Vid Ingelevics - Unification Proceeds

Project description • Unification Proceeds: Washington, DC Although the fall of the Berlin Wall is often historicized in celebratory terms as the end of the Cold War, the after-life of its fragments have for the most part escaped public scrutiny. This artists' project by the artists' collective, FBI (Blake Fitzpatrick, Robert Bean, Vid Ingelevics) involves the tracing, documentation and consideration of the now-atomized fragments of the Wall. The Wall is a form of ruin. However, it didn't just crumble away but, because of its symbolic weight, was dismantled and scattered around the world. Small shards or slivers of the Wall were objects of personal exchange by Cold War era tourists and can still be found today for sale on the Internet accompanied by dubious "certificates of authenticity". Their most visible form is probably that of the enormous "trophy" slabs – full top-to-bottom sections of the Wall still bearing	their original graffiti -- given as gifts by governments, multinational corporations, universities and museums to one another. As these disparate pieces of the Wall travel the world they take on new contexts and sometimes unexpected meanings.Our interest in the after-life of the Wall has been to reconsider it as a kind of multiply displaced historical monument. We acknowledge the Wall's continuing material existence and the private and public transformations its fragments have undergone. The exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Toronto specifically marks the 15th anniversary of the supposed fall of the Berlin Wall by tracing some of its fragments to the epicenter of the Cold War "victory" -- Washington, D.C.
* NOTE: since carrying out this project in 2003-04, Blake Fitzpatrick and I returned in 2009 to the searching out of North American Wall fragments, large and small, in a two-person collaboration under the new title of "Freedom Rocks" (taken from the label on a bag of Wall fragments sold in Toronto in the early 1990s), which has resulted in exhibitions in Berlin, Toronto and Ottawa. Work is in progress to represent our new work on a new stand-alone website. Stay tuned! Meanwhile click HERE to see a description of our new work on Ryerson University's website and HERE to see our Nov. 2009 interview on CNN.

Project description • Unification Proceeds: Washington, DC

Although the fall of the Berlin Wall is often historicized in celebratory terms as the end of the Cold War, the after-life of its fragments have for the most part escaped public scrutiny. This artists' project by the artists' collective, FBI (Blake Fitzpatrick, Robert Bean, Vid Ingelevics) involves the tracing, documentation and consideration of the now-atomized fragments of the Wall.

The Wall is a form of ruin. However, it didn't just crumble away but, because of its symbolic weight, was dismantled and scattered around the world. Small shards or slivers of the Wall were objects of personal exchange by Cold War era tourists and can still be found today for sale on the Internet accompanied by dubious "certificates of authenticity". Their most visible form is probably that of the enormous "trophy" slabs – full top-to-bottom sections of the Wall still bearing

their original graffiti -- given as gifts by governments, multinational corporations, universities and museums to one another. As these disparate pieces of the Wall travel the world they take on new contexts and sometimes unexpected meanings.Our interest in the after-life of the Wall has been to reconsider it as a kind of multiply displaced historical monument.

We acknowledge the Wall's continuing material existence and the private and public transformations its fragments have undergone. The exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Toronto specifically marks the 15th anniversary of the supposed fall of the Berlin Wall by tracing some of its fragments to the epicenter of the Cold War "victory" -- Washington, D.C.

* NOTE: since carrying out this project in 2003-04, Blake Fitzpatrick and I returned in 2009 to the searching out of North American Wall fragments, large and small, in a two-person collaboration under the new title of "Freedom Rocks" (taken from the label on a bag of Wall fragments sold in Toronto in the early 1990s), which has resulted in exhibitions in Berlin, Toronto and Ottawa. Work is in progress to represent our new work on a new stand-alone website. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile click HERE to see a description of our new work on Ryerson University's website and HERE to see our Nov. 2009 interview on CNN.


back to histories overview page
back to projects overview page
back to home page

back to histories overview page

back to projects overview page

back to home page