APA (Abteilung für Produktentwicklung und Analytik/Department for product development and analytics), Hamburg: High potential - low outcome

The concept of the laboratory refers to the given framework of an experiment, an experimental assembly, and at the same time to the arbitrariness of this arrangement. A system of - in themselves - mutually stabilizing statements, which must be always regarded as expandable and refutable.

With "department for product development and analytics" we adopted the name of a closed down laboratory of the Shell company in Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg. It is located on a profoundly contaminated urban waste land in the port area. The governmental master plan "Sprung über die Elbe" (jump over the river Elbe) suggests the complete new modelling of the area within the next years and shifts the whole place towards the vision of a "green archipelago". Until the opening of the international garden exhibition in 2013 an ecological real estate is supposed to develop there. Why do those industrial zones and urban waste lands become projection surfaces for concepts of "action space", and to what kind of shifts refers the appropriation of artistic vocabulary and practice within urban planning processes?

In the focus of our research we discuss the parameters of space and the position we are speaking from. What would a free or open place for thinking be? Are such mental spaces tranferable to physical places? Our interest is to observe and examine the various points of strategies of appropriation and transfer between different artistic, social and economic practices, and to define the conditions of our own actions on this basis.