In my work, I research the fabric of Western European cities. My methodologies consist out of walking as an artistic practice, counter-mapping as a way to invite people to look at space differently and conducting minor and temporal interventions within the cityscape as a means to counteract the privatization of our public space.
For my interventions in Lichtenberg I wanted to investigate how positioning myself in the city in different personas influences other people’s perception as well how it influences human interaction.
I brought a hand-tailored worker-suit interpretation with me: a bright orange costume with reflective patterns on it, referring to the suit construction workers generally wear. By putting on this suit for my interventions, I want to investigate if merely pretending that I have the authority to conduct changes into the infrastructure, actually grants me more authority.
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Raum fur freiraum intervention
When I arrived in Lichtenberg, there was still a thick layer of ice covering the pavements. Over the course of a week it gradually melted away, making place for a springtime feeling: a different smell entered the air and the chittering of excited birds would become a daily soundtrack while I conducted my walks.
On one of these walks, zigzagging in between the apartment buildings of the grid-like patterned Neu-Hohenschönhausen, I passed a street where the uniformity was interrupted by a series of bird houses hanging in the trees.
The sight of these different multi-colored small houses in contraposition with these high-rise grey flats inspired me to make a birdhouse myself.
Together with Alec De Bruyn we constructed a miniature replica of the building where Lichtenberg Studios is located, including the slogan “Raum fur Freiraum” that is prominently visible on the façade. Wearing the orange suit and carrying the birdhouse on my back like a portable home, we walked from the location of the studio to stadtpark Lichtenberg, where the birdhouse was put in a tree on 03/03/’25, around 11h.
I went by on 4 separate occasions afterwards to check if the birdhouse was still there, and the last time I visited on 15/03 it still was. I hope the birds appreciated my appeal for affordable housing and have moved in by now, free of cost.
On the recollection and preservation of stones
I became intrigued by Lichtenbergs “Erinnerungskultur: staying above Lichtenberg’s museum that promotes local history, and all the memorial sites in the borough like Rummelsburg Gedenkort give the past a very prominent place in the present. Evidently Berlin bears a complex past that is important to remember, but at the same time smaller histories like the invention of the egg slicer also have a place in the Lichtenberg museum. Around that time, while wandering around Berlin’s Mitte, I stumbled upon the questionable practice of selling pieces of the Berlin wall preserved in resin as a souvenir.
This gave me the idea to collect and preserve random pieces of pavement from Lichtenberg for later times.
For future remembrance of uneventful days and unremarkable streets, I redistributed these artefacts in clean newly built gentrified areas to break with the surroundings.
