Public Intervention by Jakob Margit Wirth and Marina Resende

CONTEXT:

TEXT: For one day, the Warschauer Straße became Amazonstraße, a temporary transformation, a poetic irritation on the day of the inauguration, an artistic intervention by Jakob Margit Wirth and Marina Resende. Disguised as Amazon employees, we performed a fictional welcome campaign for the thousands of workers moving into the new Amazon headquarters, as well as the neighboors.

The intervention speculated on a near future already in motion: one in which corporations rename streets, redefine meaning, and quietly occupy the symbolic and material layers of the city. What appears as celebration becomes camouflage, a gesture that mirrors how Amazon infiltrates urban infrastructures while erasing traces of the local and collective.

By performing inside the language and aesthetics of the corporation – as PR and Community Officers – we exposed the smooth violence of its integration strategies. Through flyers, signage, and direct dialogue, the action aimed not only to irritate but to encounter: to open a conversation about belonging, access, and ownership.

Amazonstraße tries to make visible what is easily invisible, the process by which urban space, imagination, and identity are privatized under the rhetoric of progress and innovation. With humor and ambiguity, the intervention unfolded as a counter-script: against the normalization of platform urbanism and the silent annexation of the city by corporate capital.

Berlin does not need more symbols of power. It needs spaces for life, encounter, and resistance.

Presse Amazonstraße, 16.6.2025

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/bezirke/friedrichshain-kreuzberg/protestaktion-gegen-neues-hochhaus-in-berlin-aktivisten-benennen-s-bahnhof-warschauer-strasse-in-amazon-strasse-um-13862488.html

https://taz.de/Einzug-in-den-Amazon-Tower/!6091391

​​https://www.msn.com/de-de/finanzen/top-stories/berlin-warschauer-stra%C3%9Fe-in-amazon-stra%C3%9Fe-umbenannt-proteste-gegen-east-side-tower/ar-AA1GOGDA

https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/news/berlin-warschauer-strasse-in-amazon-strasse-umbenannt-proteste-gegen-east-side-tower-li.2333881

https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/friedrichshain-kreuzberg/article409274235/berlin-wegner-bei-der-eroeffnung-des-amazon-towers.html

https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1191934.edge-east-side-tower-demo-gegen-amazon-turm-in-berlin-auf-schlechte-nachbarschaft.html

Images ©Jeremy Knowles