COMMON PLACES
(1994 — 2000)
Common Places is about how cultural identity is manifested in ordinary urban spaces. Selecting four typical contemporary European cities that range in size from small town to small city, I photographed the way traces of each city 's distinctive history mix with the everyday, reflecting not only current cultural and economic cross-influences but also an ambiguity about the past and the future. The cities are: Katrineholm (Sweden), Cambrai (France), Erfurt (Germany), and Thessaloniki (Greece).
Extending the process whereby I examined how these places see and show themselves, I exhibited this project in the four concerned cities, each time soliciting response texts written from the perspective of that city. The presentation of the work in New York, accompanied by the publication of the response texts, marked the completion of the project.
A first newsprint catalog was available for the exhibition of Common Places in the four concerned cities. It included reproductions of the main body of 32 photographs and a text, The Untidy Intimacy of Places, by Christopher Phillips. Accompanying the exhibition of Common Places at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, a second newsprint publication presented response texts written from the perspective of each of the four cities:
Jean-François Chevrier- Paris, Saturday, April 1...
Catharina Gabrielsson- Out of Nowhere
Alexandra Yerolympos- A City is its People
Kai Uwe Schierz- Discovering the Past
Gertrud Sandqvist- Katrineholm as Utopia
Hercules Papaioannou- Affinity and Apartness
Jacques Soulillou- On Traffic Flows and History (1)
Alain Demarquette- On Traffic Flows and History (2)
Ingo Schulze- New Money (from Simple Places)
Carole Parmat- About Mikael Levin's Photographs of Cambrai
Beatrice Duprez- Email
Katrineholm, Sweden. 1994
Katrineholm, Sweden. 1994
Cambrai, France. 1997
Cambrai, France. 1997
Erfurt, Germany. 1998
Erfurt, Germany, 1998
Thessaloniki, Greece. 1996
Thessaloniki, Greece. 1996
Installation View, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris 2003