Selected Citizens

Paul Hutchinson

Info: Graffiti reading Stadt für Alle stretches across a chimney in large white letters. City for all is the phrase visible from Paul Hutchinson’s Berlin studio window that he encounters almost daily, almost ritualistically. And yet it remains aspirational, suspended between declaration and reality. What does it mean for a city to belong to everyone? It is a promise that suggests universality compared to a lived experience that suggests otherwise. Because, indeed, some citizens are worth more than others. In The Right to the City (1968), French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues that urban space should not be governed by market logic alone – not reduced to a commodity, not carved into exclusive zones of access and ownership – but should be shaped by those who inhabit it. Instead, today’s urban life has increasingly been downgraded into a product with aestheticized governance and uprooted social interaction. The promise remains universal, but the reality is selective. Paul Hutchinson’s Selected Citizens unfolds inside this contradiction. The exhibition marks a thematic continuation of his practice, which has long circled the phenomena of contemporary urban life: social mobility, the oscillation between intimacy and exposure, fragility and inner-city roughness, personal vision and collective structure. (…) Parallel eröffnet die Ausstellung Paula Allhorn. Interiors bei Caprii by Sies + Höke, Orangeriestr. 6, 40213 Düsseldorf.