The latest approach to city development has insisted on showing and instigating bottom-up processes. Artistic means are getting used to set up situations in which different social groups can express their demands towards decision-makers and get involved in the development of their neighborhood. In Berlin an important protest movement against raising rents and profit-making city development has emerged and made its demand a public affair. However, the process of how city developments are making their way from top-level decision-making down to the asphalt still remains rarely traceable.

This workshop will consist of a multi-headed investigation through artistic means of a new area in the middle of Berlin whose development is currently taking place away from public awareness. Some of the means employed will be: archive research, interviews with the administration, street-mike, jam poetry, photography, street performance, etc. Following an input on urban geography and interventionist art history, we will together create a perceptive mapping of the traces left by different agents of power, ranging from international investment companies and EU's normative governing down to local neighborhood consulting assemblies and anonymous poster actions. The goal is to test, compare and experiment with different means of collection and text and image production in order to follow and connect the multilayered, often remote and multiscalar forces concretely building the city (Neil Brenner, New State Spaces). Invited artists and scholars will help us reflect on the ongoing process.

The study case will be the area historically known as Lehrter Bahnhof, now called Europacity. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with the exception of an endless construction site which became the Hauptbahnhof Berlin, this area has stayed under the radar of city development, allowing several cultural activities to take place in its midst. Since 2005 there is a masterplan for the area, based on an international private-public cooperation project, including the surroundings of the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city's contemporary art venue. The transformations are incremental and strangely remote from public life even though they are unfolding in the middle of the German capital.

Outputs of the workshop will find their way onsite as much as via spreadable documents. Means of mechanical, digital and performative reproduction will be explored and combined, including newspaper distributed in the neighborhood, festive formats like processions and parties and one-night shows.

Announcement :: Interventions in the public space
Meeting Point: Minna-Cauerstrasse / Invalidenstrasse, July 30th 2015, from 17 to 21h

Europa City Berlin where is that? Please take me there? Brückenkopf ins Niemansland – Do you live here? If Europe was an animal, which would it be? A lion, a spider, an elephant, a sloth… What should be on a square called Europe Square? Many things we share with you come out there? – April is the cruellest months breeding – Why do you live in Berlin?

We invite you beyond the masterplan on a shared journey through the scenery of the coming Europacity. A constellation of actions and horizons where you can map with us the atmosphere of the future. Good shoes and water required.