A project by Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg for the Förderschulzentrum München Ost

We all remember them from our schooldays, those messages left behind by others - a simple 'I was here' carved on a desktop or a cheeky graffito sprayed on a wall. Schoolchildren obviously feel a need to leave their mark on their school, however anonymously. In Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht ('Marble, stone and iron breaks') Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg give pupils of the Förderzentrum München Ost, a special school in Messestadt, an opportunity of inscribing their personal history in the history of the school. In association with the school staff, the artists will help pupils to create an innovative piece of Art for Architecture that will become physically integrated in the school building. The situation is unusual in that, although the work of the school has already begun, its building is still being designed. The Förderzentrum is scheduled to move into its new home in 2005 along with an elementary school and a crèche. At present, the teachers and pupils occupy provisional quarters at the nearby elementary school.
Riedweg and Dias took their cue from the school's specific needs. They started by visiting the premises, learning about the school's activities and asking staff and pupils about their requirements. The project takes into account the nature of the Förderzentrum's work, which is to give intensive instruction in small classes to children in need of special help in preparation for attending elementary or secondary school. Pupils and staff are an integral part of the project; and planers and architects involved in the new building have agreed to find a place in it for the resulting work of art.
Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht offers everyone concerned an opportunity of developing a relationship with their future home even before it has been built. The project promotes this feeling of belonging to a community by encouraging input from those who fill a school building with life - the pupils and staff. Riedweg and Dias are creating an archive. Each and every member of the Förderzentrum is represented in this archive, which in its entirety will reflect the specific character of the school. Objects collected in glass boxes will form a storehouse of personal memories and associations, giving concrete expression to the links between objects and personal identity that all of us are continually establishing as an aid to orientation in time and space. Recorded in this way, individual stories become history, part of a intricate network of meanings that give individual pupils a firm place both in their immediate surroundings and in society as a whole.

The boxes might be built into the new structure like items on shelves, generating a collective portrait of the school community, perhaps in conjunction with monitor images. In addition, empty boxes will be made available for future pupils at the Förderzentrum to continue the project in a similar way. The work will also be presented on a website: at the click of a mouse, users will be able to access the objects and the stories associated with them, along with videos and photographs.
Dias and Riedweg will carry out the project in several stages. During a first workshop phase they will give all classes in the Förderzentrum an introduction to approaching smells and objects in associative terms. In the second workshop phase the artists will ask pupils and staff to bring along an object that reminds them of an important moment in their life and to tell the story in which the object played a role. In this way, the object becomes a medium for participants both to describe and to investigate some aspect of their attitudes to the world. The objects will be collected at a central point in the school. Their handing-over and the telling of the stories relating to them will be recorded, in whatever language the children choose.
Following these workshop phases, the objects will be stored in the glass boxes and the project's website designed. The site will include a link to the Förderzentrum's own site. Later, the artists will follow the construction of the new school building in order to discuss with the architects how the installation could be integrated in the structure. When pupils and teachers move in in 2005 they will find something familiar in the building that will immediately tell them that this is their school.

Summer 2002