VIDEOFENSTER 2021 is an immersive urban video-art and film project that will take place in Cologne’s Ehrenfeld neighbourhood in Germany. The works exhibited by Video_Fernster will illuminate the streets transforming the windows and displays of local businesses into screens or micro-cinemas that configure a lively urban trail. Pedestrians and viewers will be drawn into an urban experience inspired by the CoronaVirus pandemic in which real and imagined perceptions, stories, memories and imageries of lockdown will be revealed at different locations in the neighbourhood. This first edition of Video_Fenster has a particular interest in examining ‘homes’, ‘neighbourhoods’ and ‘communities’ and their connections with identity, memory and representation. All works submitted should relate to one or more of Video_Fenster’s central topics; 1. Inside or Outside? 2. Home, a wide world 3. Planet House 4. Ehrenfeld’s Narratives. Descriptions of each topic are explained in detail in the Open Call.

Windows are the heart of the VIDEOFENSTER project. We believe windows can convey feelings of attraction, curiosity, exposition, mystery, secrecy and exclusion. They also make us instinctively aware of the divisions between private and public spaces. As such, windows connect both spaces and act as openings among these spaces. Physically they suggest an ambivalent topography where we can find space, time, sound, reflection, opacity and transparency as fluctuating effects that become mediators of our perception. During the development of CoronaVirus there have been times in which they have been the only connection we have had with the world outside our homes. They have become accomplices of our innermost desires and feelings. It is now time to invert the role of windows into sites of expression so we can finally come together. Each location can be accessed following our urban video trail. Every window gives access to one of the four themes of VIDEOFENSTER’s 2021 version and is designed as a site for displaying meaningful narratives that invite viewers to reflect and express their own experiences during the Covid_19 pandemic.

Video_Fenster_2021 is a thriving possibility for artists, filmmakers, Ehrenfeld community and general public to explore the city, engage with art and and share ideas. It’s also an invitation to celebrate the neighbourhood and its creative and festive vibe by enjoying artwork that evidences a reflexive examination of our spaces and exposes us to a series of intimate reflections that have been held among walls during this epidemic. In other words, Video_Fernster’s video trail transfigures the neighbourhood’s urban and architectural features into sites where subjective images explore the effects of living through a pandemic from a site that has been restricted to us, the city.