Placemaking
The interdisciplinary art project “Placemaking – Die Migration von Räumen” sheds light on the spaces brought and created by migrants between their arrival and home countries. In the art project “Die Migration von Räumen: Über Placemaking im Fokus von Migration und Mauerfall,” initiated by Stefanie Bürkle, an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists works with various media to explore the urban transformation into a new Berlin and the preservation tendencies in the migration of spaces, with resulting conflicts of making and creating space. An extensive publication has been released in connection with the project.
Fall of the Wall and New Spaces
The project “Viele Grüsse aus Hanoi” and several other artistic projects in recent years have shown that migration leaves its mark on urban space. Our urban living quality, even entire neighborhoods, have changed in recent years due to these inscriptions.
The movement of people in space, migration, is also a movement of spaces. Many such “migrated spaces” can be observed in Berlin, which itself is not a static space but represents a multitude of changing spaces. These numerous movements and changes have accelerated since the fall of the Wall.
Hometown | Migrated Space
The spaces brought from home (rural, urban) dock with the changing urban textures almost naturally and find new places in the rapid urban transformation since 1989. Therefore, in Berlin, the question arises not only of adapting or integrating migrants, but also of changing the “German” understanding of urban culture in the interplay with the once “foreign” influences. Perhaps our urban spaces and those of our hometowns have changed more than the migrated spaces of some immigrant groups who still derive a large part of their identity from the preserved image of their home country, these image worlds are often idealized by memories or already belong to the past and come from a time when they left their homeland. The social change in the old homeland is often not even noticed.
Transcultures Other groups are characterized by a transcultural networking, for which anchoring in Germany plays only a subordinate role. They are actors within globalized networks and are not bound to a cultural space but move extremely successfully in several cultural spaces. In this project, we focus on the existing understanding and experience of space among migrants living with us, mostly second-generation.
Thus, we will investigate the spaces created by migration on the one hand (migration of spaces) and on the other hand examine the mutual perception of urban space (placemaking). Since the fall of the Wall, who has actually made space for whom?
Project website: www.placemaking.de The project was funded by the Hauptstadtkultur Fonds and the Schering Foundation; media partner “tageszeitung”.