Three Dots & Sandra of the Tulip House or How To Live in a Free State (2001)
By Matthew Buckingham
Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koester's video installation Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State, 2001, is a ruminative work inspired by the complex history of Christiania, a famous anarchistic community established in Copenhagen in 1971. Divided between large freestanding screens--each accompanied by its own unidirectional speaker to minimize the discordant buildup of sound--Sandra of the Tuliphouse comprises five independent twelve-to-twenty-minute video loops that may be watched in any order, in part or (by the more determined visitor) from beginning to end. Making its belated New York debut at the Kitchen, Buckingham and Koester's project feels oddly removed from real time, its ostensible subject an anachronistic curiosity repositioned as a locus for open-ended reflection. While the project relies on a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, historical record and self-conscious mythmaking, we are at least fairly certain that Christiania--however unlikely it is sometimes made to seem--is a real place. A self-governing squat located on eighty-five acres of land owned by the Danish Defense Ministry, it is currently inhabited by nearly one thousand people, bu…
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