Already a year of Corona. I’m looking forward to four weeks in Lichtenberg, taking different paths, thinking different thoughts. I like roaming through unspectacular areas anyway. First of all, I’m interested in the outer edges of Lichtenberg.
It is very cold at the beginning of March. In a garden in Falkenberg, a man with dangling arms is teetering on his feet in front of a woman. As I pass by on my bicycle some distance away, he curls his arms and imitates the flapping of the earflaps of my fur hat in the wind. I wave and am happy about this funniest encounter of the day.
In my search for a suitable material, after many unsuccessful attempts, I come across the print shop Oktoberdruck and by a happy coincidence I am given another material, a whole bundle of discarded foils. Better than I could have wished for.
The idea is always what you already know.
The sense is the discrepancy between reality and imagination.
Again and again I pass the empty prefabricated buildings between Wartenberger, Haupt- and Wollenberger Straße in Alt-Höhenschönhausen. The residential quarter, where contract workers from Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola lived, was built in the early 1980s. In 1994 the houses were “emptied”. Since then, this settlement has been an urban wasteland.
In the evening, the light falls beautifully and almost horizontally on the warm grey-brown of the western buildings.
The POLITICAL WELLNESS banner hangs centrally on the left of the façade and is clearly visible from the opposite intersection.