12 Last Songs New York – an update
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12 Last Songs New York – an update
Unfolding on different scales – from intimate conversations in a library, to a durational performance and live exhibition presented in a museum – the project continued Quarantine’s exploration of diverse approaches to mass portraiture.
Taking place in 2025 in Manchester and Chemnitz, twin cities since 1983, The Questions was made in collaboration with ASA-FF (Chemnitz, Germany) and formed part of the programme for Chemnitz 2025: European Capital of Culture.
In Building of spines, hosted in libraries, a book is handmade over 7 days in response to conversations with library users, published and made available in the library’s collection.
Would Like To Meet brought together 5 artists from Chemnitz with 5 artists from Manchester, each with a generational age gap, asking what questions they might have for each other. Read about the artists here!
Telescope is a new work by Quarantine – a live exhibition of borrowed belongings, and their owners’ thoughts about where they belong. Young people on the cusp of adulthood and older people who’ve lived a life are invited to lend something to display. This evolving exhibition is animated by a live dialogue, as performance-hosts ask the lenders a series of questions as starting points for conversations that are by turns complex, funny, familiar, extraordinary – and profoundly human.
It’s an insight into what we hold on to; what we value and why, both individually and as a society.
Alongside these parts, The Questions was accompanied by Florian Malzacher’s The Art of Assembly, which brings together artists, activists and thinkers in a longitudinal study into how and why it matters that we physically assemble, and what this enables – socially and politically – in a time when so much is uncertain. In Manchester and Chemnitz, we asked: what makes a city?
Image: Quarantine, Telescope, Museum Gunzenhauser. Photo: Mark Frost