Hajoe Moderegger, Associate Professor of electronic design & multimedia in the City College Art Department, has been named a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.
Hajoe Moderegger, associate professor of electronic design & multimedia in The City College of New York (CCNY) art department, has been named a 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. He will share the fellowship with his artist wife, Franziska Lamprecht, with whom he collaborates under the name “eteam.”
Guggenheim Fellowships support men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. Professor Moderegger and Ms. Lamprecht are among 180 artists, scientists and scholars named Fellows this year, picked from approximately 3,000 applicants from the United States and Canada.
Professor Moderegger said the fellowship would support the creation of a new work called OS Grabeland. The project deals with issues of existing and missing resources related to two pieces of land, one located in the Northeast of Germany and one located in the Northeast of Nevada. The land in Germany is a set of 13 allotment gardens, seven of which are rented out. Eteam are in the second phase of the project, which started in 2006 with the purchase of the allotment gardens.
"In 2009, the current tenants went on a transatlantic land cruise which brought everyone to America,” explained Professor Moderegger, who will be on sabbatical next semester. “This year the journey continues in order to reach Nevada. All these travels happen hypothetically, most of the gardeners have never left their village. In order to travel, we, together with the gardeners act out the journey to turn it into a reality. All efforts are being video taped, photographed and turned into a document of what has happened.”
Formed in 2001, eteam fuses land ownership, participation and utopian ideas through the use of new media tools and physical presence. They have produced work in many media including video, web, installation and live performance.
Principally, the couple pursues projects based on random pieces of land they buy on eBay or in Second Life (SL). SL is a virtual world accessible on the Internet that allows users (called residents) to, among other things, meet other residents, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade virtual property or build virtual objects.
“We explore options of land use through continued acquisitions of different-sized parcels and locations. Each new location demands a different solution for what we see as an alternative potential of the place,” said Professor Moderegger.
Museums and galleries that have shown eteam’s works include: Centre Pompidou, in Paris; MUMOK, in Vienna; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, in Madrid; the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, MO; Neues Museum in Weimar, Germany, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Eyebeam, in New York.
Their videos, including “1.1 Acre Flatscreen,” have been screened at: the 11th Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva; the New York Video Festival; Taiwan International Documentary Festival, in Taipei, and Transmediale, in Berlin.
In 2009, eteam won the Bremer Video Art Award. They’ve also earned grants and awards from Art in General, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, the Henry Moore Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and Rhizome. In addition, the couple has been awarded residencies at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, the MacDowell Colony, Smack Mellon and Yaddo.