Blog Entry by Elizabeth Feder // March 30, 2011
The beauty of the opening for Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery at KW Gallery was in the spatial magic it acquired as the night went on: we were all involved in a communal, structural disintegration.
You walk in, past the proper galleries, through the narrow corridor until everything opens in an eruption of smoke, bodies and beer. That would be perfunctory for most art openings in Berlin on a Saturday night, save for the Ziggurat in the center of the massive sunken space built from boxes of cheap EFES beer, shrouded in bodies that are digging for a drink from within the body of the tower.
Here was a scaffold, fantastic and fleeting, that Gaillard provided the city for several hours, where an air of the mystical, voyeuristic and participatory all collided atop a precarious decision we all had to make between our sure footing and the next drink. Intersecting archetypal and monumental form with temporary program created an energy of peculiar interactions, with all in the room facing each other in a queer curiosity.
I expect that few of us there anticipated to be both the art and architecture that evening.
