The Arthur Boskamp Foundation is pleased to present the books created through its 2012 grants for “book/writing” projects: “Childhood is an Inventsion / Lapsuus on Guvitelma” by Anna Herms and “Another Earth Catalog” by Fabian Reimann, as well as the two corresponding exhibitions “Teenage Bus Stop” and “Another Earth” at M.1 from 18.11 to 16.12.

At the beginning of the year, when the Arthur Boskamp Foundation grants were awarded, the jury considered the prizes to have been given to two artists whose positions and projects were as clear-cut and incisive as they were different. However, as the books and exhibitions came into shape, surprisingly many analogies and intersections became apparent. Both of the grant recipients had taken up topics that – using words carefully chosen – could exceed the scope of a grant publication. They were dealing with different tools for appropriating the world, but both on their own terms.

In his publication “Another Earth Catalog”, Fabian Reimann uses the “Whole Earth Catalog”, a comprehensive index of tools for improving the world and oneself published in 1968, as the starting point for a final issue of the personal photo essay zine “freeman’s journal” he has been publishing for over 10 years. In “Childhood is an Inventsion / Lapsuus on Guvitelma” Anna Herms seeks to apprehend (written) language as a crucial moment of childhood and tool for discovering the world by means of a book-filling text collage made up of her own as well as appropriated texts.

Fabian Reimann compiles illustrations of 1960s utopias in a series spanning his entire book and only interrupted by one very personal text. While his compendium certainly draws on the “Whole Earth Catalog”, it also includes other visionary utopian projects. He orients himself loosely on the five categories structuring the original “Catalog” (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics und Learning) and links the early visions with images of later developments or developments that arose from them, in light of their eventual failure or realization.

In contrast, Anna Herms combines excerpts from texts by known and less known experts on the topic of childhood (pedagogues, philosophers, literary figures and pop musicians) with her own texts and text images in a story that swings back and forth between the joy of learning to read and write, the brief moments in which it is or seems possible to move the world with language, and the flip side, in which the world becomes a gray, alienated mass of words. The text is interrupted by only a few illustrations – including a photograph of long since grown-up Hohenlockstedt children.

The exhibition “Another Earth” (Fabian Reimann) expands the tool and model aspects of the “Whole Earth Catalog” into the sculptural, spatial dimension. “Teenage Bus Stop” (Anna Herms) continues the writing from childhood into the often conflicted phase of youth. It is a time when things are suddenly unclear and uncertain, but the whole world also seems wide open – with all the feelings of euphoria and great visions for the future that come with it. And that brings us back to the “Catalog” and the intersections between the two works.

This year’s Arthur Boskamp Foundation grant publications have been made possible through the generous support of G. Pohl Boskamp GmbH & Co. KG.

Fabian Reimann’s exhibition has been kindly supported by Wilhelm Schmid Stielfabrik & Sägewerk Ofterdingen GmbH.

Both exhibitions travel on to Lapua/Finland in January 2013, where they will be on view 30.1. – 2.6.2013 at Lapuan Taidemuseo, the museum that co-produced this year’s grant publications and shows with the Arthur Boskamp Foundation.