by Shana Beth Mason
Editor’s Note: JoN welcomes Shana Beth Mason , an art writer, consultant andcritic based in Florida;  Her essay on Jane and Louise Wilson and their video installation “Stasi City” is posted below.
The dissolution of the USSR led to myriad consequences that have concerned this journal, amongst them the phenomenon of “Ostalgie”, the nostalgia that former East Germans have expressed for their Soviet past ( A very recent consideration of this term came in the form of an art exhibition last Summer at New York’s New Museum ; This wide-ranging look at “Ostalgia” brought together the work of more than fifty artists from twenty countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics.)
Seen against the background of the Ostalgie culture, The Wilsons’ “Stasi City” acts as a potent antidote and ominous remembrance of the DDR’s dreaded police.

Jane and Louise WIlson (b. 1967, lives and works in London); Stasi City; 1997; video installation, 5 mins. (loop)
Between four screens joined at their ends, zigzag images of the former police headquarters of the Stasi (the ‘secret’ enforcement sector of the GDR) pan sideways, vertically, and forward. Wooden elevators carry anonymous, conservatively dressed workers up and down who are unaware of the other’s identity (they all wear the same type of shoe, adjusted so that any man or woman walking through the space sounds exactly alike.) The camera scans an empty audio room, with a tape recorder still running but recording only the hum of the abandoned computers and fluorescent lamps. Double-padded, soundproof doors lie open, exposing sparsely furnished offices: chairs displaced from their desks, file cabinets open, and telephones lying on floors.

Stasi City, installation view
The scenery reflects a stark, Modernist space that, by the nature of the open drawers, computer equipment still running, and various papers scattered over the granite floors, looks to have been quite recently abandoned. After the sounds of buzzing lamps, tape recorders, and footsteps have accompanied the viewer on this tense tour, the final shot silently observes a pair of feet in a track suit (whether they belong to a male or female is impossible to determine absolutely), who levitates through a ransacked room along with a chair and a gas canister. As the container clangs on the floor, the camera cuts to black. The surreal journey through the eerie hallways and interrogation rooms begins once more.  Welcome to Jane and Louise Wilsons’ Stasi City.
Jane and Louise Wilson were born in Newcastle, both attending the Kenton Comprehensive School before splitting in their formal art education: Louise graduated from the Dundee College of Art, Jane from Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). The twins completed their postgraduate work at Goldsmiths (University of London), and have since had their works featured in over 80 group exhibitions and sixteen solo exhibitions in Great Britain and throughout Europe. Stasi City, alone, has headlined five international exhibitions in New York, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Berlin. Defining elements of their practice has been considered as those of ‘the mental and physical process of disorientation, the oscillation between subject and object and the implication of death’ and ‘visually compelling investigations into the tensions between control and resistance.’[1]

Jane and Louise Wilson
The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security) was founded in the 1950 and acted as the main enforcer for the GDR until the fall of the Berlin Wall beginning in December 1989. Major administrative and intelligence activity was conducted from the Berlin-Lichtenberg compound and, according to former informants, workers, and survivors of the Stasi’s brutal (some claim, fatal) interrogation methods had roughly 91,000 employees who acted as the eyes and ears of the GDR into the lives of its citizens. ‘…This vast complex…had been a catering depot for the Nazis and an internment camp for Stalin’s Russia, before becoming the sprawling home of East German intelligence.’[2]

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
After the passing of the Stasi Records Law in 1991, East German citizens stormed the secret police headquarters in search of their personal files or those of friends and loved ones.[3] Perhaps this violation of secrecy (which was the paramount concern for not only the methods and activities that the Stasi engaged in, but the very identities of the Stasi, themselves) would somehow heal the wounds from ‘a history we would rather had never existed.’[4] Nevertheless, the Wilson twins are granted access to this fortress, now rendered dysfunctional through the defeat of Socialist ideology.
The Modernist vessel of Stasi City, designed strictly for function versus form, harbored the overwhelming sense of paranoia, fear, and tension perpetuated by the Stasi’s agents upon the East German populace and, undoubtedly, one another. The mass-produced nature of every surface and every room compounds the sense of alienation and anonymity in such a vast, oppressive political organ. ‘It was strangely banal,’ Jane recalls, ‘but when we lit it, it became an intervention- it was a very theatrical space. There were these great  double doors, padded for effect and on the other side they’re just plywood.’[5] It is, as both Jane and Louise wrote, the ‘Architecture of Entrapment, [the] figure becomes split and fractured – it is absorbed  into the architecture, for a fleeting moment it is revealed, then concealed again.’[6]Objectively filmed in still and panning shots and without any spoken dialogue, the Wilsons’ interpretation of the deserted centre echoes the most crucial security measure of the Stasi: surveillance.
The tension and paranoia felt by someone who is being secretly monitored is the same felt within the Wilson twins’ theatrical reconstruction. For the Wilsons,Stasi City is the realisation of Michel Foucault’s formulation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, ‘a metaphor for the process whereby disciplinary architecture (and technologies) police both the mind and body of the modern individual.’[7] Memory and time are essential aspects of the work, calling on varying histories of communities living through the Cold War, individuals lost in its chaotic state of fear, and the disturbance of time, itself, contained in a former site representing domination and intimidation now left useless through the erasure of its parent political environment. ‘But more importantly, in this project the Wilsons have extended their poetics of alienation,’[8]and it is this alienated space of the Stasi that alienates the viewer from without, and simultaneously traps the viewer from within the repetitive, drab corridors and sealed rooms.
[1] Doherty, Claire. ‘Awaiting Oblivion’. Jane and Louise Wilson. Ellipsis, London, 2000.74.
[2] Adams, Tim. ‘Jane and Louise Wilson’. guardian.co.uk.
[3] ‘Background Information on the Stasi and East Germany’ The Lives Of Others.Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, colour, 137 min. Sony Pictures Classic. (Sony Pictures Classic Official website).
[4] Rendell, Jane. ‘Between Real And Imagined’, Urban Futures (eds. Tim Hall & Malcolm Miles). Routledge, New York. 2002. 19.
[5] Wilson, Jane quoted in Leris, Sophie. ‘The Wilson Twins: Double vision’. The Independent: On Sunday Online.
[6] Wilson, Jane and Louise. ‘Architecture of Entrapment’: notes written by Jane and Louise Wilson on Vegas edit board, displayed in Turner Prize exhibition, quoted in Millar, Jeremy, ‘The Story So Far’. Jane and Louise Wilson. Ellipsis, London, 2000. 43.
[7] Doherty, Claire. Ibid. 75.
[8] Adams, Brooks. ‘Jane and Louise Wilson at 303.’ Art in America. 1998.