art + urban planning – a year in Germany

post #6: art as community identity building process

2010-02-10T14:41:00.020+01:00

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

2010-02-08T11:12:00.017+01:00

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

2009-12-11T15:21:00.007+01:00

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

2009-12-11T13:55:00.025+01:00

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...

post #4: impressions of Glaucha and Dessau

2009-12-11T12:51:00.017+01:00

on impressions and the photography experience in Glaucha and Dessau...

Earlier in the month, I spent some time in Glaucha, a neighborhood in Halle, taking photographs. It’s interesting to see how the photos transform the way I view the place. On the search for an essence of Glaucha, to capture the typical building and street, I took certain photos (see the post on curating the city). Afterward, I looked back and saw what I thought was worthy of shooting. I think back to why I took each photo, what I notice and don’t notice, and how the photo documentation compares to my memory and impressions of the place. In Glaucha, for example, I tried to document the variety of types of housing and streets – but still focusing on what is typical or characteristic, not on the exceptions. In my mind, my impression is that Glaucha has a real mix of newly renovated housing and of vacant housing that is boarded up and in disrepair. Sometimes they are right next to each other, and sometimes there is a block of predominantly renovated or predominantly disheveled facades. But the photos appear bleaker than the images in my head. Although I documented both conditions (including attached facades, showing a clear juxtaposition), the black spaces behind the broken glass in the windows of a vacant top floor apartment that is covered in graffiti are so striking that they just make a strong impression that sticks longer than the cleaned up buildings, many of which are lovely, but also more “quiet”.

I had an opposite experience in photographing Dessau. At first impression in October, I was under-whelmed by the scruffy landscapes where buildings had been torn down and replaced with low-maintenance parks and garden lands. But when I looked at the photographs I took in October, these spaces looked much better than I remembered, and when I went back again, on a particularly cold gray day in December, they again looked the way I remembered – pretty bleak – but again, the photographs captured something attractive about them that wasn’t registering in my impressions formed on the sites. These projects in Dessau are also intriguing to me because I heard them explained before I saw them, and the idea sounded really good – the plan to gradually let easy-to-maintain green spaces (cut through with bike and pedestrian paths) take over as buildings are taken down is appealing (See IBA website: Dessau) The fact that this solution was arrived at through a community process and was unexpected by the planners facilitating it also appeals to me – and may be the key to its success – because people want it, no matter if it’s aesthetically perfect, and they’re satisfied with the long term transformation being not-always-pretty, because the idea came from the community. Another thing that I found interesting about seeing these spaces was that my impressions were relative – although the new landscaped spaces were very plain, in comparison with a “before” picture, they are a clear improvement.

post #3: inspiring examples

2009-12-09T20:02:00.012+01:00

some inspiring examples...
I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples...

I Am a Curator (support structure phase 1: art)
Audiences at the Chisenhale Gallery in London could curate their own exhibition for one day from a collection of “sculpture, video, sound works, painting, performance proposals, drawing, social intervention and action descriptions. The result was 30 shows, each documented and presented on the Chisenhale website archive”

walking & talking (support structure phase 5: education)
A series of walks (think of landscape artist Richard Long)
“A public call was made and over a 6 month residency, Condorelli and Wade were taken on walks and talks around Wivenhoe park, researching and recording the diversity of the University in the same way that it was originally conceived. The walks and talks act as a register of collective memory and experience of the site from its creation to now. The conversations led to the production of a set of temporary signs located around the site to encourage conversation and an awareness of social acts.”

Safe Harbor (Red Hook, Brooklyn)
Choreographer Martha Bowers’ “multi-media outdoor performance piece that walked audience members through the community to visit staged vignettes that told some of the community’s stories, in some cases, from the residents themselves.”

anywhere-somewhere-everywhere (Nottingham)
A public event at the site of a planned renewal project featured a self-guided walk using a handheld video player with curated content including maps, recordings, and images “as an approach to curating architecture in situ”(51), created by artist/choreographer Cie Willi Dorner

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube by Michael Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Working Group at Kansas State University. See also Michael Wesch's website Mediated Cultures.
This isn’t an art project, but it is an entertaining and thought-provoking lecture about digital media as a community-building tool. It addresses a broad scope of activities that are not exactly relevant to the kind of community building I am thinking about, but it opened up my mind to possibilities for communicating and curating information about a specific place by using the web and the “vlogosphere” to share through amateur video, photography, and sound, individual perspectives on a place. The lecture/video is 55 minutes long but I found it flew by.

post #2: curating and mapping

2009-12-09T13:40:00.024+01:00

curating and mapping...
Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about the themes of curating and mapping. It all started with an attempt to understand the research approaches of visual anthropologists and ethnographists. The researcher as participant-observer is a core concept in these fields, and I reflected on my own position – what am I participating in? What does it mean to be an outsider and a non-native speaker from the US? At this stage, I am simply a participant-observer in navigating the city’s neighborhoods. Eventually, I will get more involved in some neighborhood activities, but for now, I’m really just another person walking around. As an outsider, I don’t see things habitually yet, but what stands out to me is different from what others would notice. This is where the concept of curating comes in. Here is a quote that describes how navigating a city is a curating process...

“Our individual experience of the city is innately fragmented, episodic and partial. In order to navigate the city a path must be traced. This path may consist of a sequence of known streets or a series of views to distant landmarks, but it could equally be framed by the determination to find something less tangible; warmth, fresh air, adventure or solace. Along this path individual moments are later singled out as significant milestones or as distinct, and sometimes treasured, memories. In between these moments, the rest is blurred or lost. This is why an individual’s experience of the city is fragmentary. The mind makes sense of these moments by placing them in a historical sequence or by sorting them into a range of possible groupings and then by representing or reframing them, in diaries, conversations and reminiscences. In this way, we each curate our experience of the city.”

SOURCE: Chapman, Michael and Michael Ostwald. 2009. “Curated desires: film photography and the visual transformation of urban space in surrealism” in Chaplin, Sarah and Alexandra Stara. 2009. Curating Architecture and the City. London/New York: Routledge. p.39.

Chapman and Ostwald distinguish curating from cartography, defining curating as a “selective presentation of elements...to infer the existence of a totality.” and cartography as a scientific effort to “construct a whole and identify its constituent parts”. Curating is interpretive whereas cartography attempts to be objective. However, I think of “mapping” as a term that can encompass both of these ideas and is also a common tool for visual anthropologists. I saw an example of this in an exhibit called “Placemaking” at the Schering Stiftung in Berlin. One element of the exhibit used maps made by people who had immigrated to Berlin from other countries. The maps included information about each individual’s routine destinations and paths as well as areas, such as “no-go zones”, that they interpreted as either irrelevant to their life or worth avoiding.

some inspiring examples...

I have been thinking about how this concept of curating and personal mapping can be used in community art projects and found some inspiring examples, which I discuss in entry number three...

post #1 video: skatepark

2009-11-19T11:43:00.013+01:00

Here is my first attempt at making a video...

It is made up of clips from about 10 minutes I spent one day at the skatepark in Halle Neustadt. Although my filmmaking is completely amateur from a cinematography point of view, I think I could fit into the "visual anthropology" mold, using still and moving images to observe and document the way a space is used, who uses it, its life at different times of day and year, etc...

post #1

2009-11-04T14:41:00.010+01:00

project and context...

My project is about how planners and other people working to improve cities use artistic and cultural projects or interventions as part of a revitalization strategy.

My host institution is the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Sachsen-Anhalt 2010. The IBA concept has been used in Germany since the early 20^th century to generate and exchange ideas about the possibilities for cities and regions in terms of planning, design, architecture, community, and development. It uses a sort of laboratory style approach – picking a location and a theme to focus on and then setting a time frame of usually a decade or less to form partnerships and try out new ideas. The IBA office I’m working in is focused on the state of Sachsen-Anhalt, which is in East Germany, and which has lost approx 15% of its population since reunification in 1989, due to a number of reasons including unemployment, aging populations and decreasing birth rates. Given that population numbers are projected to continue declining, the 19 cities in this IBA project address the challenge of improving the quality of life for residents in “shrinking cities”. Each city has unique characteristics and each has chosen to approach this challenge differently.

Multi-functional parking lot in Aschersleben

Curated "Drive-thru Gallery" exhibits paintings that
fill empty spaces along the ring-road in Aschersleben

In Dessau, low-maintenance landscapes gradually take over where buildings once stood

There are physical and spatial issues as well as social ones. Most towns have a context of oversized infrastructure and undersized resources – so a typical problem is how to maintain and keep in operation a transit system for a population that still lives in all of the neighborhoods but with less dense population in all of them. Another common question is how to offer quality education – and in this case it often means creating facilities that are centralized and serve the whole town. Education – up to and including the University level - can be a source of stability and quality of life. Quality educational resources give families a reason to stay and create a reason for college students to move in.

Halle Süd - streetcars passing vacant buildings

on deliverables...

I’m still in the early stages of figuring out/playing with what shape my deliverables can take, what scale they’ll be, who the audiences are, and what kind of small-scale ongoing products I should be producing. For now, I’m going to start with blogging and maybe write an article or two and try to present at a conference later in the year. I’m keeping lots of field notes and taking photos, trying to do some sketching, and also starting to collect sound clips. We’ll see what it all adds up to in the end. I’m brainstorming possibilities for a creative product. I was inspired by the animated documentaries I saw over the weekend in Leipzig – when done well, they can be a powerful medium for communicating a story in a concise format that has a potentially broad appeal and reach. The animated documentary form also has the potential to bring together a bunch of things I’ve been inspired by – audio-guides and sound portraits, street art, video and photography, sketching, the idea of narratives in urban planning, and community portraiture.

A few photos I like...

I took this photo in Berlin

This is a shot from the train to Dessau. The two guys are laughing because they were hamming it up when they noticed I was taking a photo. (Click photo for larger version)

In Halle, a mother with a carriage in the "Hochstraße" underpass.
You can see the blur of a cyclist in the foreground.
I like the colors and repeating lines of light and shadow in this photo.

some themes I’ve been thinking about...
I've been thinking about the way Deborah Frieden (Cultural Project Planning Consultant in Oakland, CA and former Project Director for the deYoung Museum in San Francisco) categorized public art projects into different groups - high profile glamour projects, civic district initiatives, community centered projects, and ephemeral events or happenings - as well as the way public art, economic development, and tourism often come together and how improving quality of life on a local neighborhood scale can be included or excluded from that mix.

Halle an der Saale...

I’m taking the first 1-2 months to focus intensively on the city of Halle an der Saale, which struggles with several forces - the pull of tourism and questions of how large-scale to get with it, not enough resources for all the needs, high-profile versus low-profile projects and the tension over what really impacts "quality of life"...

Halle turned 1200 years old a few years ago. In 1970, Halle Neustadt – a town of its own - was built next door as a place for chemical industry workers and their families to live. In 1990, the centuries old Altstadt and the young Neustadt were united to create one city, admittedly physically divided by a river (the Saale), but still intended to function as a unified entity. The differences between the two sides are plain to see and also hidden under the surface, but they are still the source of much discussion as the city loses population and figures out what that means in terms of whether and how and which places are used. When it comes to Halle and its various neighborhoods, there's lots of emotion and energy - pride, resignation, tension, creativity, etc...

View of the market square in Halle's Altstadt on a sunny day

View of the market square in Halle's Altstadt on a cloudy day

A former department store (built 1901) in Halle's Altstadt

In October it was used as an info-center and exhibit space for a media-art festival

Mix of old and new facades along pedestrian shopping street in Halle Altstadt

Shopping center in Halle Neustadt

Market in Halle Neustadt

A clinic in Halle Neustadt - built 1974, still in use, now the Halle Neustadt Health Center

Restored buildings in Halle Neustadt - mixed-use with senior housing

current projects in Halle...

There is a variety of projects in Halle that are recently completed or that are in progress. One is a skatepark in the Halle Neustadt city center, which is technically a landscape-architecture project for an open-air recreation facility, but it also has a lot to do with culture in the sociology sense (as opposed to the fine arts sense). It’s interesting because it is both outward reaching – trying to be attractive as a destination for the national/international Skate scene – and very local, trying to create a use that will keep and attract young people. Another is a project that was a pretty simple community participation project to renovate a fountain, called the Tulpenbrunnen, in an apartment complex in Neustadt and to involve the residents there in designing the tiles to go around the fountain. There will be another “Action” next summer, where artists and residents will do temporary sculptural installations in a little green strip called the “Grüne Galerie”. I’m going to try to get involved in that one.

The skate-park in Halle Neustadt

Am Tulpenbrunnen - fountain in an apartment complex in Halle Neustadt

Urban gardening project in Halle's Glaucha neighborhood

Grüne Galerie in Halle Neustadt

welcome

2009-11-03T14:29:00.000+01:00

Welcome. The purpose of this blog is to assemble my thoughts on my year-long project in Germany. I keep field notes, reading notes, interview notes, and journals. I take photos and do some sketching. I am still forming lots of ideas about what shape this research will take. This blog is one more exercise in documenting and presenting my work so far - I will keep it informal and experimental and see where things lead...

I look forward to comments and responses.

I will update this blog on a (loose) monthly basis.