5 February 2020 / 1979 / 1980

Videoart feature
Territory of Beauty

5 February 2020

Today, Wilfried is announcing Cologne as the next physical NewMediaFest2020 venue in March 2020 – WOW Jubilee III / Germany.

He actually had no plans to do anything in the field of art again in Cologne, but Letitia Gaba, one of the Cologne based visual artists participating in some of his projects and member of an artist collective running the independent art space “Halle Zollstock” invited him to do a presentation of “The 7 Memorials for Humanity” on Sunday, 1 March 2020.

For Wilfried it is the unique opportunity to thank all the artists from the region of Rhineland (including besides Cologne also the extended region around Düsseldorf, Bonn etc) personally for their support since 2000, by presenting, among others, their artistic contributions in virtual and physical space. An official invitation will be released next week.

5 February 1979 / 1980

In Wilfried’s life February was often the month for making far-reaching decisions, on 5 February 1979 he (still residing in Amsterdam after the art study @ Rijksakademie for the past 4 years) leaves for a classical travel to Italy like all the artists generations had done during the past centuries, he is looking for that kind of inspiration he needs when he would start 1980 his professional life as a visual artist under the identity of AGRICOLA, but he needs desperately also some distance in order to find out whether his love relationship could be saved.

It will be a travel of really big adventures, Wilfried is describing in the autobiographical novel he is writing since some time, when he located in Taormina on Sicily starts exploring the Italian island first, then slowly travelling back to the North by visiting all the magic places around Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Milan, and returning after nine months via a side trip to his mothers home in Southern Germany back to Amsterdam, just to find out that his love in Amsterdam cannot be saved, so he decides to leave Amsterdam on 5 February 1980 for sure in order to find his new centre of life in Cologne, a place attracting Wilfried (at that time) the most as a city of the arts.

Nobody could know at that time, that on 9 November 1989 the wall in Berlin would be falling, on 4 October 1990 Germany would be re-united and Cologne once Germany’s capital of culture closely situated to Bonn, would never recover from losing all attraction and privileges after the German capital had moved from Bonn to Berlin.
Cologne with its nowadays more than 1 million inhabitants is probably the most provincial of all German provincial towns, also due to widely known characteristics – a typical kind of corruption, called “Klüngel”. Cologne is not standing for art and culture, but for corruption and lack of culture. That’s really sad!