Curated by Alexandra Meffert & Jorge Sanguino:
Group show in Chemnitz following an invitation from Klub Solitaer

With works by Charles Cohen, Beatriz Eugenia Diaz, Mauricio Limón de León, Angelika Kammann, Christian Seybold.
Opening Dec. 5. 7 pm.

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One of the most recurring themes in nineteenth-century literature is the move to urban centers such as Paris, London, and Saint Petersburg. Characters full of ambition and curiosity enter a difficult landscape of intricate, unreadable social relations—shot through with hypocrisy, superficiality, and corruption. Through this lens, authors like Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky anatomized the bourgeois society of their time. As Stendhal observed in The Red and the Black (1830), “I am here because of my name, but thought is hated in your salons.” This cutting remark captures the vanity of the Parisian milieu, a society ruled by appearances and ambition.

A reversal of this topos—the retreat from the city to the province or small town—signals a moral exile in search of authenticity and simplicity. The pattern persists today in softer form: recent shifts from major hubs to less densely populated regions (for instance, from Berlin to Brandenburg) suggest the narrative’s continued relevance. Yet what stands out now is that “moving” is often strategized from the perspective of individual benefit rather than in terms of relationships with the new communities and collectives already inhabiting these places.

With this in mind, our Düsseldorf–Chemnitz proposal investigates the contemporary meanings of “moving”: relocating from dense cultural-financial capitals—mirrors of many representations—to other cities, and asking how such moves might be reimagined not as private optimizations but as practices of relation, reciprocity, and shared life.

Klub Solitaer e.V.
Augustusburger Str. 102
09126 Chemnitz