Claiming Common Spaces I: Art and Urban Practice
Cities are our home, our stage, our work. They set the rhythm, the way we dispose of space and time. Fifty years ago, the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre described the urban fabric, architecture and urban life as a reflection of our social challenges in his essay “The Right to the City”. His visions and critical theses on a city of the future, in which the “place of consumption and consumption of place” coincide, have long been part of our reality.
Based on this range of topics, the Alliance of International Production Houses is developing a broad program in the respective houses, which will take place on the stages of HAU Hebbel am Ufer and in Berlin's urban space. Claiming Common Spaces brings together artists, urban researchers and activists to explore aspects of the diverse, global urban societies of the 21st century and current socio-political developments in our urban centers.
The programme will kick off with a lecture and discussion with New York urban sociologist Sharon Zukin, who will analyse the global transformation of cities through migration, deindustrialization and gentrification. In further discussion panels (with Nicoleta Esinencu, Andrej Holm, Nazan Maksudyan, Renzo Martens, Klaus Ronneberger, AbdouMaliq Simone, Christoph Twickel and many others) and four public labs (with Chim↑Pom, Lenio Kaklea, Lukas Matthaei, Erin McElroy, metroZones, Nina Scholz, Jeremy Wade and many others), concrete positions, approaches and strategies in dealing with the urban will be discussed and further developed. What role does art play in public space? How can cultural centers stabilize their international work in nervous times, flanked by which strategies of international cultural policy? Why are the big technology companies pushing into our city centers - in short: Who owns the city?
Last but not least, international artistic works - music, installations, performances - that have been created in and for the urban space, such as the work “Corbeaux” by the French-Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen or “McDonald's Radio University” by the Japanese artist Akira Takayama, will be shown, a lecture series created together with refugee teachers in McDonald's restaurants, or the question project “Proyecto Pregunta” by the artist collective MIL M2 from Santiago de Chile. Near HAU2, the inflatable “Bubble Palace” will be a place of temporary community and intoxication, where concerts (Shkoon, One Mother, Boy Division) and various performative interventions will come together.
Also with Anas Aboura, Rodrigo García Alves, Jochen Becker, Elisa Bertuzzo, Johannes Ebert, Andreas Görgen, Felix Hartenstein, Katja Heitmann, Hauke Heumann, Ingrid Krau, Keigo Kobayashi, Kollektiv ZOO, Ingrid LaFleur, Jan Lemitz, Eike Lucas, Clemens Melzer, Sebastian Quack, Sander van der Schaaf, Christoph Schäfer, Michael Schindhelm, Mieko Suzuki, Michael Zinganel and much more.