foyer exhibition
from 26.06.2020 to 01.11.2020

City-Making

Creative work for the Nuremberg of tomorrow

About the Exhibition

City-Making ("Stadtmacherei") deals with the important role of independent creative work in helping to shape a liveable city for the twenty-first century. The show honours this work in a multimedia presentation with a selection of over forty exemplary projects and initiatives from the Nuremberg metropolitan region that are already providing vital stimuli for the way we will live and work in the “city of tomorrow”.

In four categories, Neues Museum Nuremberg and the N2025 Application Office present projects and initiatives that shape and enrich the cultural and social life of the urban milieu in different ways. Based on an open understanding of creative work, the show gives a voice to actors from different fields who deal with the use of local resources and means of production, promote social cohesion and bring people together, or create accessible cultural offerings. With videos, pictures and texts, City-Making offers a colourful cross-section of the diverse creative scenes in and around Nuremberg.

The featured initiatives are characterized by their socially or ecologically sustainable approaches, engaging with areas such as rubbish avoidance, local production and consumption, inclusive work, sharing economy, reuse, traditional crafts, social commitment, self-organizing cultural scenes, and new uses for vacant spaces. They create new spaces and formats for communication and networking and develop possibilities for allowing citizens to participation in shaping the city.

The exhibition in the foyer at Neues Museum is a walk-in media archive with interactive video screens on which visitors can explore the region’s creative scenes. In interviews, images and texts, the creatives communicate their visions. They speak about the opportunities and shortcomings of the context within which they live and work, as well as discussing new concepts for shaping the city of tomorrow.
The City-Making project is also intended to encourage people to join in and initiate further socially relevant projects, as well as providing inspiration creative activities in which everyday problems can be solved and new ideas formulated.

Reinterpretation of a Legendary Knowledge Space

Inspiration for City-Making came from Ken Isaacs’ legendary multimedia space, the Knowledge Box (1962). Like its predecessor, the digital reinterpretation in Nuremberg is based on cumulative information, designed as a contemporary form of walk-in media and knowledge space. In contrast to the “mind-altering box”, as Isaacs’ work was also called at the time, the new installation dispenses with the sometimes psychedelic 1960s-style presentation.

It opens up a well-structured archive with several levels of access to the projects and initiatives. In addition, the new version converts mono-directional communication into an interactive usability that allows numerous relational combinations and connections.

Beyond the duration of the exhibition itself, City-Making will remain accessible as a mobile online version at: www.stadtmacherei-nuernberg.de. City-Making can thus be experienced in the walk-in installation at the museum, but also as a permanent, growing archive and an alternative map for new routes through the city.

Realization

The project was initiated by Dr. Eva Kraus (Director, Neues Museum, Nuremberg) and Prof. Hans-Joachim Wagner (Director, Application Office, European Capital of Culture 2025). It is supervised by a curatorial team consisting of staff from Neues Museum advised by Prof Martina Fineder (Design Theory & Research, Wuppertal University), who ran a precursor to the exhibition project in 2014 in Vienna under the title “Tomorrow Is...”. The technical and editorial team that developed this earlier exhibition, led by Andreas Pawlik (Dform.at) and Antje Mayer-Salvi (Redost.com), was also responsible for the new edition in Nuremberg.

Cooperation

City-Making is being realized as part of the application process for Nuremberg’s application to be Cultural Capital of Europe in 2025 and as part of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of Neues Museum (2020*20).

A cooperation between Neues Museum and N2025.