PROMENADE FICTIONALE

With a fictional audio tour, we show and document our collected perspectives on the city of Dessau-Roßlau and on work during the Corona pandemic. Living and working in the Muche Master’s House for three months – that was also part of our residency. But at the beginning of May 2020, traveling was out of the question and working on site was not possible. Nevertheless, we contacted the Dessau-Roßlauer*innen: with postcards. Every day in May, each of us wrote a card to a resident of the city.

We documented the writing of these 93 postcards to Dessau with videos that we shared on our Instagram account. In this way we connected the intimate with the public, local with global reach, a supposedly outdated way of communicating with social media - and at the same time asked about the meaning of urban spaces and encounters. What if you can't meet? How powerful are places through the stories we tell ourselves about them?

In Dessau, a stack of postcards awaited us with the answers from Dessau-Roßlau residents to their questions about special places in the city. These formed the starting point for our work on site: In quiet town talks, we invited residents to respond in writing to quotes from the postcards and to continue telling them. Together with the photographic exploration of the urban area, the postcards and conversations result in a collection of new perspectives on Dessau-Roßlau. 

The result is a fictional audio tour and a city map that visitors can use to explore Dessau-Roßlau themselves. (Simply scan the QR code with your smartphone and download the audio tour.) The city map consists of postcards that invite you to continue the conversation and stories about Dessau-Roßlau.