Photo by Chris Frey

Visitors to The Building sketched American artist Cecile Evans as part of a life-drawing class hosted by curator Alix Rule.

Anri Sala Liam Gillick Carsten Nicolai Buckminster Fuller Ingar Dragset Michael Elmgreen Anton Vidokle Colin Chinnery on the Future of ShContemporary

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The closure of The Building, previously dubbed unitednationsplaza in reference to its location on the Platz der Vereinten Nationen, marked the end of a three-year project launched by artist and curator Anton Vidokle in 2006. Having spent two years preparing to launch unitednationsplaza for the ultimately canceled Manifesta Cyprus, Vidokle set up shop in Berlin instead, going on to realize a series of collaborations through a construct loosely based on a “seminar/residency program” and dedicated to the potential of “the exhibition as school.”

The effort harnessed the febrile creative energy coursing through the city, and attracted the participation of such names as Liam Gillick, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Tirdad Zolghadr, among others. Vidokle has repurposed the theoretical structure for similar projects, including last year’s “Night School” in New York and a month-long project in Mexico in March 2008.

In Berlin in 2007, a year after unitednationsplaza was launched, Vidokle teamed up with fellow artists Julieta Aranda and Magdalena Magiera to re-boot the project with a new name — The Building — and a looser, more spontaneous, open-access approach. In the two years since, the space has hosted more than 150 screenings, discussions, and lectures, as well as maintaining a video-rental project and public reading room.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, The Building closed with an appropriately instructional two-day marathon of talks, presentations, interactive projects, films, and post-instructional parties staged by an eclectic group of invited curators and artists, many of whom have forged connections with The Building over the past few years.

According to Vidokle, the final act at The Building was conceived as an audience participation effort on a grand scale. “For the last program, we wanted to try to motivate our audience to replace us as organizers, and sent out an open call for proposals for short 30-minute events," he said. "We received more than 100 various ideas from artists, curators, and writers who have been coming to The Building over the past years. From these, we selected a dozen or so which seemed to make sense in the context of a closing program and in view of all other activities that have taken place at this site.”

There was plenty to see. Swiss super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist was on hand, in discussion with Berlin Biennial curator and critic Elena Filipovic about Walter Hopps and other groundbreaking curators featured in his new book, A Brief History of Curating. A lecture on “sousveillance” — a system integrating the city’s surveillance cameras with tracking devices and subverting their omniscient watch — led to a citywide tour. And in the upstairs classroom, a space that echoed unitednationsplaza’s philosophy of “the exhibition as a school,” curator Alix Rule hosted “Pedagogy as Potentiality in Reverse; 12 Gestures and a Short Study,” a packed life-drawing class where visitors sketched the form of American artist Cecile Evans.

“My assumption,” said Rule, “is that everyone — not just artists but critics and curators and art historians and so on — has had to draw from a model at some point. And that it would be a funny experience to do it together with this crowd of people, now, in a self-conscious “school.”

Another highlight was the screening of a remarkable 1967 film featuring the late, legendarily eccentric architect Buckminster Fuller conferring with a gaggle of hippies in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and titled, appropriately, Buckminster Fuller Meets the Hippies in Golden Gate State Park. Meanwhile, curator and Frankfurter Kunstverein Director Chus Martinez kept a series of zombie movies running, in honor of “those who will stay in Berlin after The Building,” intending to offer them “something that may help them to deal with the empty site.”