Achtung Sprengarbeiten! (Caution! Blasting Operations!) examines the phenomenon of blasting and its social implications with regard to power and powerlessness. As an irreversible fragmentation of objects, blasting stands for both the violent destruction of existing structures and the release of previously bound-up energy.
As a linguistic metaphor, the explosive force of blasting can be found in many common phrases and expressions, such as when we speak of something being “dynamite” or a “bomb,” of “having a blast,” of “bringing down the house,” getting “blown away” or “blowing your mind or your stack or your cool.” And scholarship and the arts cannot get by without the notion of detonation. Thus modernity’s irreversible processes of change are described as “blasting open” the continuum of history; and artistic avant-garde movements like to make use of blasting metaphors in order to emphasize the radicalness of their views.

Ed.: nGbK

Work group: Eckhard Gruber, Karl Heinz Jeron, Martin Kaltwasser, Matthias Reichelt, Petra Spielhagen, Annette Taubert, Christoph Tempel

With contributions by: Eckhard Gruber, Ludwig Seyfahrt, Thomas Brandstetter, Mike Davis, Shirin Homann-Saadat, Jörg Rennert, Annette Taubert, Martin Regenbrecht, Christoph Tempel