Conspiracy Dwellings explores surveillance in Stasi Germany and is the second work I have made on this topic, the first, Burning Poems is a 3 screen video installation a work that responds to surveillance and censorship in Stalin's Soviet Union through the life of the celebrated Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, (2005). In both of these works the concept of the home is central to issues of concealment, safety, danger and deception, themes that are also explored in earlier works such as Ghost Town, a video of the Warsaw Ghetto (1996-1998) and The X Mark of Dora Newman (1990-1993).

Conspiracy Dwellings (2007) considers the city as a three dimensional map in a 5 channel video portrait of a city that situates the conspiracy dwellings firmly as part of the architecture of a city, no longer blank spaces absorbed in the urban geography. Each of the 5 channels focuses on a particular district of the city, 1. Alte Stadt and central shopping areas: 2. Juri Gagarin Ring: 3. City North, 4. Northern new town suburbs: 5. City South and were shown in the 5 corresponding venues throughout the city as illustrated in this catalogue. The complete installation was displayed at Kunsthaus Erfurt and will be shown in this form at South Hill Park and other subsequent venues. The complete programme runs for over two and a half hours and is an attempt to construct a meditation of the city under the gaze of Stasi surveillance where the unseen protagonists the Stasi officers, informers, victims and bystanders are as it were forced into an invisible alliance in the shared cityscape; a cityscape in which citizens were a threat to the State, and the State was in fear of the people.

The work portrays most of the 483 dwellings that the Stasi used as secret meeting places active from 1980 - 1989; many of these secret-meeting places were rented rooms situated in flats often occupied by a resident who received a portion of the rent as payment. Over the 5 years in the life of the project I explored the city documenting these buildings as if in the role of an archaeologist of contemporary history or a 'painter of modern life'.

Tina Clausmeyer

The images on the enclosed poster illustrate the geographical distribution of the architecture of surveillance, in the form of 'conspiratorial dwellings' used by the MfS (East German secret police) in Erfurt during the 1980's. Every extant secret meeting place is represented by a photo. Altogether, a conspiratorially used urban network of 201 individual streets and almost 500 individual secret meeting places are visualized here. Of this, 60% of the conspiracy dwellings were in private flats, 20% in firms or institutions and 20% were in flats rented under-cover by the Stasi. This counter-cartography is organized alphabetically according to the Erfurt districts in which the once-active, secret meeting places could be identified. The visual representation of the conspiratorial meeting places clearly shows the banality of the everyday exercise of power by the SED dictatorship. In this way, the invisibility of once-used-conspiracy architecture is counteracted by being revealed today. Other meeting places, which cannot be identified any more because of renumbering or demolition of the building, are visualised as an empty space and inserted into the overall cartography.

Verena Kyselka

My Stasi file OPK (Operative Personen Kontrolle) code-named "Pigment" was opened in 1993. The file mostly contains handwritten and typewritten texts about my person, which the Stasi (Ministry of State Security) officer had written down following the verbal reports given by informelle Mitarbeitern (Informers), or IM's for short. These reports include information about me, my environment, family, circle of friends and acquaintances, home, my activities and my plans. What is written in these files mainly concerns banalities, which through the initial, orally received interpretation of the informant, and the written-interpretation of the Stasi officer become subversively active.

Dekonspiration reconstructs the real facts that lay behind the contents of my Stasi file, presented from the point of view of the observers. What really happened and what was reported? Three aspects of information are demonstrated in an installation:
1. Written reports by the Stasi officer: his personal projections about me that originated from the verbal reports of the Informant.
2. The verbal report of the Informant. The note "the IM reported openly and objectively" is often added at the end of the written report. What did this mean? Was it just a formality or does it characterise the informant as an upholder of the truth? Could it be that the report was influenced by the informants' own thoughts and perspectives?
3. Testing my memory against the observation of the Stasi Informant's record of me in the files such as what did I do at a particular place and time; what did I think; what did I write in my diary; what did I buy; which clothes did I wear?

The three aspects of observation show how ordinary everyday life can be falsely interpreted as subversive activity, recorded and filed as evidence against you. For example they reflect the misinterpretations and mechanical misconceptions produced by modern systems of "total observation" which are increasing and haphazard.

"The persecution of the persecutor" is research into the role of victim and perpetrator. Three Stasi officers worked on my file. What has happened to these Stasi officers? Did they change their names and homes and where are they now? These are questions that I asked myself almost 20 years later. I followed these people with a camera without their knowledge over a day. It is not their daily routine that interests me it's more the act of observation itself for example when and where I press the record button on the camera and why?

The word 'Pigment' printed on my T-shirt might jolt the memory.

C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent]

C.CRED initiated the Permanent Ignition project as a platform for collaborative forms of research on specific historical manifestations of dissention with the aim of deepening our understanding of various historical formations of resistance and opposition as a basis from which to construct a critical and reflective space for contemporary forms of cultural and socio-political dissention. The first project, Permanent Ignition: Turin, was a collaboration with former activists involved in the radical left-wing movement in Turin in the 1960s and 70s, and was followed by Permanent Ignition: Stuttgart-Stammheim, a project involving a series of public discussions of the historical narratives and forms of commemoration involved in the alleged 1976-77 suicides of the core group of militant activists of the first generation of the Red Army Faction in the prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim.

In the most recent manifestation of the project Permanent Ignition: The Stasi Edits, C.CRED sets out to explore dissention within the framework of the former GDR and, in particular, the repressive control and surveillance system developed by the Stasi, including the phenomena of so called informal co-workers and conspiracy dwellings. What narratives of dissention do these histories present us with? What do they articulate and what can be articulated, in turn, from their history? What space do they leave for dissention in our current political situation?

Within this context - and within the context of the overall Conspiracy Dwellings exhibition - it soon became clear that any investigation into particular East German mechanisms of surveillance and social control and the concrete strategies of dissent and resistance these generated could not be discussed in a vacuum, but instead needed to be contextualised in current political debates. Between the perspective of the victims of Stasi surveillance, nostalgic glorifications of the 'good old days' by large parts of the increasingly economically and socially marginalised East German population or their reductive banalisation in the mass media, and attempts by a small, but well-organised and vocal group of ex-Stasi personnel and among certain parts of the new post-communist party to re-contextualise the Stasi as a legitimate tool of national security there is little or no space for a consensus on how and by whom these histories should be represented. Former dissidents feel ignored and not taken seriously by the leftwing spectrum of the mainly West German dominated political and cultural elites who in their turn resent the way the dissidents' experience is often appropriated into a 'victor's history' which portrays capitalism as the only remaining viable political system thus discrediting any form of current or historical leftist project.

Permanent Ignition: The Stasi Edits tries to give space to and at the same time contextualise these different current political manoeuvres and the many coexisting and conflicting ways of talking about the Stasi and the GDR in general that they give rise to.

The installation Permanent Ignition: The Stasi Edits, in its current version, consists of an audio installation based on a series of conversations recorded in Erfurt in August 2007 with various people we encountered that agreed to participate in the project. Our approach, rather than aiming for a 'representative' selection of interview partners in order to provide some form of 'whole picture', was more intuitive and improvised, one conversation following upon another, thematically and topically as well as in terms of participants, most of whom were contacted on the basis of personal recommendations and existing social networks.

For the audio installation, these informal conversations have been edited into a series of themed tracks that have been installed on four different set of speakers positioned on low plinths in the exhibition space. The tracks are looped and played simultaneously on all four sets of speakers, creating a complex soundscape of overlapping voices that at times can be distinguished from one another, and at other times become little more than white noise, forcing the visitor to sit down next a particular set of speakers to make out the theme, narratives and perspectives outlined. Each set of speakers is also provided with a small booklet containing an elaboration on our approach to organizing the interviews and editing the recorded material, thus juxtaposing our different positions as 'artists' coming into this situation to the diverse range of positions of those participating in the project. This multiplicity of possible positions is highlighted by a number of 'citations', words that are printed on panels on the walls of the exhibition space: these refer to stereotypical roles or positions that emerged in the interviews - either implicitly or explicitly - as a way of situating one's own or other people's attitudes towards the Stasi and GDR history.

Permanent Ignition: The Stasi Edits deliberately undermines the possibility of any totalizing, unilinear history - a fixed image of the past that is both based on and reinforces the reductive, authoritarian and moralizing logic of 'good vs. bad', 'victim vs. perpetrator'. In the small exhibition space the different speakers' (hi)stories, told as memories and interpretations, in emotional or distanced, rational voices - are layered on top of each other alongside silences, misunderstandings and failures to communicate - they overlap and conflict, cancel each other out or question, confirm or confuse. They turn the installation space into a polyvocal field of sound that confuses, as much as it documents or presents - where it is easy to misunderstand, mishear, misconstruct, in other words, where one has to think again, think anew, to work to get something out of it and to map one's own path through the noise, charting out new ways of thinking about these histories along the way. Coming into the installation one doesn't get the whole picture, the whole story, an easy answer or polarity of positions - like looking into a crystal, one gets only a series of slightly skewed fragments of a history, fragments repeated from different angles and perspectives to form an entity that is not closed into any one meaning or position, but that opens up a potential to think difference and to think differently. We hope then, that Permanent Ignition: The Stasi Edits can provide such crystal images of a history that can never be owned, but that can remind us to continuously assert our irrevocable ability to dissent.