Pictures of an exhibition – participatory social art performance

On the artist website www.petry.eu you could read a quot from Elon Musk: “I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.” and the reply from the spanish german artist Juan Petry: “I wanted to be involved in worlds that would change the thing.” Following his mission to figure out agagin and again new kinds of participatory social sculptures he invited friends and neighbours – with the german artist Rolf Habel – to a very special art exhibition.

Under the titlle “Copii de Ciocanesti – the kids of Ciocanesti” he mounted 14 canvas in the “room for art” in Windeck near Cologne, in our second home unit in Germany.

Every canvas was related to a real human friend in the area of Ciocanesti, a villlage 31 kilometer far from the capital Bucharest in Romania. Laura, Raluca, Irina and all the other children of the yearly summer school where described with a portrait foto, a short description and some information about their role in this summer school event.

The “special” in this exhibition was the issue, that no painting was worked out. Petry had mounted white canvas at each place.

Before the audiance entered the exhibition space, Petry talked about his experience in the summer school in the last two years and his workshops and the lovely people in Romania.

After a walk from canvas to canvas talking about the little stories related to the kids of Ciocanesti the audience started to work out all paintings. Everybody choosed 3 or 4 stories and they organised themselves in teams to paint 14 works in 4 hours.

Finally all art works where mounted again and we all enjoyed a walk through this “pictures of an exhibition”.

This is one of the works, titled: “Raluca”.