++++ Not everybody is keen on guided tours. The group in the town of Bredäng near Stockholm, in any case, stands diffidently around the young man who tries to praise the merits of the environs.
He is not doing a bad job. Despite that, his listeners follow him in a rather bedraggled way instead of engaging in lively discussions about the good and bad points of the surrounding architecture.
The Danish artist, Pia Rönicke, who was born in 1974, presents her video, A Place like Any Other, on two monitors at the Kunstverein. On one of them you can see how the guide conscientiously enlightens his group about the merits of Bredäng, a typical conglomeration of architecture from the sixties dedicated to the spirit of New Living. Uniform residential blocks stand at regular distances between carefully planned lawns. The traffic is carefully directed around the houses. In the shopping centre, which is the centre of the settlement, everything is to be had which a Stockholm suburbanite could desire.
Everything is well meant and implemented with good intentions. And the guide does his best to sell the underlying utopias as reality when he proclaims, "Bredäng has great qualities!"
But an unbridgeable gulf opens up between what he communicates and what the group sees. Residents who show themselves as a happy part of the new living concept are nowhere to be seen. Lawns, squares and shopping centre seem desolate.
On the second monitor screen, the residents themselves speak and tell about their everyday lives in Bredäng. The voices speak of the difficulties of being an immigrant in new surroundings or of being a single mother. They criticize the ugly architecture or complain that the natural surroundings have been destroyed by further buildings.
There is no trace of sublime utopias from a new kind of town planning. Unadorned reality dominates here.
Pia Rönicke reflects in her works, of which some can be seen also in the video program at Städel, about urban space as an orientation point for people, about a possible reconciliation between ideas and their implementation, about latitudes for action within the structure of relationships between people and nature in urban space. Bredäng, however, seems to be far removed from such solutions. jdv
Frankfurter Kunstverein and Städelsches Kunstinstitut, until 25 August.