IN-A-GADDA-DA-VIDA by Anna-Catharina Gebbers
Pia Greschner, Staircase, 2008 (video still)
The screening program In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida brings together time based media works. The origin of the title of the eponymous song by the band Iron Butterfly is already entwined itself by myths. The topography of the imagination that is connoted with the Garden of Eden combines inexhaustible, food-giving vegetation with architectural utopias, dystopias and heterotopias: As place to which the longing aims the Garden of Eden is conceived as a walled in orchard. Due to mankind‘s curiosity and urge for knowledge the garden has to be abandoned and is therefore doomed to decay. The place that prospers the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is as locus amoenus as locus terribilis: The longing for home and a better future play an as important role as misunderstanding, deterioration and disillusionment.
Anna-Catharina Gebbers is a Berlin based independent exhibition maker, writer, editor for polar magazine, and director/curator for Anna-Catharina Gebbers | Bibliothekswohnung, Berlin. She teaches at the University of Bayreuth, the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design