Berlin: Some Negatively-Geared Historical Complaining

It's sexy to complain about Berlin, so much that it's a virtual necessity to living there. Visitors to the city might scratch the surface of its cultural life, political problems, or social atmosphere, but those who try to live in it can get a deeper understanding, especially of how difficult it is to actually survive here for many people not the beneficiaries of parental trust funds - and of how things are changing. Berlin used to be be both a saviour and a curse at the same time, a city which both compounds and alleviates precarity. But now something entirely else seems to be happening in the city.

I have lived here for 10 years, and never written about it. I'm not in love with Berlin, and I never have been - the pretentious and superficial parts always prevented me from really connecting with it. I live here in a marriage of convenience. The parts that excite me, especially the authentic radical left politics which somehow survived here in our neoliberal context, built discourse, and worked to protect so much that has been destroyed in other places, have largely disappeared or been twisted beyond recognition, even as my favourite low-key haunts have been painted over with designer paints. Now, the city looks and feels to me a lot like any other place, its rough edges smoothened out, with a shiny Big Tech gloss over every street lamp. 

A street scene in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Photo from me.

Since the 90s, Berlin has been in a state of adjustment. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a period of flux that produced a lot of strange phenomena - empty buildings, especially, which were sometimes squatted before being turned into cultural spaces or social projects. These gaps were often filled by hungry investors, conglomerates who plunged money into the former East, often without any plan for how to actually deploy what they bought. Changing governments have faced problems of excessive speculation in a marketplace that no longer services any actual need, with space distributed by a roulette wheel of capital and government interest. The desire to regulate this situation meets the reality of global capitalism, sometimes creating agreements, but more often something like a permanent stasis.

The Glow

Dreams are perhaps one of the original sites of artistic speculation. Like art-works themselves, they hold a mirror up to life, projecting our hidden desires, wants, needs, and compulsions. This makes them a rare site of speculation on authentic truth - insistently unreal, and yet somehow, in that very unreality, revealing of a deeper, otherwise inaccessible reality.

And yet, our conception of dreaming seems to have changed recently. A choir of Big Tech and political interest - having mined our material world to its current limits - turns increasingly to our fantasies as sites of new territorial invasion - our dreams are harvested for their revealing of desires to be relentless deployed in marketing, with individuals acting them out for us in real-time as agents for the objectives of exploitative corporate interest, and self-regulation posing as a solution to problems caused by an increasingly destructive context. In a world of exponential powerlessness, our dreams turn to fantasies of domination and control - fulfilled by apps that measure our brainwaves, streamline our yoga, deliver our sex on-demand, and open the door for AI to occupy the place where human imagination once steadfastly stood.

In a context relatively hostile for dreaming as a human practice, The Glow (Das Leuchten), a new work from Cologne-based SEE! Kollectiv, is refreshingly old-school in its approach to dreaming. Principally a choreographic collaboration from SE Struck, Alexandra Knieps with performance duo Anja Müller and Clara Marie Müller, the piece features live sound composition from Maria Wildeis, who sits on-stage with the sound desk and reacts to the performers gestures. It's bare and stripped-back, with long periods of silence interrupted by interventions that sit on an abject plane, not quite announcing themselves, our attention sitting constantly in the realm of subconscious white noise. 

As it's a dream, The Glow drifts between spaces: German and English languages, theatrical gesture and flowing rhythms of dance, woven together with fragments of historical texts from authors such as Walter Benjamin and Lina Bo Bardi, combined with those of the collaborators. The piece opens with a lazy pulse of light, the soundtrack beginning its wander into the main premise, as though entering sleep. From this space, a dancer (Anja Müller) emerges, their movement bare and empty as the liminal space around them. The first words are pronounced: "I was dreaming of a crash. A frontal, head-on collision. Und überall ein weißes Licht, und das war das Ende." ("and everywhere a white light, and that was the end"). The text begins a symbolic death, a metaphorical killing of the earthly state so that dreams may enter, as the second dancer (Clara Marie Müller) enters and begins to shadow the first in diagonal, somewhat aimless walks across the stage space, eventually exploding into an asymmetrical partnership that fragments and reassembles itself before the audience.

 

Photo: Dieter Hartwig

Open workshops celebrating Digital Cultures of Ukraine, 24th and 25th of February @ Flutgraben, Berlin

Among various strange scandals plaguing an apparently suddenly neoliberal(?!) Flutgraben, my colleagues at Cultural Workers Studio are planning a weekend of workshops that mark the 2-year anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which created huge suffering and displacement that continues today, and the determined resistence.

 

  Image:Your correspondant getting painted at a Cultural Workers Studio event in May, 2023.

The workshops will feature 3 of my colleagues - the indeterminable Axxi Oma, the scandalous Ann Krekhno, the unwaivering Olha Bohachevka, as well as myself, leading participants on courses through a digital jouney of the former factory Flutgraben that we have called home for approximately 2 years now. Together with this, partners from the Kyiv-based disability-access organisation On Equals and volunteer infrastructure rebuilding project YURBA, will make presentations each morning - the former on "Inclusion of people with disabilities in the cultural sector through creative social projects”, and the latter on "Reintegration of de-occupied communities through cultural interaction and social activities", while staying in nearby apartments and breakfasting every morning with Kreuzberg's finest.

The weekend workshops are 4 months in the making, developed through intensive collaboration with YURBA's dogged manager Tetiana Soloviova and OnEquals' serene community-builder, Sofiia Lavreniuk, together with my fantastic colleagues Hanna Liashenko and Olha Bohachevska. As well, we are partnering with fantastic organisations: the Germany-based collaboration organisation zusa, and the Ukraine-based infomal education organisation, Insha Osvita, which awarded us the grant through the "Culture Helps" funding stream, and who (particularly the seemingly inexhaustable Henrieke Moll) have gone extra lengths to support our sometimes-complicated activities.

Such support and collaboration is direly needed at a point in the invasion where resistance is faltering, as the international political appetite for sincerity slowly gives way to cynicism, mostly through apathy and exhaustion. It is our hope to inject some much-needed cultural energy into the struggle for Ukrainian self-determination, one where a history of oppression and aggression has an opportunity to give way to a celebration of community and togetherness.

Further information on the weekend workshops can be found here: 

https://flutgraben.org/en/entry/take-your-place-open-workshops-for-displaced-people-from-ukraine-24-25th-february/

Wanna join us for the weekend?

Here's the registration form below! (English and Ukrainian)

https://forms.gle/7XzrdP5zcyoTZwnx5

See you there!