When I’m tired of justifying my existence as an artist, I hit the streets and just live as one. Lara Busch, member of the Foundation for Non-Existance

2 decades or 20 years or just 7,300 days further away from here…Lara Busch is getting lost in Berlin in the way that Walter Benjamin once pointed out while talking about his childhood there. And, as he emphasised, that kind of getting lost needs training. Many of us are engaged in a similar quest for meaning in different cities around the globe. However, Berlin is a very specific case. Once, there was a wall. This wall was the symbol of the once dismembered Europe, of a world seemingly divided only into the East and the West. Today, no other city in Europe is as thoroughly documented as Berlin. In no other city in the world can we buy as many maps from different periods of urban development as in Berlin. So, how come that appropriation-by-art (and I am not referring to appropriation art, readymades, the Neo-Geo group or Sherrie Levine’s notion of appropriation) makes so much difference in rendering the city? I am referring to appropriation-by-art which is interested in originality, authenticity and authorship of a place, which is, as we might understand, a palimpsest (de Certeau). By adding her text to the semantically less saturated patches of the spatial manuscript of the city, Busch takes exclusive possession of its history, or better to say, historicity. Gut gekauft, gern gekauft opens a series of dialogues with different places, giving us the possibility to observe closer and find out what a particular mise en scene is about. There, or…here. Written 2006 by Sonja Lebos