Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 5, 2004

In the Aquarium
Recently at "Babette" on Karl-Marx-Allee
Mark Simons

.........
If you haven't read the accompanying theoretical text, you only grasp the context of the situation gradually. The heads on the screens belong to the East Berlin documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise and the East Berlin architect and city theoretician Bruno Flierl. Flierltells Heise his life story over four hours, and this in a space that remains invisible to the public. The cameras that carry these images to the outside do not film the two together, but rather each individually, so that the spectator not only sees the one talking, but also the one who is listening...
The story carried over the headphones and onto the screen creates such a strong vortex that you almost forget the artificial environment. Above all if you look not at Flierl narrating, but rather at Heise listening, dressed in his black training suit and looking like the prototype of concentrated seriousness, you can feel like you're watching a meditation exercise.
The intimacy created there stands in stark contrast to the anonymity and disjointedness of the situation. The audience for the art project has nothing to do with the people who are sitting in the bar, drinking a cocktail and chatting. They are further isolated from them by their headsets: Like fish in an aquarium, the two populations - the art and the drinking communities - glide past each other. The familiarity created here then has the anonymity surrounding it as its precondition. The hope that a real and fruitful relationship between people who are concerned with a certain theme at a certain place could arise is obviously not something that can relied on any longer. In contrast, you can count on a public context in which every word spoken is consumed and neutralized through its strategic use and therefore made worthless.
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Berliner Zeitung, 23. April 2004

Spaces of the City, Spaces of Memory
The architect Bruno Flierl and the documentary filmmaker Thomas Heise at the KIOSK for Useful Knowledge
Tobias Lehmkuhl

.......Four hours of a narrated life - that seems like a lot, but it's little more that tatters, a minimal excerpt. The fragmentary character of such a life description is further stressed through the involvement of the audience. It virtually represents the selection process that the narrator and interviewer (since Thomas Heise is by no means only a listener) must carry out. You can take your headset off whenever you like, talk with your friends, carefully observe the other people, or pay attention to the interferences that are produced, especially by those who have only come to drink, spurning their headsets but still not letting themselves be distracted from the almost motionless partners on the screens.
Flierl and Heise sit alone, isolated in their closed conversation rooms. This is made clear when Flierl reports how isolation as a war captive presented him with the opportunity for self-discovery. At the time he was lacking a social-political orientation. This he found later in the GDR - "as prediction, not as promise."

....At midnight, the still very attentive seeming Flierl asked: "Is anybody still there?" Yes. A few have stuck it out, but outside everybody's gone. It has gotten cool. Whoever has wanted to remain is warming themselves up with a couple of glasses from the glass bar. Unnoticed, an open space has changed into a closed place of retreat. This must have pleased Bruno Flierl: architecture in motion.