the stage in front of which the true essence of a street unfolded – as a meeting place where children play and festivals are celebrated. In his photobook, Chargesheimer created a panorama that was as alive as it is today that the name ‘Unter Krahnenbäumen’ survived the street and became the epitome of the original Cologne lifestyle.
For one evening pictures and videos were projected upon an installation of Studio Quack & Büro gisbert (Philipp Rose) transforming Körnerstraße into an open air photo museum. Following the shapes of the railway arches the tunnel installation allowed the public to observe the multimedia presentation form the inside and the outside. Occupying street space, and talking about it through the collective memories condensed in the pictures of Chargesheimer made the installation a great contribution to the festivals overall spatial discourse.
The streets are the social knot of our contemporary cities. Their public life and usage reflect our state of mind and manifest the quality of urban life itself. To publicly contemplate about the streets of Cologne, the Chargesheimer Tunnel went back into the past—digging deep in the archives of the photographer KarlHeinz Hargesheimer—and transported images of the livelihood of the famous street »Unter Krahnenbäumen« from the midst 20th century in the here and now of Ehrenfeld's vivid Körnerstraße.
The PhotoBookMuseum, founded in Cologne in 2014 by Reinhold Mißelbeck, is dedicated to mediation and exploration It serves as a platform for collections and sees itself as a mobile, vibrant place that is open to a wide audience. Studio Quack & gisbert work at the interface of art, design and architecture. They are experimenting with public space, re-thinking it and teasing its boundaries. As a tandem they move in the field of temporary installation, intervention, graphics and exhibition design. Process and experiment are in the foreground.
