Abteilung für Produktentwicklung und Analytik
With the name APA (Abteilung für Produktentwicklung und Analytik, engl.: department for product development and analysis) we adopted the name of a closed down laboratory of the SHELL group in the industrial harbour of Hamburg.
This was not meant to be affirmative or ironical appropriation of company structures.
Our interest is to observe and examine the various points of strategies of appropriation and transfer between different artistical, social and economical practices and further the limits of those strategies.
The symbolic take-over of the site and the reopening of the laboratory under artistic paradigms enable us to observe the interweaving of discourses from within a model situation and allows to shift the questions from a specific or local environment into a superior context.
The area, we are referring to is located in a partly contaminated wasteland in the industrial harbour of Hamburg. According to the plannings of the city government it shall be transformed into an ecological estate as part of the international garden exhibition (IGA) in 2013. The citys´ masterplan „Jump over river Elbe“ proposes the complete remodelling of the area inbetween the next 20 years, by shifting the whole place into a vision of a „green archipel“.
The analogies between artistic fieldwork, the search for artistic utopian spaces and the highly ficticious projection in the masterplan show the necessity of exact distinction:
Who deals with which strategy when and why, to achieve what?
The simultaneity of economical consideration and the shaping of ideas within society refer to transitory processes, which supposingly are subject to contrary motivations.