"WRITING WITH YOUNG PIONEER ESPINOSA"

The Berlin artist Thomas Bratzke was once Thomas Espinosa, a “model” Young Pioneer at a school in Lichtenberg, East Berlin. Like all children in the GDR, he learned to write using the Schulausgangsschrift (the standardized cursive script) in 1983. In 1986, he emigrated to West Berlin and later became active in the Berlin urban landscape as the artist and writer ZAST.

His own first-grade writing exercise book serves as an artistic space for association and history for the new works created for the exhibition »Writing with Young Pioneer Espinosa.« Thomas Bratzke experiments with the material of the notebook through research, writing exercises, and conversations with those who shared this past. Through script and text, he comes into contact with memories of a childhood that finds new narratives in the exhibition as a collective history suspended between romanticism and forgetting. Videos, texts, drawings, and objects function like pieces of a mosaic, the parts of which can be assembled by each viewer for themselves.

“This transition during childhood wasn’t moderated at all. There was no conclusion, no ending. Because of that, the story of childhood for an entire generation simply breaks off. I wanted to know how others felt about it and what themes occupy them when confronted with forms of memory. For me, writing is the first experience of adopting a ‘good form.’ I remembered being proud as a child of being good at it—copying words, writing beautifully. That made me stop and think. In the GDR, ‘beautiful’ was synonymous with ‘good.’ Humans are good. Children are good. The handwriting is beautiful. You don’t want to just throw everything you found beautiful into the bin. And it’s also not about that old saying: ‘Not everything was bad.’ It’s about taking a very close look.” THOMAS BRATZKE

Writing Workshop with Thomas Bratzke
Tuesday, December 13, 2016, 6pm