Satellite Voices

Munich

Ayzit Bostan and Gerhardt Kellermann's Replika

August 14

The breeze of an Italian summer blows through Munich from through this unique fashion and design collaboration

• Text by Christine Bierhals

Munich’s Hofgarten is a small and quiet nice park in between the busy city center. Distinctive for the Hofgarten are its arcades, but nontypical are the huge white curtains which decorate them this summer. They are part of the art installation REPLIKA, a project from Munich based fashion designer and artist Ayzit Bostan and the industrial designer and photographer Gerhardt Kellermann.

The installation takes up the idea of a deferral of a picture to another place within the city of Munich. The historic tradition of copying Italian architecture in considerable edifices of Munich, such as the Feldherrnhalle as a replica of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence is continued in time with REPLIKA. The Hofgarten of Munich is now presented as replica of the Piazza San Marco. The two artists reproduced the well-known waving curtains of the arcades of Venice and manteled the 88 arcs of the parc with this kind of light cloth.

The textile work of REPLIKA plays not only with the aspect of architectural borrowing but also with the creative means of disguising and discovering and - linked to that -with a new spatial perception of one of the best-known public places of Munich. Through the seemly simple creative measure, the arcades are emphasized new within the architectural concept of the Hofgarten thanks to the installation. Until the October 21 the installation is an open, playful invitation into the Hofgarten, a request to discover this public place and to perceive him again.

Images 1,3,4 by Gerhardt Kellermann, portrait by Fabian Frinzel