Street art in front of the Palast Der Republik, circa 2002. Photo Manuela Conti
Moving from Florence, the first stop on my journey into the global dimension of public space passed through Berlin. A natural trajectory, following cultural and political contaminations cultivated since the 1980s, when I had the opportunity to visit the city still divided by the Wall, and then in the 1990s, when I frequented it through my activity as a new media artist, observing the process of reconnection and mending that followed the fall of the Wall (I would end up living permanently in Berlin from 2007 to 2021). A city steeped in cinematic suggestions, as well as an essential node in a planetary aural geography, the focal point of cultural scenes that have contributed, like few other places, to shaping an urban identity universally recognized, rooted in historical traumas and recent conflicts. In this identity coexisted the noir undertones of the Cold War and Ballardian evocations of the entropic decay of the modern industrial city, the ghosts of the historical avant-gardes of the 20th century and the decadence of bourgeois Enlightenment values in the futurist cabarets of the Weimar Republic, the intersectionalism of the liberation movements (feminists, queers, pacifists, ecologists, and of course squatters) and the nihilist post-punk shatter. ‘Poor but sexy’, as it was effectively labelled by the mayor who governed it for the longest time, Berlin was, and is, an extension and natural landing place of my trajectories in its interweaving of historical memories, everyday conflicts and futuristic visions. The image I retain of that phantasmagorical Berlin in the early 1990s is fixed in a vast terrain vague still surrounded by the graffiti-covered wall, in which stands an entire pink-painted Soviet Mig 21, mounted on a truck and surrounded by the camp of a rib of the Mutoid Waste Company - that very same tribe of space age travellers I had met in Florence in 1991 on their way to Santarcangelo di Romagna, where they still have a base. They had set up on the Potsdamer Platz esplanade, the same desolate landscape where the final scene of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire takes place. Soon, that gigantic void would become the city's largest urban regeneration site, a symbol (questionable in form and substance) of its political and economic rebirth, and a declaration of intent for a reunited German capital, Europe and western values.
Mutoids in Potsdamerplatz in 1990. Uncredited picture from https://cargocollective.com/MutoidWasteCo
Berlin at the beginning of the 2000s exhibited the overlapping of three concurring urban concepts (lefebvrian triplicities again!), three ideas of city that had developed along contiguous lines only to find themselves suddenly confused at the fall of the wall: the socialist city, planned, centralised and bureaucratic; the liberal city, the product of entrepreneurial initiative and capitalist realism; and the alternative city, emerging from the antagonistic libertarian visions of urban movements and subcultures. Of course, this abstraction has a purely heuristic value, designating assemblages of views and practices that in reality have always been far more nuanced and contradictory. The so-called liberal city, represented by West Berlin, elected as the epitome of successful western capitalism, in fact was in reality grafted onto social-democratic planning principles more congruent with socialist East Berlin than one would like to believe, while the possibility of experimenting with and sustaining alternative and utopian models and lifestyles was highly dependent on the welfare regime put in place by both competing political systems, however much in retreat. Indeed, these three competing visions gave rise at the beginning of the millennium to a phenomenon of territorial transformation centred on the public dimension of urban space and thus on the process of redefining the meaning and use of public space. A process that concerns the practices of everyday life, collective memory and the economic and productive dimension of the city.
Ministry of Finance on Leitziger Strasse. Photo Manuela Conti
The former divided city also displayed three fundamental characteristics that were reflected in the peculiarities of its public space and the debate that was cultivated there: it was a plural city, in which the urban identity was beyond all limits the result of complacent conflicts and painful coexistence; it was a transforming city, in which the natural evolutionary process in every urban context took on exemplary connotations, becoming the transformation itself the very substance of urban identity; it was a possible city, allowing itself to be perceived as an open territory with latent potential, a fertile ground for experimentation and realised or realisable utopias.
The keyword in the public debate around the city's development in those years is recomposition. Recomposition of the divided city, of the two souls separated by the wall, of two complementary territories that have expressed divergent morphological drifts over the last few decades. Recomposition of the fragmented urban fabric, torn apart by the war catastrophe and stretched by abandonment, redefining an idea of a homogeneous and compact global city and capital. Recomposition of an interrupted continuity between past and future, the effect of a regime of institutionalised anomaly during forty years of the Cold War - a caesura, a kind of temporal slippage that has dilated and at the same time projected Berlin's everyday into a elsewhere. The literature on the city in those years is schizophrenically divided between an overabundance of publications on historical Berlin and an equally copious production of illustrated books and monographs on the Berlin of the future and the architectural theory that is found there. There is an urgent, desperate search for a shared present.
After the end of World War II, the city experienced a stalemate, in which the western part remained embedded within the Soviet bloc as a monad of strategic geopolitical value, an outpost of Western values, but also an extraordinary and early example of how a city can live primarily on its symbolic value, its image economy. This explains the poor side, with a city evidently isolated in the middle of an enemy territory, publicly subsidised to keep it alive in conditions of economic stagnation and rampant unemployment, but also the attractive side, the sexiness, whereby the city presents itself as a place open to colonisation, experiments, imaginaries of liberation. As a matter of fact, in the cone of shadow, in the regime of suspension that first emerged in West Berlin surrounded by the GDR, and later continued in East Berlin suddenly orphaned by government and ownership, an extraordinary construction site of collective practices originated, as much in the field of government-promoted social engineering as in that of concrete alternatives created by social movements. The enabling condition remains the abundant availability of space. Trivially, the catastrophe of war spawned opportunities. Both the built stock and open spaces outnumber the population remaining in the city. In the post-war period, efforts to reconstruct concentrated public housing according to modernist principles were massive on both fronts, and this until the 1990s without inducing any particular pressure on the existing open spaces, which had been disproportionately increased by wartime and post-war demolitions.
Street art Gallery, early 00 years. Photo Manuela Conti.
The quality of urban life in Berlin is (was!) determined by emptiness before plenitude, by latent space, by the potential use of land as a reserve of possibilities. Available space par excellence, Berlin's public space at the end of the twentieth century is undoubtedly the result of the violent destruction of World War II and the freeze caused by the subsequent Cold War, but it is also - and above all - the product of modern, well-designed, and wisely sized urban planning dating back to the industrial revolution, specifically the Hobrecht plan of 1862. A thorough design to outline infrastructures, govern balanced development patterns, and organically distribute parks and greenery across the urban fabric. The basic architectural module, centred on the model of the Mietkaserne with a succession of courtyards, originally inhabited by multiple functions and social classes, generates an extremely porous urban fabric. The result is a richness of public space that is not only the effect of individual behaviour and social rules, but also the product of a design that favours and amplifies public behaviour. Cafes and businesses, Biergarten and production activities, residential units and their uncovered extensions, such as courtyards, Spielplatz (playgrounds), gardens and urban orchards follow one another in a multiplicity of forms and combinations, generating parcels that are accessible and permeable to public life. The urban fabric is articulated in a great variety of spaces that organically interconnect, producing a plethora of semi-public courtyards and green spaces connected by the spinal element consisting of a hierarchical system of wide streets and avenues. Quite different from the cramped and geologic Florentine street as much as from the crude New York concrete strip, both characterised by a drastic separation from the enclosed and protected private spaces, to whose mere interconnection they are functional, the Berlin street, in line with the principles of a bourgeois 19th-century town planning, of Haussmannian imprint, is varied and multifunctional. It is designed to negotiate different uses and accommodate multiple needs: not mere functional flow, but resting, different transport modes, pavement businesses extension, flowerbeds and trees. A multiplicity that generates a large number of lived and personalised spaces, animated with social life, fluidly integrated in an intense but rarely congested mobility. From a historical perspective, the result of this original design is sublimely recounted in the form of an urban symphony by Walter Ruttman in Berlin, Symphonie einer Großstadt, a masterpiece of urban cinematography, succeeding in making the rhythm of the city resonate through a silent film.1 While the harmonious, dancing crescendo of 1920s Berlin would soon be subverted by the events of Nazism and World War II, the social character of the city survives the war, imbued in the original design. It is worth remembering that the destruction wrought by the Allied bombing actually accidentally continued the Nazi demolition plan already initiated by Speer in the late 1930s: Adolf Hitler hated Berlin, a decadent, promiscuous, socialist city. The plan of the Nazis' architect-in-chief for the transformation of the city into a new imperial capital called Germany involved the massive destruction of most of its blocks to make way for inhumanly large arteries designed for military parades - not unlike the Stalin axis designed in the 1950s to connect Moscow to Alexanderplatz with a straight line. The devastating firepower discharged by Anglo-American bombers between late 1944 and early 1945 left the city in a heap of rubble, in which around 80 per cent of the buildings were destroyed or irreparably damaged; but it did not actually erase the design of the city traced by 19th-century town planning, with a paradoxically less drastic impact than that imagined by the Nazis redevelopment of Berlin.
Speer’s plan for Germania
On the other hand, by one of those strange deviations of history that make history real, on that surviving fabric of the bomb extraordinary intervention, and what follows in terms of Cold War geopolitics, the conditions are created for the initiative of marginal actors and radical imaginations. In the resulting extraordinary disposition, the most diverse practices of living and commoning find their place and flourish. In the 1970s, the saga of colonisation by sub-cultural, alternative, pacifist movements of West Berlin began, facilitated by the abundance of housing available despite the destruction (and by the exclusion of young Berlin residents from conscription, effectively equating living in West Berlin with a kind of civil service). The working population, especially in the west, includes increasing portions of Gastarbeiter with a migrant background, who are concentrated in the large social housing estates. Instead, the growing ‘alternative’ population massively settled in the unrenovated houses that had survived the bombings, mostly heated with coal stoves, with communal bathrooms and kitchens, giving rise to a strong squatter movement and a widespread culture of self-organisation and social solidarity.
From the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum. Photo Manuela Conti.
At the end of the 1990s, the migratory flow reached a peak with the explosion of techno music and the branding of the city as Europe's cultural capital, which opened the door to the regeneration of the city's image before that of its built heritage and generated a circle, simultaneously virtuous and vicious, between image production dynamics and spatial processes. In fact, what I found in Berlin in those years was analogous to the process of colonisation of disused areas in Italian cities by social centres, but on a radically different scale and extension. Here it was not the interstices and margins temporarily neglected in the post-industrial transition that were affected by temporary and flexible practices, but the entire city, invested by the historical paradigm shift. Imbued with a vibrancy, a connective and empathic excitement, the city appeared elected for a mission: to show the way to a new urban society, inclusive, tolerant, creative, in the heart of Europe.2 Tolerance, creativity and inclusion, also made possible and nurtured by the availability of negotiable and malleable public space, soon became the very manifesto of the future city. Unlike in Florence, and more generally in Italian cities (congested, anchored to consolidated and conservative economies, oriented towards the containment if not the blatant repression of urban movements) here in Berlin the scenario was, or at least appeared, relatively open to the contribution of this wave of desiring and plural subjectivities to the process of reconstructing identity, centrality and a sustainable economy.
Street art installation in front of the Palast Der Republik, 2004. Photo Manuela Conti.
Such a vision of berlin was taking shape during a season of intense and suggestive exploration of the territory, applying to a practice of conscious flânerie the systematic approach of the urban dermatologist, obsessively investigating signs and irritations of the city's epidermis, frequenting its subterranean currents and convivial conventions. The city I roamed literally exploded with signs, expressing in all its surfaces a stunning semantic richness, from the colourful and lofty declarations of brotherhood that covered the crumbling Berlin Wall to the anonymous and obscene urban subconscious scratched on the walls of underground club toilets. Everything became a sign, a trace, a clue, telling a collective and molecular story that was deposited on the tired and dormant surfaces of the post-war city: a city to be read on walls and pavements, to be experienced wandering around as if immersed in an avant-garde novel. Everything had a voice and a narrative, even the coal soot still covering certain areas, even the leaves of a thousand varieties of plants reclaiming entire lots freed from asphalt, as well as the thousands of human initiatives and communications stratified through posters, stickers, graffiti, flyers, institutional communications and informal communications, commercial messages and political messages, iconic languages and textual languages.
The city’s skin. Photo Manuela Conti.
From this catalogue I drew a repertoire of constructive and agonistic practices of the evolving public space. The skin of Berlin exhibited, and still does, an intoxicating richness of voices that speak of political involvement, antagonism and resistance, but also of existence, pure and bare. Walking around the city exposed to such a polyphony, one could feel the proud manifestation of those subaltern counterpublics evoked by Nancy Fraser in a well-known article,3 the echoing in each message of claims, codification of emotional assemblages, germination of communities in perpetual remaking. What first catches my attention was the cacophonous richness of graffiti and street art, which manifests itself in a variety of different styles, crews and techniques. It is only one face of a trend of planetary tribalism, in which artistic practices establish undercurrents that unite distant places and people, capture assonances and speak languages that transcend national distinctions. I recognise the mark of several Italian artists, some of them Florentines well known to me, who intertwine with the many who have come from all over the world to populate the city with liberated images and mark its territory as naturally as a dog raising its paw. Cultural hybridisations can be read, as in the case of the Brazilian pixação, which imposes itself here as one of the dominant styles and becomes the hallmark of historical Berlin crews such as Berlin Kidz and 1UP, with the typical vertical stripes of hieroglyphic letters traced by descending from above on the façades.
Graffiti in Friedrichshain. Photo Manuela Conti
Of course, the original influences of 1980s New York writing are not lacking, and the whole inexhaustible panoply of techniques for producing marks on walls that have sprung from the global imagination: dripping, colour bombing, tagging, collages, murals, mosaics, xero-art and whatnot. They are textual and iconographic practices that flourish on walls but connect and refer through elusive and initiatory codes to a myriad of artistic, sound and sexual subcultures, and to antagonist and movementist political dimensions, reconnecting to discursive practices and sound productions, publications, broadcasts, events and more or less stationary spatial settlements. They draw cryptographic maps of alternative practices and communities: maps that speak to the initiated and intentionally bother the others, and that have inspired my situationalist losing myself in the space of Berlin.
Actually, composer Edmund Meisel was commissioned to compose a soundtrack associated with the film, which is in fact an independent work that can be read rather as an orchestral transposition of the original work.
A set of keywords that echoes the positive techno vibes celebrated by Richard Florida, and which would soon become part of the mantra of the impending creative class. Florida, R. L. (2002). The rise of the creative class: and how it's transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York, NY, Basic Books.
Nancy Fraser (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/466240