post #6: art as community identity building process

Absthof, Halberstadt - marking out the emptiness

Photo by Kerstin Faber 2007

art as process in Halberstadt
As I transcribe an interview with Martin Peschken, one of the professionals involved in the “actions” in Halberstadt about rethinking what “Leere” (emptiness, vacancy, void, blankness) means, I am beginning to do some of the anticipatory analysis that happens during the research process and noticing patterns in what I’m hearing, reading, and seeing. The use of art-related activities – “Actions, Interventions” etc. as a way of engaging community in a participatory process that isn’t a traditional community design process or community meeting format, seems to be an important theme – an important skill developing in these situations that could be generally applied, although it must vary depending on place, people, themes, stage of progress etc. But the skilled team of planners, artists, sociologists, community members, etc. should be able to think this way – an atmosphere of an event, as opposed to a meeting, makes for a totally different perspective on the part of participants. And the idea of focusing on process rather than product is also very important here – the events are not intended for consumption, as Dr. Peschken emphasized, but for involvement.

Trainingspfad des Sehens - Training path for seeing. (Photo by Nella Young)
View of the Cathedral through the only physical remainder of the path on this site.

I also find it interesting to think about this in terms of the challenges of documentation and product. To be honest, I’ve really gotten the best sense of projects from the stories told to me by people involved in them – so far, this has mostly experts/professionals who were involved. Sitting down and asking someone to tell me about these projects and places – tell these stories - has been a simple structure but has yielded the richest content and is much easier to connect with and get a full image of (especially when I talk to a few people) without any pictures. Of course, the pictures sometimes help you see how the reality looks on the ground, which can be very plain. But maybe that’s the challenge of this IBA – there are expectations from architects and planners that a physical product be the result, but perhaps that is actually not as powerful, long-lasting or valuable for a community as the process, the shared narrative, the joint experience, and the sense of identity, community, and belonging, that results from the process and that makes people feel a place is home, where they have relationships and where their opinion counts.

Absthof, Halberstadt - a reading picnic
Photo from the city of Halberstadt 2007

In the context of shrinking cities, where it is more important that people living there want to stay than that new people move in, building identity and sense of ownership seems to be a high priority and a worthwhile result.

Post #5: remembering and forgetting in Weimar

In the end of January, I attended the “City Map” art opening in Weimar, a series of works by students in the Bauhaus University Weimar’s MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies.

The theme was “remembering and forgetting”, and this matched up with the semester’s lecture series on memorial artworks.

I found it interesting to note that, while the works I viewed fit this genre, many of them also reflected the students’ own experiences in a new place and relating as outsiders in a small town with a long and complicated history. (It is important to know that the students are an international group from all over – no single dominant nationality amongst them – and their working language is English, although all speak some German.) For the most part, the art works focused on remembering and forgetting the past in the context of German history and Weimar history in particular - a really interesting theme to take up living in Germany, and in the east. In spite of the forgetting/erasing that went on in Germany, history – even recent history that many citizens still remember – and the conflict between remembering and forgetting is definitely on the surface in the east.

The issues of post-GDR identity and shrinking cities are present in the built environment, where many of the old buildings which were neglected by the GDR government are now renovated or protected from destruction and where many aging plattenbau (pre-fab) buildings and 1960’s-1970’s apartment blocks are in disrepair or being torn down, and are often associated with poverty or with senior citizens. There are also plattenbau that are restored and quite nice, and there are many old buildings that are too expensive to be worth restoring. This housing situation is also an interesting setting for very creative support-systems for ownership and renovation at very low cost. The organization Haushalten e.V. has worked on this in Leipzig and in Halle an der Saale.

With major population loss but also some investment from the West for renovation, may towns face interesting image and identity issues surrounding the past and planning for the future. These issues, which also include aging and smaller families and working mothers, are important throughout Germany and Europe, but particularly strong in the East and I think worth trying to understand better. They are also quiet issues and sometimes uncomfortable issues, and I think that it’s just easier to smooth them over than to face them, which made the assignment for many of the students in Weimar an interesting sort of social excavation project.

Here are a few snapshots of the works of four of the artists:

(Photos by Nella Young unless otherwise noted)

Loukas Bartatilas placed sandwich boards around town with images that are not the typical things pointed out in the tourism materials, asking people to think about what more Weimar is or could be...

"If we forgot for a minute that Weimar is the city of Goethe and Schiller and the Bauhaus, what could Weimar be?

Photo by Loukas Bartatilas

Sofia Dona built a second balcony on the Hotel Elephant, whose original balcony, over the entryway, was infamously used by Hitler to address the crowds during National Socialism. By creating an architectural double, the idea was to point to the historic associations, but at the same time weaken them, making the balcony no longer unique...

Photo by Loukas Bartatilas

Rosa van Goudoever produced an audio tour entitled "Color me Weimar". It was a single track, about 40 minutes long, walking from the marktplatz, through a section of the park and returning down a busy street in town. Through recording her own narration and personal stories as well as ambient sounds, interviews with others, and long silences, she shared the perspective of a newcomer to Weimar - things she saw and experienced in her time as a new resident in the town. We travelled as a loose group, and had both a solitary and shared experience. The writing was poetic, focusing on color, emotion, conveying a sense of the outsider's combination of curiosity, loneliness, heightened observation, and associations with home...

Carly Schmitt's project was about discovering a site on the outskirts of Weimar, where the buildings were being taken down and ground into wood chips. She created a video piece of her explorations of the site and played it on embedded screens in a pile of the woodchips that she had relocated to the town center. Viewers had to dig through the pile to unearth the screens. The pile changed shape throughout the exhibit week and the audience participated in revealing the video imagery of the site...

post #4 photos: Dessau

Images of Dessau: "wo Gebäude fallen...stehen Gärten"





this is what you see to the right...
and this is what you see to the left...
bike and pedestrian paths cut through low-maintenance landscapes with apartment buildings...

post #4 photos: Glaucha

Glaucha images
Here is a series of images of Glaucha streets and housing. It was hard to choose images and ideally I would be more selective. However, I find that skimming through the larger group rather than focusing on a limited number gives more of an overall impression and a better sense of the neighborhood look and feel and the contrasts within. Glaucha is primarily residential, but does have a commercial street or two, plus some ground floor shops in otherwise residential streets. This gallery is focused on images of housing.

street views...

building mix...

boarded up ground floors...

two doors...

three empty buildings...

facade details...

more facade views...

Last shot: streetscape with turquoise Trabant...