The final presentation of our Artist Residency at Jelly Reading - Mayor David Stevens signs a brick as part of the HEXAGON Project

Me, wearing the HEXAGON Cape, together with Matt Hulse and the Mayor and Mayoress David and Alison Stevens after our final presentation on the Düsseldorf Way in Reading (the photo was taken by my self-timer)

From August 4th to August 21st, together with the British artist and filmmaker Matt Hulse I was invited to stay in the space of the Jelly Reading as artists in residence. So our stay at the art association which is located in Broadstreet Mall, right next to the HEXAGON, lasted from my own until Matt's birthday. During our stay in the post-war modernist architectural buildings Matt and I did a lot of research and prepared our interdisciplinary film project about HEXAGON Reading.

On September 4^th we returned to the Jelly to give a final presentation of what we had achieved during our residency. We showed our own photos together with archive material we had found in the library and the HEXAGON, the Cape I had made, that was related to the architecture of the multi-finctional venue and above all we presented our video “There is a Place” (Link) that we shot in the architecture around the HEXAGON. To our great delight, the Mayor of Reading, David Stevens, and his wife Alison took part in our final presentation, which ultimately led to the idea of ​​the international brick exchange, respectively the brick signing.

Reading - Famous for beer, biscuits, bulbs - and bricks
As bricks play an important role in both twin cities, ideally as well as materially, it seemed obvious to us to include the topic of bricks in our project, also as a homage to Joseph Beuys, whose 100th birthday was celebrated in 2021. In 1983 Beuys created a work called “Brick for F.I.U.”, that consisted of a series of 200 bricks, signed and numbered by himself. Beuys' ability to see beauty in everyday life is an approach that Matt Hulse and I really appreciate (like e.g. in our video SPACEFALL).

In the end of our final presentation at the Jelly, we asked Mayor David Stevens to sign a brick for us, which to our great pleasure he did. Thereby and in the sense of Joseph Beuys the Mayor acted as an artist – following Beuys's idea tht everyone has the ability to be an artist. In the meantime, a new tradition has developed from the idea of brick signing and it was continued in Düsseldorf as well as in Reading.

Photo: Philip Newcombe, Reading