Max Johnson

Jump Ramps is a work by Max Johnson and Samuel Oswald. Inspired by a classic skate part, Oswald follows Johnson as he uses stolen door wedges as jump ramps to skate through the urban spaces of Vienna and Leipzig on his fingerboard. Drawing on the much-cited transformative power of skateboarding, which is based on the idea that skaters strip architectural space of its intended function and transform it into a different state for the duration of a trick, the door wedges are also repurposed in a way that reverses their function. The door wedges, normally used to hold a door in place, become in the video the very prerequisite for a movement that they had previously prevented. As a performative gesture of appropriation and reworking of both urban space and the wedges, these otherwise static elements are activated through fingerboarding. In relation to the scale of the surrounding architecture, the focus is on the temporary current state of the objects, thereby raising the question of the artistic potential of appropriation.