2020. Public Performance. Berlin. GER.
#permanent_construction_side #past_presence #collective_construction_of_identity #reveal_overwrites #all_are_construction_manager #cultural_rebuilding–reloaded
CONTEXT: 30 years after the fall of the wall a new city has been created. What is the result and which discourses are hidden? And which problems are we facing in this neoliberal time of urban policy?
The work embarks on a research trip in the search of changes in Berlin since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the attempt to break through the surface of the present and to question the current coding, Jakob Wirth puts the crowbar along the former wall strip (Mauerstreifen). Trying to uncover the past, paving stones are removed at four locations.
Thereby each place of the performance symbolizes its own discourse and shows lines of conflicts in Berlin: the Potsdamer Platz stands for the 90s, as a search for the identity of a new capital city; the MedieSpree and its neoliberal urban development for the 00s , the Springer new building, with the decontextualization of Berlin for the 10s and the biotope on the outskirts as a third landscape for the future of the 20. But all these layers become overwritten.
The performance itself uses official symbols, like the red dot (a paper which you install at a construction site to show the possession of a permit), to make these interventions permanent signs of revelation. It also declares everyone as a construction manager of the city, by supplying all interested people with a tool-kit for starting a new construction site. Let us continue to work together on our city and shape the cultural restructuring – reloaded.
Photos and Video: © Inda Küster, Jakob With