The eye travels up to the ninth floor, tracing the abstract shapes sprawling over the slender façade of the residential tower at Otto-Preminger-Straße 2. The black outlines on the vertical white band of the wall invite manifold associations: flames, perhaps, or birds. But the shapes encode a more universal message: a line of poetry that the artist Barbara Kapusta translated into an alphabet of forms of her own devising.

“This is the space we inhabit as neighbors,” an initiate would read; an almost simplistic description of the residents’ situation, yet one that lends itself to diverse references and possible readings. To Kapusta’s mind, the line is a ‘proposal,’ an extended hand: everyone, however little they have in common with others, can be a neighbor. By underscoring the active dimension of inhabiting a space, the artist highlights that the making of a community is an ongoing process that must be undertaken with care and solicitude every day.

Kapusta created her flaming script for the exhibition Futures held at Kunsthalle Bratislava in 2022, where it was part of a work on video. Blending dystopia and utopia, the video looks back on community life in the fossil culture and limns a nonhierarchical future of abundant solar energy.

What matters to her, Kapusta says, is keeping the past in mind as she sets out from the present to construct a future. If we read the space as not just the shared areas of a residential building but a place in general, it may be understood in this sense as a nod to the sedimented layers of history present at any inner-city construction site, without engaging in a dedicated effort to unearth such memories.

Refusing easy legibility is a defining stratagem of Barbara Kapusta’s art: in her poems, words are often torn apart; where one poem ends and another begins is left unclear. Sounding out the possibilities of language, she believes, is implicitly a political project as well, rebuffing a reactionary language police while fostering a productive way of dealing with mistakes.

Text: Kathrin Heinrich