It is on this central square of Berlin that Eva-Maria Wilde (1972 in Dresden, Germany) and Yves Mettler (1976 to Morges, Switzerland) meet for a common exhibition in the gallery Blancpain Art Contemporain. Wilde grew up there, Mettler landed there, both live there. Central element of the cultural history of the city, as the collective memory, Alexanderplatz takes in spite of its multiple transformations, as much as architectonic than functional, a key position in the mental map as well of the Berliners as of the visitors of the capital.

The animated history of the city of Berlin is readable on the surface of this square which had to become the representative center of the Ex-GDR. If this square was the theater of spartakists mobs in 1919, it was also the place of gathering of November 4th, 1989 of a million persons announcing the fall of the wall. Every determining historic period expressed, by means of town planning competitions articulated around this square, its political will. Although these competitions tried to assert their respective time, their realization also showed the obvious distance between the desires and the reality. None of the competitions was besides able to be completely realized. Every realization has been interrupted, removing certain elements in the profit of others.

This ongoing transformation of the urban space, readable from the remaining facades and spatial conceptions of Alexanderplatz, is the point of departure of the collaboration of both artists.

Having collected a fund of images from the archives of the city and the region, and having met Hubert Matthes, one of the architects of the socialist collective who formerly planned the square, they constituted their own documentation of the site, each following his own areas of research. It is from this material that Wilde and Mettler recomposed a history and an image of Alexanderplatz. By respecting the historic and architectonic perspectives foreseen by the various plans, their reconstruction proposes a actualizing model parallel to this place always being made and undone.

The installation visible at Blancpain Art Contemporain consists of a set of facades of various time periods, each being realized in a different material: a wooden grid in reference to the window of the station built in the socialist period, a floating frame abstracted from the structure of the factory Minol, two curtains reproducing prototypes of modernistic buildings, a sprayed cloth reproducing the temporary dressings produced by the scaffolds of construction sites and two cut-outs, one for the neo-classic facade of the department store Tietz (the biggest commercial facade of visible Europe in 1904) and the other one for Centrum Warenhaus, department store of socialist Germany, the facade of which was recently removed by the current owner.

The installation produces a set of superimpositions, plan of which is based on a spiral (shape of the square during socialist period reaching then eighty thousand square meters, and built the same year as the Spiral Jetty by Smithson). The space of the gallery is so fully transformed. The installation proposes by its materiality and composition a space where the rigorous structures become confused with the others, opening a space to a complex plan drawn by the crossing lines of flight and building plans of meetings.

The exhibition also gives way to both artists to exercise their own tools of interpretation of the urban material.

Eva-Maria Wilde: Sans Titre, 2005

laque sur MDF, 60 x 50 cm laque sur MDF, 60 x 50 cm

Of her search for decomposition of the urban structures, Eva-Maria Wilde developed a prototype of building shell facade working in the form of a stencil she uses here as generic element within the historic elements: day image, night image, two vertical facades cross the space of the gallery throughout. The stencil is sprayed on the cloth, a direct loan of the urban subculture. Eva-Maria Wilde also intervenes in the exhibition with a set of collages based on the constituted collection of images: assemblies of photos, photocopies, cut, torn and recomposed drawings, samples of facades stemming from her research fund to generate the fragmentary and superimposed images of the reality and the memory.

Black, white and grey varnish paintings black, branded by the materialism of the paintbrush, form a series of abstract urban figures, signs where is condensed the global urbanity and its temporality.

Yves Mettler takes over the motive for the spiral of the former socialist place with a vinyl record suggesting to the visitor appropriating the square in the form of a mantra based on the contradiction inherent to the planning of the public space. He completes the historic interpretation of the site with a block of screenprintings based on a confrontation of the architectural projects of every time period with clichés of contemporary passers-by on the Alexanderplatz.