ABOUT
The public restroom known to Freiburg’s residents as “Kaiserwache” was due to its central location in the city and its immediacy to the banks of the Dreisam a well-frequented building. With the final decommissioning of its original purpose the question arises as to what an alternative use of the heritage-protected building might look like. A question whose relevance will only increase, especially in view of the acute lack of space in Freiburg, despite many buildings being vacant. With this in mind, the "Kaiserwache" project is planning an interim use of the space, which intends to take this problem into account by presenting forward-looking artistic perspectives. There is much we have yet to understand about precisely how the public toilet functions as a bulwark of sex binarism, a tool of gender regulation, an apparatus of class subordination, a site of heteronormative policing, an ableist institution, a place of colonial administration, and a mechanism for the production of subalternity.
Rather than simply accommodating preexisting variations among us, the dispositif of the public toilet is co-constitutive of these regimes of inequality. For a particularly instructive example, think about how the standard facility disables the bodies that do not conform to the model of its generic user. A wide range of analytical apparatuses and conceptual lenses could be used to study this site making “Kaiserwache” a fertile ground for context-oriented artistic exploration. The public toilet is remarkable as a location from which to view the production of multiple social inequalities. Attending to the interaction of multiple axes of difference in such a site can, for example, enable us to disaggregate the experiences of a group like “women” along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and nation and, by the same token, to craft potentially coalitional models of political response. Continuing this review of possible analytics, the public-private distinction, at least when deployed in a non-dichotomous fashion, can arguably reveal some interesting aspects of the site. Among other reasons, this is because the contents and boundaries of what is configured as private and public are highly variable and remarkably fluid in the case of the public toilet.
PORTFOLIO︎
Founded by the Cultural Office of Freiburg, Christina Sperling, Marco Spitz, Ilja Zaharov, Rahel Zahlten.
2021-2022 run by Christina Sperling, Marco Spitz, Ilja Zaharov, Rahel Zahlten
2023-2024 run by Christina Sperling, Lena Reckord, Ilja Zaharov
2025-2026 run by Ilja Zaharov
The space is funded by the Cultural Office of Freiburg and the Regional Council of Freiburg.
Special thanks to Samuel Dangel.
We are kindly supported by Cargo.
