This project organized by AM art space and Department for Culture and Education of the German Consulate-General Shanghai (DcaE). Sibylle Hofter introduces her working processes to potential participants as well as to an interested public. With her background of 2 decades of multi media art practice including extended research on extra artistic fields, curatorial and participative approaches she is currently driven by the hubris to create a multi focal collaborative photographic portray of Shanghai within its regional context and beyond the schemes of photographical genres. 

The ongoing Agentur Schwimmer photo project promotes a simple approach in a complex world: what is behind the facades and what makes our daily reality working? What are our possibilities to perceive and to show? Who is sewing the pants we recently bought? Who is planning a new city neighborhood? Who is teaching our children? How is the health system organised? How are they working in the offices of the internationally acting construction contractor? How is a tourist service company organised? How are the goods transported from A to B? Where and how is our food grown? 

Each of these few questions out of a million represents a multitude of background aspects and obvious aspects. The general approach of the project is the unrestrained enthusiasm to get to know more about the inner workings of society: the supply chains of society. 

Art is able to develop visual languages which are beyond our daily visual experience. Contemporary reality is over-fed by trillions of data-records usually named "images". But where are the images? Along the cleavages of the genres the photographic image is currently decomposed to certain schemes according to and simultaneously with specific image economies. Even photo art tends to decrease in schemes and formal discussion in order to withdraw from core involvement with the subjects shown.

*image (left)
Sibylle Hofter
Christmas singing, soccer club FC Union, Berlin, dec 2013 
courtesy of the artist