1550 San Remo Drive was filmed in February 2017 on the premises of the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, California, USA. The video features quotes from JR Davidson, Thomas Mann and the real estate companies which marketed the house, before it was bought by the German government in November 2016 for $13.25 million. 
 

"The Thomas Mann House at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California, was designed by the modernist architect JR Davidson for the exiled German writer Thomas Mann in 1941. Mann lived at the house between 1942 and 1952 before his emigration to Switzerland, where he spent the last three years of his life. The house is 5,000 square feet (460 m2) large and situated on a plot of an acre. In 2012, the house was put up for rent in 2012 for $15,000 per month, and for sale in 2016 for $14,995,000. The house was marketed as a potential "tear down", with no mention of Mann in accompanying sales literature. At the time of its potential sale, the house was not subject to any local historical protection orders. The house was bought by the Government of Germany in November 2016 for $13.25 million." 
 

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann_House)

 

Niklas Goldbach lives and works in Berlin. After studying Sociology and "Photography and Video" he was awarded with a "Meisterschüler" degree at the University of the Arts Berlin in 2006. In 2005 he received the Fulbright Grant New York and majored in the MFA program of Hunter College, New York City.

 

Niklas Goldbach received several scholarships and has presented his works in numerous international shows and festivals such as Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Mori-Art Museum, Tokyo, Cornerhouse, Manchester, documenta 14 public programs, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Centre Pompidou.

 

Niklas Goldbach was a visual artist-in-residence at Villa Aurora in early 2017. During his fellowship he started filming for 1550 San Remo Drive.

 

 

Filmed with support of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V. http://www.vatmh.org

In the series titled Absent Speech, Delgado decided to work with international news headlines, published in the newspapers or the internet. From a technical standpoint, he has vanished the content of the news, including any reference of the image. By suppressing environments, places, and cultures, the news is reduced to a minimal presence, stripping them of meanings and/or adding others. The artist tried to create a space of mental repose, aimed at generating a supposed tranquility, in contrast to all the alarming, and in many cases manipulated, news that the media offers us constantly.

 

In this artwork, both the discourse of the press and the news in general become something "abstract" and formal, while the decorative appearance trivializes the ideological and social content, and turns the people involved in the news into concealed, unknown identity characters. On the other hand, these paintings depart from any nationalism or stereotype regarding the phenomenon of identity, to reach a dimension and an accent of universal nature, borderless, transcultural, quite in tune with our times.

 

The figuration represented in these works is unfolded within a space of strange ambiguity. They are human figures, in solitude or together, those that make up this universe of what at some point were just that, news headlines.

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Born in Cuba in 1965, Angel Delgado lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada. A visual artist who includes performances in his practice, Delgado centers his work on the issue of individual liberty, or the lack thereof. This focus is the result of having been sent to prison for six months in the early 1990s, for a scandal due to a public performance that he presented in Havana, Cuba. It was in a Cuban prison that Delgado found his main technical and instrumental resources, developing a kind of artwork closely linked to the living conditions in jail, including soap sculptures and paintings of religious images on fabric. His work consequently is based on the limitations, restrictions, prohibitions, controls and other losses of freedom that are constantly imposed on the human being within society. At the moment his interest is to take personal experiences towards a collective experience, speaking about the imprisoned condition that the collective psyche suffers as it confines the individual.