Loving Berlin

Berlin, June 20 - 25, 2005
Lead Concept and Curatorial Direction with Hilke Schellmann, Philipp Schwarz and Celia di Pauli

It is possible that previously Berlin has not been loved enough…

The Colors of Berlin are the heart and kick-off for Loving Berlin, an international urban arts festival from June 20-25, featuring work by Stadtblind, UnionDocs, Knifeandfork, Posttourismus Büro, Glowlab, Yellow Arrow and A Rip Around the Block that animate the particularities of this great city in new ways. Events will take place at the German Architecture Center in Mitte, the Volksbuehne’s Rollende-Road-Schau am Alexanderplatz, the Humboldt University Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, CafeSchmidt – le treff, Kurort Wedding and visible on streets throughout the city. For this one week, Berlin will be explored and loved like it never has before.

City Forum – Opening Event with all artists
BBQ + Presentation + Discussion
Free; Beer, bratwursts, etc. for a small donation
Monday, June 20, 5 – 9 pm
Moderated by Alexa Färber from the AG Stadtforschung and Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der HU
DAZ Köpenicker Str. 48/49
U8 Heinrich-Heine Str., S Jannowitzbrücke

City Forum is an evening of BBQ and presentations by the participants of Loving Berlin and Berlin urban research scholars on some of the central themes of the festival: urban experience, documentary arts, new methods of site-specific storytelling, everyday life, psychogeography and cultural politics. Christine Nippe will introduce the themes with a presentation of her dissertation project: “Art and the City. Artists in Berlin and New York. The symbolic capital of the metropolis.” The evening will engage issues specific to the historical and contemporary landscape of Berlin, while also engaging questions relevant to cities and the arts around the world.

Imaginary Berlin – Johanna Linsley, Jesse Shapins + Jonah Spear (brooklyn + berlin)
Performance Exam
Tuesday, June 21, 12:30 – 2 pm
Mohrenstr. 40, Room 212, Berlin-Mitte
U Stadtmitte, Hausvogteiplatz

“How much of a city can be reconstructed in the mind of someone who’s never been there?” Two visitors to Berlin will take three walks. Neither visitor has ever been to the city. One has tried to learn everything about the spaces they will walk through. One has avoided learning anything. Aided by performance, the visitors will investigate and report on where their Imaginary Berlin meets the real Berlin, and, maybe more importantly, where it doesn’t. The performance exam is a forum to question the visitor’s experience and instigate a discussion about what can truly only be experienced in Berlin.

Berlin By Chance - Posttourismus Büro (berlin) with Glowlab (brooklyn)
Experimental walking machine
Functioning online at www.knifeandfork.org/bbc beginninng June 20

Walk led by creator Gesa Henselmans
Tuesday, June 21, 2:30 pm
Leaving from Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Mohrenstr. 40

This is a game that makes it possible to explore the city by chance. No matter if inhabitant or tourist, everybody only knows parts of the vast area called Berlin. Exploring the city one usually follows some personal patterns or routes. Berlin by chance is about fooling these patterns. It«s about getting an idea of the vasteness of the city by taking chance as the routeplaner. Anyone who wants to join is sent out on expedition by a random generator. The explorer is asked to collect impressions of his journey and put them back into the system. This is how a communal, pyschogeographic cartography of the city is building up. A kind of guidebook or archive of Berlin. And a game ready to play at any time.

Hundekopf - Knifeandfork (göteborg + brooklyn)
Interactive SMS-story around the Ringbahn
Narrative goes live on June 20

Stories (…) are like mountain tops jutting out of the sea. Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local and, for all that, a part of a universal pattern.

- Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (1990)

Hundekopf is a new project exploring the experience of Berlin’s Ringbahn, which encircles the inner city and is used as a literal vehicle to move between time and place in a fiction-historical narrative structured through SMS text-messaging. The Knifeandfork artist group approaches the urban environment as a narrative space - a human artifact constructed of stories both real and imagined that we collectively engage in telling.

Yellow Arrow Walks - Yellow Arrow
Starting June 20 at locations throughout Berlin

Yellow Arrow Walks is a series of self-lead scripted, interactive experimental walking experiences that use the platform and symbol of the global public art project Yellow Arrow.

The Commons_Berlin - UnionDocs (brooklyn + berlin)
Performance Documentary
Thursday, June 23, 9 - 10 pm
Volksbühne’s Rollende-Road-Schau am Alexanderplatz

The Commons_Berlin is a performance documentary using new media and a collaborative structure to engage the two distinct, yet related questions: What is common? What makes a city unique? The Commons_Berlin borrows the structure of a rock act. Short, song-length acts made up of live and pre-recorded movement, voice, video and music combine into a 60-minute theatrical experience that culminates months of experimental development in Brooklyn and integrates a week of urban performance interventions throughout Berlin.

Rip 2.1-2.4 — A Rip Around the Block
City-tours with audio guide

There are four audio tours, each 15 minutes in length. Two leave from the gallery of the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and two from the Rollende-Road-Schau am Alexanderplatz.

The stories, both fictional and real, are on the trail of ripped bodies and urban myths.

Day of Wedding-Love – Berlinliebhaber of all kinds
Saturday, June 25, 2 pm - ???
Love Bowling party with DJ’s begins at 10 pm
Café Schimdt - le treff and Kurort Wedding, Krellstr. 3
Prime Time Theater, Osloer Str. 16

A series of street activities and exhibitions around Berlin’s most-overlooked district culiminate in the final party for the Loving Berlin festival.

The Colors of Wedding was the first incarnation of the Stadtblind project The Colors of Berlin and will be on exhibit at Prime Thetaer. This loving, mini-portrait of the overlooked district of Wedding will be exhibited in full as originally seen in the Stadtblind Galerie in Wedding in 2003.

Love Bowling is the final party of Loving Berlin and will celebrated in Heiko Schmidt’s remarkable Café Schmidt, where the ancient, full-scale mini-bowling alley that inhabits the basement will play a central role.

Documentation from the entire festival will be spliced together into a video and re-presented in projections.