The Shell Game /Alba neagra
film, 2', Berlin, 2006

In early May 2006, we witnessed groups of people gathered on Berlin's Liebknecht Bridge, playing alba neagra, or the shell game — a street con typically involving four or five men: the dealer and a few players who try to lure in unsuspecting passers-by. Here, however, the players were a mix of women and men, engaging with one another in a kind of theatrical performance. Interestingly, tourists showed little interest in the game. In the background, the Palast der Republik was being demolished, its construction site surrounded by large banners that proclaimed, “A democratic decision.” The entire scene suggested that someone in the background was playing alba neagra with history itself. "In their installation Alba Neagra, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor focus on various aspects of urban transformation: the conquest of existent spaces by architectural elements that reflect political decisions is visualised by a structure that suggests the volume of a tilted house, placed aslant in a room. A video compares the treatment of architecture and history with the shell game, during wich the elements appear and disappear acording to an incomprehensibile and deceptive system. The construction and the video are supplemented by photographs of empty spaces and wastelands in Marzahn, where architecture surprisingly reproduces itself at another spot-that is, in apiaries that duplicate the form of the Plattenbauten found here. The artists examine the ideological traces of architecture and the contradiction ontained the various historic layers." excerpt from How to Do Things? - In he Middle of (No)where..., catalogue, Appropriation of a Space of Possibility by Dorothee Bienert and Antje Weitzel Palast der Republick, Berlin, constructed 1973 - 1976 demolished 2006 - 2008 index