Examples of encounters

Barbara Klemm + Free Christian School of Frankfurt am Main

Lighting, aperture, colour or monochrome, staged or documentary, analogue or digital work − such were the questions which the children asked of the photographer Barbara Klemm when they met her in her studio on 12 November 2008. The pupils had taken part in a photography competition at their school and got Barbara Klemm to assess their entries again. In doing so, the artist recalled her own beginnings and described the conditions under which she worked as a photographer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at locations all over the world. “Her accounts of photo-trips to distant countries were particularly exciting. A photographer certainly has some experiences! Barbara Klemm showed us the good sides of the photographer’s profession, the exciting and stimulating ones, but she did not leave out the bad sides either. She has given me the motivation to continue with photography and to take a real interest in this form of art.”

Friederike Mayröcker + Wiedner Senior Secondary School

On 9 December 2008 at the “Alte Schmiede Wien” House of Literature pupils met Friederike Mayröcker, who read from her “Scardanelli” poems, still unpublished at that time. Friederike Mayröcker started by revealing what motivated her in writing these poems. After the reading came a conversation between the poet and the pupils about the “breath of poetry”, on how the poet's own feelings are exposed in writing, about montage technique and the process of ageing, a subject about which the authoress spoke in public for the first time. On being asked what it meant for her to meet young people, Friederike Mayröcker answered: “I can only repeat again and again that I enjoy being with young people very, very much. I still feel very young myself. You stay basically the same person when you are old. I often have the feeling that I am still a seven-year-old child in a summer garden, that is what I feel inside me. I have not lost that.”

Karla Kowalski + Polytechnische Schule Graz

Karla Kowalski put up on the wall of her architect's office, especially for the children's visit, the drawings she had submitted to an international competition. Her guiding principle: to identify the qualities of a location and incorporate them in the design. And to build for the human soul. Pupils from the Graz Polytechnic School discovered from her talk how many of the buildings with which they were familiar in Graz had been designed by Karla Kowalski. But the budding carpenters' and joiners' greatest admiration was reserved for Karla Kowalski's solution for constructing a garage storey under a completed house by building it into a hill. When it came to their own professional future, the pupils were also able to find information from Karla Kowalski's staff about the various kinds of work carried out in an architectural practice.  

Hans Helmut Prinzler + Berlin pupils

Eye to eye − a history of German film, a film by Hans Helmut Prinzler and Michael Althen, brings together remarks by a number of Academy members − Andreas Dresen, Wim Wenders, Tom Tykwer, Doris Dörrie, Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Dominik Graf − about their greatest passion, the cinema. More than 100 young people from junior schools, comprehensive schools and senior secondary schools from various Berlin city districts were given observational tasks in the run-up to the meeting, which they were able to discuss after the film performance at the Academy of Arts with Hans Helmut Prinzler and Michael Althen. What does German film history consist of? What favourite films influenced their own work? Here are some comments by the pupils: “The old films have a different aesthetic from the one we are used to; we have completely different habits of seeing. It depends on whether you are prepared to involve yourself with an old film.”  “You can see that the visual motifs in the films change over time, for instance that the actors in the Fifties and Sixties were not allowed to touch each others’ lips when kissing.”

Thomas Florschuetz + Georg-Herwegh-Senior Secondary School
“Can I trust the pictures I see?” On 20 May 2009 photographer Thomas Florschuetz encouraged pupils from the art course to continue working consistently at their own photography. “You have to believe in what you are doing.” At first the pupils were annoyed at his fundamental questioning of the photographic image and at the way he enlarged and deconstructed individual parts of the body in his series of photographs entitled Body images. But they got something out of it. One pupil said after her visit to his studio: “The meeting is like a small process, in which you learn something new, discover something new. Thomas Florschuetz’s pictures are so alienated and abstract − one needs in one’s own drawing to get away more from precision reproduction and copying.”