Between Stopovers

About

The project Between Stopovers is both point of departure and documentation of a journey that takes the artist couple Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger from Kehl on the river Rhine via Belgrade to Krakow and back to their adopted hometown Berlin. Chosen at first for merely practical reasons, the trip’s succession of intermediary stops yet becomes its conceptual frame – the conjoining element between these places is their function as a journey’s stopovers. For a short time Johannes Mundinger and Sophia Hirsch draw near these places whose environment thus flows into the murals they create at these waypoints.

Once we acknowledge urban art’s credentials as an independent art form, it’s clear Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger partake of that genre. In this joint project their intellectual engagement is again directed at the idea of urbanity as a whole much more than at the individual places where they actually are Between Stopovers. It is a journey that deals with the questions of what makes a city, how it develops an identity and how this is constituted. Unlike the classic traveller, the two of them are not drawn to the extraordinary, characteristic or colourful facets of these respective places. Instead they consider places whose identity lies in transit, like parking lots, airports and motorways. Places whose characteristics mostly develop in parallel to their functionality, and to which Sophia and Johannes, with regards to their own transit situation, feel a special relation of sorts. At the same time, this aspect of the cityscape is subjected to the economic principles of urban development – which places it in a relationship of tension with urban art as a participatory art form that discusses and demands the appropriation of space by the individual.