14 June–17 August 2019
Opening:
13 June 2019
Artists
Participants
Project group station urbaner kulturen
Feben Amara, Jochen Becker, Fabian Bovens, Eva Hertzsch, Margarete Kiss, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page
Assistance
GOING OUT OF CIRCLES
Exhibition series since May 2018
The visual arts and artistically informed urban research increasingly meet in the field of ›urban cultures‹. One way of exploring, experiencing and narrating urbanity and built space is through art. Large housing estates built between 1960 and 1990 are of particular interest for this field. Their scale is comparable to a small town – yet crucial urban functions such as culture and the arts are almost all located in city centers, not here. For this reason, large housing estates remain oddly foreign to many people in the city.
The exhibition project GOING OUT OF CIRCLES seeks to create new narratives and images capable of questioning the seeming homogeneity of housing estates and tracing their contradictoriness. How are stereotypes of a place formed? How are they attributed from the outside and accepted within the place? And can pictures of the periphery be created which do not impose an ›image‹ from the outside but rather create new circles in society through co-productions between residents and artists?
GOING OUT OF CIRCLE - Part 3
Tiflis-Gldani / Berlin-Gropiusstadt
In the third part of the exhibition series, text and image collages will be shown on billboards at Place Internationale near the station urbaner kulturen. The artist Christian Hanussek and the architect Tinatin Gurgenidze deal with the large Gldani housing estate in Tbilisi while the artist Stephen Willats focuses on Berlin’s Gropiusstadt estate.
Gurgenidze and Hanussek’s series »Wir haben ja alles…« presents insights into life on the huge Gldani housing estate, home to about 30% of Tbilisi’s 1 million inhabitants. The estate was built on open land on the northern edge of the city as part of the 1970 General Plan and was ambitiously designed as a self-functioning urban infrastructure. Since the end of the socialist era, residents have randomly filled spaces between the tower blocks with garages and added self-made extensions to the flats (notoriously termed »Kamikaze loggias«). This post-socialist transformation and, at times, brutal appropriation of the estate’s original masterplan has enabled parallel microeconomies to flourish, ensuring many residents’ financial survival as well as a revival of the public domain through social interaction.
Stephen Willats has been making artistic interventions into the social fabric of society since the early 1960s. He involves people in the creative process of making his work and seeks to define art as a social practice. His series »In Isolation leben« was created in 1979/80 on Berlin’s Gropiusstadt housing estate in collaboration with the resident Klaus Müller, whose large apartment in a high-rise tower is a symbol of isolation in Willats’ four images. The work focuses on the physical and psychological pressures to which individuals are exposed through isolation in society. It describes in words and images a diversity of personal spaces created within set structures and anonymous architectures, and how people create self-organized social and creative networks as part of their struggle for expressions of personal identity and a sense of community.
Events:
Sunday, 16 June 2019, 16:00 (DE)
»Gldani: Historie, Stadtplanung und Überformung«
Filmscreening and lecture by Tinatin Gurgenidze
The huge Gldani housing estate is located in the north-western outskirts of Tbilisi (Georgia) and was built between the 1970s and 80s. Originally planned for 147,000 inhabitants, it currently houses around 170,000 people. The settlement is divided by an infrastructural axis with so-called “microrajons” (microdistricts) on both sides. Microrajons were one of the fundamental planning elements in the USSR, consisting of blocks of flats for 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants - each equipped with essential facilities: kindergartens, schools, grocery stores and some public institutions, such as a cinema or a library.
After the end of the Soviet era, the residents began to expand their homes with extensions, such as the famous “Kamikaze Loggias”. The open spaces between the apartment blocks were filled with numerous, unconventionally built garages.
During the privatisation of Georgia’s real estate, the state transferred ownership of its apartments to their inhabitants in exchange for an administrative fee. Ownership of communal areas outside the apartments and houses was also transfered to residents. This has resulted in numerous conflicts about exact ownership and about responsibilities for repairs and infrastructure. At the same time, a microeconomy has spread throughout Gldani, ensuring many residents’ economical survival and an enlivening of public space through a density of social interaction: the inhabitant-owned conversions and extensions provide shops, pubs, meeting places and workshops.
Sunday, 21 July 2019
14:30–17:30
Cricket Festival with AC Berlin and Hellersdorf Cricket Club
Since May 2017 refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan have been playing cricket at “Place Internationale” and have set up an open training session for the neighbourhood in collaboration with station urbaner kulturen. In doing so, they have created an informal ›Recreation Ground‹, something new to Germany but found in many other countries. ›Recreation Grounds‹ are large, freely accessible grass areas for recreation and sport maintained by municipalities and have their origins in Victorian Great Britain’s commitment to the human right to health and nature in towns and cities. Cricket is played informally on ›Recreation Grounds‹ world wide.
There were 50 cricket clubs in Berlin until 1937 when the National Socialist regime’s policy of enforced conformity was applied to sports and cricket was forbidden by the NSDAP. Thanks to the influence of refugees, the sport is experiencing a revival in Germany today and in 2017 the national team qualified for the World League.
The Hellersdorf-based sports club AC Berlin has founded a cricket department and refugee men are now playing successfully in the regional league. Here are their fixtures in 2019 from June onwards:
Sunday, 9 June, 11:00 vs Eagles, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 2)
Saturday, 15 June, 11:00 vs gegen BSV Britannia (in Werder)
Sunday, 16 June, 11:00 vs BSV Britannia 2, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 1)
Sunday, 23 June, 11:00 vs BCC 2, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 1)
Sunday, 28 July, 14:00 vs BCC 1 (in Werder)
Saturday, 10 August, 14:00 vs Viktoria (in Werder)
Sunday, 15 September, 11:00 vs Halle (in Werder)
The Cricket Festival is part of the project »The periphery is alive - the Hellersdorf housing estate yesterday, today and tommorow«.
»The periphery is alive - the Hellersdorf housing estate yesterday, today and tommorow« is funded from the “Soziale Stadt” programme and supported by the Amt für Weiterbildung und Kultur Marzahn-Hellersdorf (Marzahn-Hellersdorf Office for Further Education and Culture).
18:00
»Nicht-mehr, noch-nicht«
Filmscreening
»Nicht-mehr, noch-nicht [Not-more, not-yet]«, Documentary footage by Daniel Kunle and Holger Lauinger (2004, GER/Orig. with engl. subtitles, 82 Min)
As a physical sign of the not-more and not-yet, the urban wasteland also stands for situational openness and new possibility. Wastelands could become starting points for a cultural renewal of the city. Can the image of the ›urban fallow‹ wake positive associations in people’s minds?
»Nicht-mehr, noch-nicht« reflects the possibilities of the fallow. A new generation of cultural interventions on wastelands is presented: unconventional actors, projects and visions that deal with the reactivation of ›urbanity‹ on different ›terrains vagues‹. The viewer is offered suggestions and inspirations. What kind of open spaces and options might the urban fallow send to the citizens?
Saturday, 10 August 2019, 18:00 (DE)
»Die Landkartenfabrik als Unterkunft für Geflüchtete [The Cartographic Institute as a home for refugees]«
Filmscreening and lecture by Tinatin Gurgenidze
Following conflict between Georgia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s, around 200,000 ethnic Georgian and Abkhazians left their homes. The majority of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) now reside within Georgia in former public administration buildings that were never intended for residential use.
Only a small part of the former Cartographic Institute of Gldani built during the 1970s retains its original use, now 102 IDPs families from Abkhazia call the rest of it home. The inhabitant Tamta spent her whole childhood here and can recall how the hallway would flood whenever it rained through the leaking, damaged roof. She and the other children saw this as an opportunity and turned the flooded hallway into a playground.
Saturday, 17 August 2019
14:30–17:30
Cricket Fest with AC Berlin and Hellersdorf Cricket Club
Since May 2017 refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan have been playing cricket at “Place Internationale” and have set up an open training session for the neighbourhood in collaboration with station urbaner kulturen. In doing so, they have created an informal ›Recreation Ground‹, something new to Germany but found in many other countries. ›Recreation Grounds‹ are large, freely accessible grass areas for recreation and sport maintained by municipalities and have their origins in Victorian Great Britain’s commitment to the human right to health and nature in towns and cities. Cricket is played informally on ›Recreation Grounds‹ world wide.
There were 50 cricket clubs in Berlin until 1937 when the National Socialist regime’s policy of enforced conformity was applied to sports and cricket was forbidden by the NSDAP. Thanks to the influence of refugees, the sport is experiencing a revival in Germany today and in 2017 the national team qualified for the World League.
The Hellersdorf-based sports club AC Berlin has founded a cricket department and refugee men are now playing successfully in the regional league. Here are their fixtures in 2019 from June onwards:
Sunday, 9 June, 11:00 vs Eagles, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 2)
Saturday, 15 June, 11:00 vs gegen BSV Britannia (in Werder)
Sunday, 16 June, 11:00 vs BSV Britannia 2, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 1)
Sunday, 23 June, 11:00 vs BCC 2, Maifeld Berlin (pitch 1)
Sunday, 28 July, 14:00 vs BCC 1 (in Werder)
Saturday, 10 August, 14:00 vs Viktoria (in Werder)
Sunday, 15 September, 11:00 vs Halle (in Werder)
The Cricket Festival is part of the project »The periphery is alive - the Hellersdorf housing estate yesterday, today and tommorow«.
»The periphery is alive - the Hellersdorf housing estate yesterday, today and tommorow« is funded from the “Soziale Stadt” programme and supported by the Amt für Weiterbildung und Kultur Marzahn-Hellersdorf (Marzahn-Hellersdorf Office for Further Education and Culture).
18:00 (DE)
»Die Tiflis Architektur Biennale«
Lecture by Tinatin Gurgenidze
The 2018 Tbilisi Architecture Biennial (TAB) was the first to take place since Georgia regained its independence in 1991. The idea to establish an event like TAB was to create a cultural architectural event that until now did not exist in the city.
In 2013 the biennial cofounder and curator Tinatin Gurgenidze started to research the Georgian capital’s Gldani neighborhood, interviewing residents and documenting the ways in which they have adapted the buildings where they live.
Under the name of »Buildings Are Not Enough«, the TAB focused on the transformational processes and newly reinvented patterns of city dwellers. The alterations and adjustments made to architecture and the built environment that have been undertaken by inhabitants to suit their changing needs are the urban phenomena that TAB intended to read and interact with. The event pointed to the transformational processes taking place within Soviet modernist mass housing neighborhoods – so-called micro-rayon or micro-districts. This opened up a whole spectrum of questions beyond the restricted background of ‘Soviet’.
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