MONICA BONVICINI — Platz machen, Goldrausch Frauennetzwerk, Berlin, 1994

Published in Berlin in 1994, Platz machen — literally making space, or more pointedly make room — is one of the earliest publications of Monica Bonvicini’s career. Produced through the Goldrausch Frauennetzwerk’s Künstlerinnenprojekt Ohne Kompromiß, it belongs to Bonvicini’s 1993/94 participation in a programme established specifically to give women artists the professional infrastructure and visibility routinely denied them within the art world. Individual artist publications were central to Goldrausch’s model: not documentation after the fact, but objects designed to put an artist and her work into circulation.

For Bonvicini, the timing is unusually good. She had studied in Berlin and at CalArts and was only beginning to exhibit internationally; her first Berlin Biennale appearance would come in 1998, followed a year later by the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Platz machen therefore catches the work before institutional recognition hardened into reputation.

And the vocabulary is already there.

The book reproduces I Muri 1 and I Muri 2, made at CalArts in 1992: false walls, doors, partitions and architectural interventions that turn supposedly neutral space into something obstructed, controlled and psychologically loaded. Other photographs move through commercial interiors and advertising architecture, including a Marlboro-branded environment where corporate image, wall and exhibition structure begin slipping into one another.

What later became central to Bonvicini’s practice — architecture as an instrument of power; the politics of who occupies space; construction materials, gender, labour and institutional behaviour — is already being worked through here in remarkably direct form.

That makes the title feel almost like a manifesto in retrospect. Platz machen. Make room. Clear the space. In 1994, it describes both what the work physically does and the conditions surrounding its production: a young woman artist entering an architectural and institutional field still overwhelmingly structured by men.

Goldrausch sharpens that reading. The programme described its early objective as developing strategies of professional self-assertion for women artists, while its artist publications functioned as portable introductions to practices beyond Berlin. Bonvicini’s book is therefore both an early document of the work and part of the machinery through which that work began travelling.

The object itself is beautifully restrained: small format, spare typography, generous white space and photographs treated almost like architectural evidence. The aerial photograph on the cover turns the city into plan and surface; inside, walls, doors and rooms repeatedly interrupt the page.

Published five years before Venice made Bonvicini internationally visible, Platz machen catches the proposition while it was still being built.

13 × 15.5 cm. 48 pages; 23 illustrations. Softcover. Text by Harald Fricke.

Condition: Very good vintage condition. Light handling and minor age-related wear to covers and edges; interior clean and well preserved overall.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.