Title: B-SIDE (see reverse for more information)*
Location: Worpswede, Germany (Bergstraße)
Materials: Backside of street signs, vynil cuts, ink, found dirt and moos
Artist: Andrea Acosta

“One leaves with a path in mind but journeys are always full of unforeseeable events…

It would be hard to get to a place you don’t know without wandering a little, sometimes that wandering becomes the important thing, sometimes you get lost and make a completely unexpected discovery, sometimes nothing happens and sometimes that’s
ok too.

But getting lost is not always an easy task, if you consider the increasing forest of signs in the streets telling you where and how to look and move through space. On one of those attempts at getting lost I found myself looking at the signs themselves, at the amount, at the shapes, at the information they carry and then, in that common place, in an unexpected turn, at the grey space hidden in their backside, at the grey surfaces that are everywhere but somehow invisible, camouflaged within the constructed landscape we are so used to.

In a delicate but subversive way I use this forgotten space to question and subvert the functionality and language of signs in public space; through small subtle interventions I try to silently make visible this spaces, delicately inhabiting them and thus leading to a new direction in the streets.

I guess there is already a lot of information in the public space, but not enough poetry that allows you to not only look again but also to look different.

Over the period of one week I work on the grey surface of the street signs of one street in Worpswede, Germany (the Bergstraße). The signs where cleaned and in some cases adhesive vinyl cuts where applied, in others the drawings where made in the spot, with ink pens or by the cleaning itself. At the end it was as if the nature was taking over the constructed landscape again.

*This work is part of the exhibition ‘Life goes Public’ /10 public art interventions to update Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. Leben! PMB in Worpswede. 2007-2008.