1999, Weimar, then the European Capital of Culture, and a youth within it – a youth room.
A house, a half-timbered house, bought and renovated by a single mother around the time of reunification of Germany: three daughters, lots of neighbors, parties in the courtyard, squatted houses and punk bands. Right next door the Roten Nelken rehearse, the euro is introduced as book money and in August thousands of people stare at the solar eclipse with funny cardboard glasses—

The 1990s are generally regarded as a soft era: there was only the slow Internet modem, the word Troll was still associated with soft plastic figures with colorful frizzy hair, and in Bravo you read about the Y2K bug – the possible computer chaos due to the change from 1999 to 2000. People danced naively to Michael Jackson, watched Weinstein films, wanted all furniture to be made of inflatable plastic, and apart from Kosovo, all the major wars were over—

All seemed well with the world, and yet, directly across the street, the brutal architecture of a Nazi building smacked you in the face: the Gauforum Weimar, where the NSDAP was once supposed to reside to symbolize the prestige, power, and opacity of the Third Reich along with the Gauleitung Thüringen. Is it a coincidence that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the buildings across the street were occupied to counteract this with a little anarchy in miniature?
Looking through the window at the cold neoclassicism building, one could read all the reports about arson attacks and murders of people with a migration background, which increasingly made it into the newspapers "without racist or xenophobic motives" – the NSU only became publicly known in 2011, but in 1999 it formed. 1999, by the way, was also the year Dieter Ehrlich Otze, lead singer of the best-known GDR punk band Schleim-Keim, killed his father with an axe and then spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital—

How did it feel to grow up during that time, to look out those windows? Who did one want to be? Generation Y, Gen Y, Y-ler or Millenials, always searching for the meaning of life, between snake-games and digitalization? In her first solo exhibition, in which Barbara Lüdde works with biographical orientation, the artist shows fragmentary reproductions of her youth room – and thus perhaps one of her first artistic works ever!
Yung Barbara Lüdde.
The exhibition space is wallpapered with full-size photo plots, interspersed with drawings from various years, relics and symbols from her youth, some of which still appear today in the works of the artist, who has always liked to deal with social codes and rituals.

How political is remembering? The reproduction of stories, the showing and archiving of past perspectives?
It has been scientifically proven that in remembering, humans often alter memories, distort them nostalgically, and in the process deviate further and further from the original. Memories are subjective: mistakes can be softened, details added or omitted – psychologists also describe this effect as false memory syndromes.
How political are youth rooms?
What structural circumstances do they exhibit, as unpretentiously as possible? It is the center – the room where the amygdala was once formed.
As a young child, one does not paint what is actually seen: you abstract into subjective expressionism, drawing parts you know are there, or people simply through objects.
Children of kindergarten age, in turn, then paint mainly houses, trees, flowers and people – houses stand for security, trees and flowers for the living creature, people for social relationships.

And in adolescence? We can read and write, and so song lyrics, quotes and graffiti can become our symbols, our expressionism.
In her exhibition, Barbara Lüdde condenses TicTacToe CDs with huge plastic flowers, posters, Diddl mice and heart pillows into a large collage of materials, KeinBockAufNazis stickers next to smileys, peace and hemp leaf symbols become personal cave paintings that
transmit the desires, dreams and values of that time – an archaeology of our own origins.
Before 1999, the artist was allowed to do whatever she wanted with her room walls – Mama Sigrun had officially permitted this and then watched with interest as a kind of walk-in poetry album emerged from a mere room, the 3D documentation of a time. What today takes place classically as a chat history on screens unfolds here on walls and door frames, littered with messages and memories.

Of course, time has faded the paint on the walls – the photo reproductions of the room were not taken until 2021 – and even smells are unfortunately difficult to reproduce, only roughly imagined: Roommate Werner, in any case, a free-roaming rat, has not only immortalized
himself in nibbled exercise books [(°◡°)] and was also occasionally taken to readings by the artist—
In the end, remembering is always about feeling: Perhaps today we would like to return to that very feeling when we put a lava lamp in our apartment? Besides: Eine Wand ohne Edding ist wie Sex ohne Petting. (A wall without a sharpie is like sex without petting.)
End of youth, end of naivety, adolescent stuff?
Do we still hate boys today?
Time capsule.
Glitter and bright colors? Also a queer aesthetic.
Creating space for oneself, taking space.
So please
KNOCK PRIVATELY !!!
but then do come in.

*Maximiliane Schmid, 2022
(translated into English)

With friendly support of the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig.
Photos by Konrad Röhringer
Kunsthalle Ost – Leipzig 2022