Claudia Simon

My background has been, for many years now, arts and culture - communications, project management, cultural management.
Some day, I opened - as front desk - a shop for "Vintage Interior" in Berlin-Neukölln, ie a well-sorted thrift store with a select range. Some other day I started integrating art - with own works and exhibitions with works by other artists. One day, the first typewriter showed up - a 1967 Monpti, which since then has been my signature inernet image. The Monpti is still disfunctional, sigh, but ever so beautiful. Some day later, a neighbour gave me a very nice white Olympia SM5. And passers-by started looking into the shop window in a completely different way ... After that, some other day again, I planned an exhibit for "Nachtundnebel Neukölln", a Neukölln decentralized art event, with works "created with or depicting typewriters". And I thought: Well, now, you should also sell some ...

And so it went. Since then, I tought myself - with international support from the internet - how to clean and maintain typewriters, sometimes I even manage to repair something. I read a lot about the history of typewriters, above all on German models. One day I realized that mechanical typewriters are a means, in the context of digitalisation (and, beyond that, modern times in general), to talk about related phenomenons from a very special angle.

And now, I have started doing talks - rather, in my perception, performances - on that topic. The basis is a talk for Ingite Berlin #5, www.igniteberlin.com, which can be, depending on a respective theme or event, varied and extended, duration between 5 and 30 min. And I'm always happy to bring along a mechanical typewriter as guest book.