Concept

-2011-

For Playing the City, organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, in which artists attempted to involve the city and its inhabitants, Jankowski intervened with minimal but effective means. He switched the names of two of the city’s streets: Ahornstraße (Acorn Street) became Annastraße (Anna Street), and Annastraße became Ahornstraße. In doing so, he renamed a street in a rather upper-class neighborhood after a street in a rather lower-class neighborhood, and vice versa. Though everyone who knows their way around Frankfurt associates a certain part of town – and a certain type of inhabitant – with these street names, once the streets were renamed, people’s assumptions no longer matched reality. Jankowski accordingly had to account for the complex layers of administration, identification, and order surrounding buildings and their inhabitants; a well known but unthinkingly accepted economic disparity was, for a moment, laid bare.

Performance

Video

(1 x HD Cam, 1 x Blu-ray), 3:10 min, PAL, 16:9, color, sound, German, edition of 5, II