2-3 Straßen TEXT & 2-3 Straßen MAKING OF

2-3 Straßen TEXT

This book is entitled TEXT. The book is text, it is social sculpture, and it is art to which everyone has contributed. People who write on a daily basis change themselves. People who change themselves, change the world.

There are many different books, but this book is unique. 887 authors wrote a book. 10.000 contributions – densely packed, chronological – substitute, contradict and complement each other. A year without a breather. 16 languages together in one place. This place is called Germany. The text is rugged and thus is a manifestation of many people. It is boundless like the present.

This book would be inconceivable without the internet. Each author immerses himself alone in the bodiless digital world; the empty page. No one knows the others’ work. This book wrote itself. 

2-3 Straßen MAKING OF

A gift of time, a tree of hope, a house-journey, a native garden – the 2-3 Streets exhibition lasted for a year. 887 people wrote one book. Can creativity change a neighbourhood?

Dortmund, Duisburg and Mülheim an der Ruhr: 2-3 Streets creates society. Consumers become producers. Art becomes a real-time experiment on three very ordinary streets. 2-3 Straßen MAKING OF is the companion book to the 3.000-page book TEXT.

The book outlines the process from the initial idea and planning, life on the streets and also includes reflections on the sustainability of art. 2-3 Streets creates room and time for ideas and changes, which can never come too late. The streets become more spacious.

Jochen Gerz is concerned with the authorship of society as a whole. Creativity is not the privilege of artists, but rather a renewable social energy. This book can be recommended to all cultures and to everyone who lives on a street. It is a book which opposes the fixation on projects and the pressure to be unique at all times, because art sprouts in society like an aspirin in water – and takes effect.