Cité internationale des arts
18 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, 75004 Paris

Text Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

Timo Herbst’s proposition in the Cité des Arts is an artistic research on gestures of social urbanity and especially on questions of movement in public space. Based on the studies of the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, which have become known as „Rhythmanalysis“, the artist investigates the presence and movement of passers-by in significant places in three major cities of the world (Paris, Cologne, Tokyo). Location documentary footage, deconstructed and restructured through data processing, serves Herbst as the visual material that merges with supplementary drawings and the display dispositive (a drawing as a projection surface on a tripod) to form an overall installation. Herbst shot the Parisian footage on the very spot (Rue Rambuteau corner at the Centre Pompidou, where Lefebvre himself once made his observations.).

Accompanied is the installation by drawings based on Laszlo’s Moholy Nagy film script “Dynamics of a the Metropolis” (1921/22), in which the Hungarian artist describes the acceleration and simultaneity of the experience of urban space of perception. Herbst transforms that script with his research into the pace of moving bodies in the contemporary city. The paradigm of movement then gets mirrored in natural processes of meteorological phenomena, which are ultimately also to be seen in relation to human activities.

Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge