Plenty of tools was all we had brought from Germany into the pavilion. With them, we transformed one of the four side rooms into a large workshop. It was the first time in the pavilion’s history that sawing, planing, and sanding took place daily during the six-month duration of the Biennale. The pavilion changed for a while from a place of mere representation to a place of labour, work and action. The tool cabinets, like everything else in the pavilion, were constructed by us from collected building materials from the 2022 Art Biennale. Just before the end of the Biennale, all the cabinets along with the tools were transported to the local initiative ‘Laboratorio Climatico Pandora‘ on the Venetian mainland, where the workshop received a new lease of life.
The workshop in the German Pavilion was loud, dusty and often cramped. A new university worked here every week, often in cooperation with a vocational school from the craft sector. The material we had collected at the 2022 Art Biennale and deposited in the main room was processed here. Each group was associated with a local initiative in Venice – from neighbourhood centres to community gardens and football clubs. For these initiatives, repairs and small extensions or transformations were carried out on their buildings in Venice – using the material collected from the 2022 Art Biennale. The workshop in the pavilion served as a place where things were prefabricated, repaired or improved. It was an important agent for not merely criticising existing conditions, but for taking direct action.
We built large cabinets for the tools. The window frames for these came from the Central Exhibition Arsenale and previously served as picture frames for works by the Venezuelan artist Sheraonawe Hakihiiwe. The plywood panels are from the Philippine contribution ‘Andi taku e sana, Amung taku di sana‘. The sawhorses are made from wooden beams from the Uzbek contribution ‘Dixit Algorizmi: Garden of Knowledge‘ about the scientist Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. We protected the floor of the workshop with rubber mats that were previously installed in the Swiss Pavilion as part of the exhibition ‘The Concert‘ by Latifa Echakch.
No workshop without tools. We were on the phone for months and were delighted when we finally received so many tools donated or on loan from over twenty manufacturers. Every screw clamp, every saw was valuable to us. We collected it all in Leipzig and transported it to Venice in a hopelessly overloaded electric van. In the harbour of Tronchetto, we reloaded onto our rented cargo boat to transport it across the lagoon to the Giardini and the German Pavilion. By now we already had experience of boating in adverse weather conditions. Nevertheless, the waves were particularly high this time. We only lost a few gloves.