Dear friends of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld,

On January 26, 2020, an extraordinary experimental project will find an equally exceptional format. Our theme Alternatives for Living. Blueprints for Haus Lange and Haus Esters will transition into an online magazine where it will remain freely accessible on a permanent basis.

Throughout the year 2019, fourteen artists, designers and architects realized site-specific works and installations in conjunction with Alternatives for Living. Blueprints for Haus Lange and Haus Esters. Ideas were developed, discussed, altered and then implemented.
For all the participants as well as for us from the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, this project, which marked the centennial of the Bauhaus, was an outstanding and challenging experiment.

On the one hand, we greatly expanded the classic exhibition format, combining practice and theory with an array of different formats, for example with a FabLab, with seminars and a BarCamp, with guided tours and an Augmented Reality, with lectures, films and workshops, just to name a few. Numerous cooperation partners upheld the project with ideas from their own perspective.
With these different strategies, the crucial themes of utopia, mobility and dystopia along with the modern architecture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were reflected anew, reexamined and reinterpreted.

Museum practices were expanded in this way in the direction of an integrative and processual notion of museum. Or put simply: it was possible to discuss the future in the museum, to talk there about the interaction between art, architecture and design as well as about developments in society.

The future is, on the one hand, the key word behind another experimental path we took in conjunction with Alternatives for Living. We invited fourteen protagonists to each look into the future with a new work created especially for Krefeld and for Haus Lange and House Esters.

Future and progress in truth means thinking about how life will be lived tomorrow in terms of present day ideas. Progress in the direction of the future is currently above all measured in technical innovations, scientific insights and economic achievements. Creative minds are capable of opening up very different paths and concepts.

The fourteen artists, designers and architects from the Alternatives for Living project likewise demonstrate with their new works and installations just how complex and inconclusive the answers to questions concerning life and living in the future are. Utopian and dystopian thoughts are consequently often very close to each other. Seeing the future as a better, socially just, aesthetically pervaded and thus positive utopia is frequently fractured. Doubts seem to have fundamentally called a brave new idyllic future world into question; almost all the works also encompass dystopian aspects.
It is precisely the fact that our future is currently conceived as utopian as well as dystopian reflects the responsibility with which a future conception of the world should be encountered.

Yours,
Katia Baudin