++++ The Manifesta 4 Project is attempting to develop itself further without pursuing a pre-set topic for its activities. We have been trying to approach as many individuals as possible on our trips, in very different contexts and situations. Manifesta 4 will be constructed from that diverse mapping in a complex process and in close collaboration with all the people involved.

++++ Three distinct vectors are intended to articulate Manifesta 4. The artists, the mediating curators and the City of Frankfurt are reinforcing and supporting each other in order to create a dialogue, a flux among each other stressing the diverse individual realities and the way people work together and confront different situations. Manifesta 4 is interested in the articulation of non-similarities and subjectivities, rather than in neutralizing them.

++++ Manifesta 4 is also interested in the ways art is confronted by other contemporary cultural practices intertwined with social and political issues in very different territories. Instead of dealing with binary oppositions (interior/exterior, exclusion/inclusion) or stressing national identities, our project tries to establish a more rhizomic structure which can relate one project to another, one group to another and both to the physical place. We are working on a structure located at that transitory moment when a certain practice displaces itself from one territory to another.

++++ As a trajectory through the city of Frankfurt, the Manifesta 4 Project will reveal the contradictions of the present, the different ways artists are rethinking the classical relation between time and space in the experience of urbanity, dwelling, mobility, travel, exile, language, conversation and translation, endurance, memory and history without forgetting irony and a sense of good, trespassing humour. The topography of the exhibition suggests a movement between such points as Frankensteiner Hof, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the public spaces around the Schirn Kunsthalle, Portikus, the Städel Museum, the Städelschule, and also the banks of the River Main, subway stations in the heart of the city. Apart from situating itself amongst the physical realities of the city, Manifesta 4 is present through broadcasting by the Hessische Rundfunk (radio and tv), Radio X, Offener Kanal Frankfurt/Offenbach.

+++ The online identity of Manifesta 4, at www.manifesta.de and www.e-manifesta.org, co-exists with individual online projects.