URBAN MYTHOLOGIES

Operating in the border zones between contemporary art, urban design, and ethnographic research, Stadtblind is a project dedicated to the investigation and transformation of urban life. On a theoretical level, one of the project's main concerns are "urban mythologies." Urban mythologies are the frameworks of individual and collective consciousness that condition the construction and interpretation of meaning, and thus, structure active living in the city. Mythologies are understood as the immaterial city, the city constantly imagined in the mind's of its residents and a global community through popular culture, political agendas, the media, the tourist industry, and the arts. It is the perception of a city, formed and experienced from inside and outside, always in flux and immensely influential. The immediate provinces of urban mythologies are mental, spiritual, and emotional spaces--the spaces of subjectivity--but their impact can be traced in all facets of urban life.

We believe that the representation and interpretation of Berlin is dominated by two concrete mythologies which we have called "Berlin as construction site" and "Berlin as historical landscape." These are the two most conventional and publicly valorized forms of approaching Berlin, and it is in relation to this regime that we position our work.

BERLIN AS CONSTRUCTION SITE

Probably the image most associated with Berlin in the 1990s is that sea of cranes that covered the land between Potsdamer Platz and the Spreebogen, a swath of seemingly endless building activity that included (and includes), among others, such internationally recognized architects and artists as Renzo Piano, Sir Norman Foster, Christo and Jean Claude, Peter Eisenmann, Helmut Jahn, Axel Schultes, Frank Gehry, and Santiago Calatrava. Artists, architects, tourists, politicians, and scholars were fascinated by this landscape: it symbolized the transformation of the new German capital. Construction sites were turned into performances [ Baustellen wurden 'Schaustellen' ], various photo essays and films concentrated upon this building madness (e.g. Hubertus Siegert's Berlin Babylon ), and a seemingly endless number of books and essays appeared focusing upon the changes taking place in Berlin-Mitte.

Underlying this fascination with these new buildings was a latent assumption about Berlin, namely, the belief that Berlin was a city in the midst of a boom, a city on the rise, the "center of a new Europe." The city's population growth was predicted to be astronomical. All of the structural problems plaguing both the former East and West Berlin were by in large part ignored, or at least not aggressively or creatively confronted. No one wanted to acknowledge that neither part of the divided city was integrated into a free-market system before 1989; that both East and West Berlin were state-sponsored enterprises, their economic, social, and cultural politics driven by subsidies and isolated, protected markets. Disregarding the particular circumstances of Berlin, leading politicians, developers, planners, and architects simply assumed that the same methods used to develop other large cities in the West would be effective in Berlin.

Overnight, in the imaginations of many powerful figures, Berlin magically became a "metropolis" [ Metropole ] that could compete effectively in a globalized market with other German and Western cities. No one was ready to accept the viewpoint that Uwe Rada articulated ten years later: "[Man müßte sich vielleicht eingestehen], daß Berlin längst nicht mehr die Metropole ist, als die sie immer noch angepriesen wird, keine Global City im Wartestand, sonderen eine abgeräumte Industriestadt, eine Metropole allenfalls für neue Goldgräber und Abenteurer, mehr Saloon als Salon, eine wilde Mischung aus Detroit und Lodz, eben eine Grenzstadt zum Osten" (Rada, 2001, s. 196).   In the process of imagining Berlin as a construction site, the need to confront the actualities of the city, the specificities of the context, was neglected; a false conception of the city was generated and an impossible future projected. No one wanted to acknowledge what actually constituted the exceptionality of a post-Wall Berlin cut off from Western and Eastern subsidy, a city, in Rada's terms, that was and is more characterised by the metaphor of the "saloon" than the "salon."

The mythology of "Berlin as construction site" is not only significant because of its problematic underpinings (its out-of-touch vision of Berlin's future development), but also because of its geographical concentration. The only parts of Berlin that were considered deserving of attention were those in the center of the city. The rest of the city, except for the areas where the Szene established its presence (Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg most of all, but also Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg to an extent), was erased from popular consciousness. Or, if more peripheral regions did surface in the media and mainstream discussions, it was only when so-called soziale Brennpunkte (e.g. Wedding, Neukölln, and the Plattenbauvierteln on the eastern edge of the city) were mentioned. As far as the main players constructing Berlin's future were concerned, the distinctive qualities and complexities of these less central districts would have no place in the new identity of the city.

BERLIN AS HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE

Not surprisingly, the ghosts of the past also played a central role in the process of imagining and developing Berlin following the fall of the Wall. Questions concerning the "New Berlin" were intimately interwoven with the city's long-standing confrontation with its troubled past. The Senat 's dominant planning ideology attempted to draw its legitimacy from what it proclaimed was a historically-based, regionally-specific Berliner architecture and city planning. Concretely, this meant promoting the use of stone (not as supportive material any longer but in the form of curtain walls), limiting the height of buildings to five-stories, enforcing unified street-front façades, and dogmatically re-creating the city's historic street grid. The most prominent vision of the Senat's ideal city Wilheminian Berlin with a faint trace of the Weimar era. The post-war era, both in its Eastern and Western manifistations, would have no place in the future of the city. One of the peaks of this ongoing debate is, of course, the discussion surrounding the preservation or destruction of the Palast der Republik and the drive to rebuild the old Schloß .

While Herr Stimmann and cohorts focused upon pre-WWII Berlin, the capital of a German nation-state unified for the first time since the Third Reich could not avoid becoming the crystallization point for national discussions concerning the remembrance of the tragedies of the NAZI era. Daniel Liebeskind's Jewish Museum was built to present a historical account of Jewish life in Germany beyond the horrors of the Holocaust, the construction of a new documentation center at the Topographie of Terror, the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, was begun by Peter Zumthor, and Peter Eisenmann's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is being built.

This historical lens also manifested itself in obsession with the Wall and the empty spaces that its removal left behind. Wim Wenders and others celebrated Berlin's Brandmauern and voids. One of the most influential architectural publications on Berlin after the fall of the Wall, Philip Oswalt's Stadt ohne Form , praises the fragmentation of the city and sees its vacant spaces as the source of its future identity. The few remaining fragments of the Wall (e.g. The East Side Gallery) became major tourist attractions and Checkpoint Charlie became the city's most visited musuem.

THE PRESENT AND EVERYDAY LIFE

It is important to note that it is not our intention to deny the importance of the large building projects that took place and are still underway in Berlin. And we definitely do not believe that one can approach Berlin without confronting its past. It is understandable that Berlin was frequently approached from the perspective of its monumental rebuilding efforts and its negotiation of its history. Our critique is not of these discourses as such, but of their total hegemony, their determination of approaches towards researching and artistically engaging the city. This narrow vision of the city had its costs, its "blind spots." Our aim is to expand the discussion surrounding Berlin, to open up space for discussions that have been forced out of debates. Specifically, we contend that the two urban mythologies of "Berlin as construction site" and "Berlin as historical landscape" fail to capture the complexity of Berlin in two vital ways: they fail to account for the city's present and they ignore practices of everyday life.   

"THE COLORS OF BERLIN"

What is to become of Berlin in the 21 st century? What sort of self-understanding and identity should the city strive for to best meet the challenges ahead? These questions that were pertinent in the 1990s are also relevant today. Now, however, all of the illusions following the fall of the Wall and the euphoria of reunification are gone. A more sober, honest, and critical approach to Berlin's current dilemmas is necessary. It is against this complex backdrop of Berlin's present that we founded the group Stadtblind and developed the project "The Colors of Berlin." Our intention is to develop a different, fresh view of the city. Neither pure praise nor criticism, "The Colors of Berlin" attempts to explore the reality of living in Berlin today. The questions we ask are: despite all of the city's problems, why do so many of us still love this city, why do we choose to live here and nowhere else, why do we still have affection for a city on the brink of disaster?

We developed "The Colors of Berlin" under the premise: "Too often Berlin is seen blindly [ Zu oft wird Berlin blind betrachtet ]."   In this ever-progressing work, we have modified the form of a color-fan [ Farbfächer ] to contain five elements: a theme, an image, color blocks, a text, and a map. The themes outline some of the most basic, everyday aspects of urban life in any city: sitting, eating, vehicles, façades, the ground. This thematic structure is the organizing principle of the work, allowing us to highlight the diversity of the city by presenting series that illustrate contrast and continuities through comparison. It is the combination of the image, text, and map that make each card or page specific to Berlin.

The sources of our images are from nearly every corner of the city: the city-border in the east by Hohen-Schönhausen, the backyards of single-family homes in Hermsdorf, the inside of the Europa Center in the City-West, the banks of Diana See in Dahlem, the main residential arteries of Neukölln. Our text selection is as diverse as the locations of our photographs. We have quotations from such classic Berlin-commentators as August Endell and Wim Wenders, citations from the daily newspapers the Berliner Morgenpost and die tageszeitung , and have included statistical information, personal observations, and words of wisdom from the Dalai Lama and Virgil. In an age when the central form of communication is the rapid consumption of images, we find the insertion of texts necessary to slow the viewer/reader. The exact location where the picture was taken is marked with a black circle on a cutout from the Berlin map. This localization is essential to the scientific aspect of our documentary process and lends every image a crucial specificity.    

The two color blocks below every picture give the work its emotional and polemical element. The color tones are drawn directly from the picture itself and are intended to intensify and complexify the images, aiding viewers to see these often mundane objects, scenes, and spaces with new eyes and feelings. The colors also assure the work a degree of energy, fun, and accessibility. It is always said that Berlin is a grey city, and although we do not disagree that Berlin, like most cities, has many patches of grey, it is the amazingly vibrant and diverse color palate of the city that we wanted to bring to the forefront.

In a sense, it is our aim to distance viewers from that which is familiar, to re-frame the familiar in such a way that it becomes unfamiliar, fresh, and worthy of attention.   We present the common spaces, objects, and surfaces of contemporary Berlin in an unusual manner that encourages viewers to perceive in a new way. It is precisely the everyday aspects of our lives that are most often overlooked; and it is precisely these everyday aspects that most constitute our lived experience of the city.

Instead of directly documenting "lived experience" in a classical one-to-one fashion, we attempt to evoke "lived experiences" by displaying the many traces that daily activity leaves behind in the urban landscape. These traces may be fleeting, such as a puddle, or the more consistent presence of such essential everyday urban utensils as trash cans, benches, and trailers. But it is precisely this focus upon life in the city that forms the basis of our practice; architecture for us is "spatial scaffolding [ eine räumliche Gerust ]," the backdrop against which urban life transpires. Our approach to the city rejects pure aestheticism in favor of attention to the way urban space is used and inhabited. Such an approach is echoed by the words of anthropologist and architectural critic James Holston when he writes in "Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship," "The problem [of the city]...is more anthropological than morphological" (Holston, 157).

TOURIST INDUSTRY

One of our work's most consistent reference points is the tourist industry. Tourism in Berlin feeds off the two aforementioned urban mythologies. Berlin's top tourist destinations are Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, the Jewish Museum, the Reichstag, Museumsinsel, and the Hackesche Höfe. Tertiary tourist destinations might include the "bohemian flair" surrounding Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, shopping on the Ku'Damm and around the Gedächtniskirche, the Kulturforum, the fabricated medieval alleys of the Nikolaiviertel, or a trip to the top of the TV Tower. Next to no major tourist sites are outside of Mitte, and none are outside of the Ringbahn.

The power of tourism rests not only in the experience of a city that is transported to visitors. The tourist industry and all of its apparatuses also have a tremendous impact upon the residents of a city. The touristic approach to a city tends to reduce a place to a collection of isolated monuments and districts, blending out everything in-between. In the interest of increasing the touristic attractiveness of a city, city planning policy attempts to develop a city that fits the dominant touristic image of a city and focuses upon blockbuster events and monumental building projects.   It is precisely these chosen "highlights" that receive the attention and investment of the city planning office. That which seemingly does not fit into the touristic image of the city is, for all practical purposes, forgotten.

Stadtblind's response to this relationship between tourism and urban development has been to adopt the mass-oriented strategies and language of the tourist industry, but to focus upon those places outside of the normal tourist program. And it was with this intent that we initiated the project by running a gallery in Wedding from January to August, 2003. We see the work "The Colors of Berlin" as a type of "guide-book" to Berlin. However, instead of being confronted with the classic tourist sites and a map guiding to you to them, the seemingly banal scenes and details of lesser-known inner-city districts and the vast periphery are mapped out for potential tours. Moreoever, the colors are to be understood in dialogue with the practices of the tourist industry and its facile appeal to conventional notions of beauty. The colors, often perceived in a positive manner, are a means of generating immediate accessibility and clarity, and their aesthetic language borrows from the fields of popular advertising and marketing.

CONCLUSION

In Invisible Cities , Italo Calvino presents this fictional conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan:            

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. "But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks. "The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form." Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch." (Calvino, 82)

We believe that choosing to focus upon the traces of everyday life in the city, is akin to paying attention to all the stones that constitute an arch. A city is not constituted by a sum of its monuments, a collection of its "highlights" but by the combination of all of its details. Our ambition is to generate such a sensitivity to the city of Berlin. It was precisely this inability to confront the complex actualities of Berlin that doomed the city planning policies of the 1990s to failure. The Berlin city authorities imagined was drastically out of touch with the Berlin that actually existed or that realistically could develop in merely ten years' time. One of the most serious problems facing Berlin today is a lack of critical self-reflection. More than presenting answers, "The Colors of Berlin" asks questions. Less a direct representation of our version of Berlin's "reality," "The Colors of Berlin" should be seen as a metaphor for a method of critically examining the city.

For a change in Berlin to truly take place, a change in mentality is necessary. Intervention in the fields of the city's urban mythologies is crucial. If we want to change the city, we must challenge our forms of perception. How we perceive, determines the decisions we make, in other words, it determines how we act. Berlin will always be disappointed with itself if it only sees itself in relation to Paris, London, or New York. Berlin, because of its singular history as capital of the Third Reich, capital of the German Democratic Republic, "Showcase of the West [ Schaufenster des Westens ]," and site of the Berlin Wall, will never achieve "normality." In fact, it is precisely accepting the whole range of everyday phenomena that these historical events have instigated in the city, the core of Berlin's abnormality, that is the essential first step towards effectively working towards a better future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calvino, Italo. Inivisible Cities . Translated by William Weaver. New York: A Harvest Book, 1972.

Holston, James. "Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship." In Cities and Citizenship , edited by James Holston. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Rada, Uwe. Berliner Barbaren. Wie der Osten in den Westen kommt . Berlin: BasisDruck, 2001.