Public Performance. Berlin. GER. 2020.
#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 searchery of changes in Berlin since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jakob Wirth puts the crowbar along the former wall strip (Mauerstreifen). Paving stones are removed at four locations. He tries to break through the surface of the present and to question the current coding. He doesn`t recognize it as ‚given‘ and at the same time he tries to uncover the past.
Each places of performance symbolizes its own discourse and show lines of conflicts in Berlin: the Potsdamer Platz stands for the 90s, as a search for the identity of a new capital city; for the 00s the MedieSpree and its neoliberal urban development, for the 10s the Springer new building, with the decontextualization of Berlin and for the future of the 20s, the biotope on the outskirts as a third landscape. But all these layers becoming overwritten.
The performance itself, uses oficial symbols, like the red dot (a paper which you install at a construction side to show that you have permission), to make these interventions as permanent signs of revelation. And 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 side. Let us continue to work together on our city and shape the cultural restructuring – reloaded.
Photos and Video: © Inda Küster, Jakob With
