URBAN COSMETICS
Anton Steenbock
SONDER is an art duo surgically intervening in public spaces, routines and infrastructures. Founded in 2009 by Peter Behrbohm and Anton Steenbock, SONDER has specialised in conflict refinement, order implementation and the search for new collective futures.
In 2018 SONDER introduced a security service clandestinely watching over the people of Jena, Thuringia from a monitoring station disguised as a pile of sand. In 2021, they unveiled an equestrian statue with bonfire on Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee. 2023 they received the A.I. Anarchies Fellowship from the Berlin's Academy of the Arts to implement their socialist start-up TOTAL.EARTH, looking for a new collective afterlife. In 2023, they found the cleaning service "Urban Cosmetics" in Stuttgart, which was the first to use innovative fine cleaning measures and aggression-reducing vandalism replicas and recently expanded to Berlin.
Within the LINA programme, SONDER aims to develop new site-specific interventions, once again conceived as fused dychotomies.
The Berlin-based company SONDER offers a cutting edge treatment for your town that lets you experience its streets and squares in a way it had never been experienced before. To verify our promise, we introduce a brand new combination of soft cleaning techniques and the installation of aggression-reducing vandalism repliques in public spaces. In accordance with the Japanese Sharawadgi, artificial disorder is introduced into the cityscape at specific places, while fine-cleaning measures are be carried out simultaneously. This allows us to not unilaterally solve the conflict-ridden balance of mutual disorder and its ordering disturbance that has shaped your place for decades, but to subject this conflict to cautious care.
