FOLKE KÖBBERLING & MARTIN KALTWASSER
Interim Use at a Former Death Strip?
Art, Politics and Urbanism at Skulpturenpark Berlin
Karen E. Till
Twenty years after unification Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through
marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped
with plastic façades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine.1 Although
these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and
reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first fifteen years of Berlin’s
post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to
situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited
visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as
planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center
might replace this former parliamentary building of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three
plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms
that led down into those sites . Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn it one more
time (2006-08), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of
earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms
erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the
division. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a new
view into the history of a place.”2 Köbberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” of
the city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter urban natures. The artists listed the
diverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biological
species on a large billboard at the site. For the artists “the stairway [down into the excavation] …
provided an experiential path,” bringing viewers into the opened ground “to be surrounded by
the site’s intrinsic, biological processes.”3 When standing on the platform, visitors were
surrounded by layers of earth and the plants just above ground and at eye level. Here they could
witness “the territorial appropriation [of the city] by wild plants:” “This overwhelming presence
of flora presented the natural potentials of the place typically beyond the interests of its potential
developers.”4
As these artists remind, the urban practice of viewing the city from atop wooden
platforms has a deeply personal as well as political and economic performance history in divided
and post-unified Berlin. Viewing platforms in recent memory were first erected in haphazard
fashion by locals to retain some kind of contact between family members and neighborhoods
separated in 1961. These flimsy structures became associated with memories of loss,
displacement, and division for many Berliners. Sturdier viewing edifices were later erected in
West Berlin, changing the emotional politics of viewing to a geopolitical gaze of authority. As
Cold War icons of defending Western spaces of “democracy,” the platforms soon also became
tourist attractions that promoted the voyeuristic consumption of the (Eastern Bloc) Other and an
understanding of urban space as transparent. Moreover, at the time that Köbberling and
Kaltwasser installed Turn it one more time, their inverted use of a platform in Berlin questioned
post-unification viewing practices at construction sites by developers and city authorities.5 The
artists exploited the trope of the platform to challenge the assumption that city planners and
politicians are the city’s strategic experts, or the all-seeing, masculine surveyors who look at and
define the world according to national imaginaries, property values, and potential economic
development. Rather than look up at the spectacle of skyscrapers and renovated structures being
built and rebuilt, they asked the viewer to look down into the spaces of land speculation and then
to move down into the earth, like a city archaeologist. The platform created an urban encounter
of inverted perspectives, reminding us that the act of looking is never neutral but always tied to
specific histories of social practices, institutions, and power relations. The artists questioned the
authoritative gaze as a form of knowing, playing with perceptions of distances and closeness, to
confront the scopic regimes of the state and the city’s institutions for economic and scientific
management.6
Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s installation points to the inherent problems of city
marketing strategies. To package landscapes, streetscapes, and even neighborhoods as
consumable scenes treats space and time as bounded entities that can be commodified. Even
though cities continuously undergo processes of transformation, planning land-use maps, public
policies, and even theories of the city represent urban space and life as well as the places
residents inhabit in static terms. In contrast, the artists invited residents and passersby to explore,
envision, remember, and create new ways of encountering their city, past and present.
As architectural historian Dolores Hayden argues, little scholarly work documents the
changes, losses, and new designs of particular places in cities that may resonate in the collective
memory of local residents.7 And yet the experiences, memories, and desires of residents and
visitors offer a complex repository of understanding “urbanism as a way of life,” to borrow urban
sociologist Louis Wirth’s oft-cited 1938 essay.8 If urban designers, the building professionals,
and urban theorists are serious about producing socially sustainable cities and communities in the
future, they must acknowledge that residents are the caretakers of urban places. As I suggest in
this chapter, planners as well as scholars have much to learn from locally based artists who have
experimented with a range of participatory and transformative approaches to engage residents in
representing and defining their city and the places and neighborhoods they inhabit. At the same
time artistic interventions offer residents creative practices that encourage an appreciation of the
fragility of the social ecologies of place. As I have argued elsewhere, such nuanced interactions
and attitudes may also result in the development of a place-based ethics of care in the context of
a city that has experienced a violent national past and dramatic urban change.9
In this chapter I focus on projects such as Turn it one more time curated by the artistic
collaborative Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum that have emerged as a direct consequence of the
divided city and are located in the shadow of the former Berlin Wall in one of the city’s former
“death strips” in Berlin Mitte. In what appeared to be an empty, overgrown lot in an isolated yet
centrally located part of the city, artists worked in and through this post-Wall space,
appropriating the materials and spatial practices of city-building professionals including media
images, buildings, streets, and parcels of land, while questioning how land development and
urban use in the “new” Berlin ignored the legacies of a once divided city. Rather than treating
space as an empty container to be filled in or emptied out, they began with an understanding of
the city as constituted by inhabited places that intersect with other complex places.10 Their
artistic matter mobilized the stray stuff, remnants, leftovers, unwanted forms, and seemingly
empty lots of the city (including the “death strips”), to create what I call “interim spaces”
through which non-normative, critical spatial and historical imaginaries of the city could be
explored. Their work invited encounters with the city as an enacted environment, and asked
visitors and locals to take notice of the complex ways places are made and remade.11 To
understand how these artists, visitors, and residents engaged with the projects, I first consider the
more general post-unification marketing and planning contexts of their work.
From Zwischennutzung to Interim Spaces.
In 2008 Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit launched a new image campaign for the city under the
slogan “Be Berlin” (Sei Berlin). As urban sociologists Claire Columb and Ares Kalandides
asked, “Why does it still matter for Berlin’s political leaders to search for a new image, a new
slogan, a new ‘brand’ twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the city?”12
They noted not only that the “New Berlin” marketing strategy was not so new by this point in
time, but also that the city did not appear to be functioning well economically. Although the
“creative industries” sector appears to be strong, such as in music, design, and art, the city-state
(Land) of Berlin has nearly faced bankruptcy, so that the public sector has had to rely heavily on
private funding and public-private partnerships. Columb further argues that the “Be Berlin”
marketing campaign and the recent “Urban Pioneers” project of the Berlin Senate’s Office of
Urban Development appear to be capitalizing on local, spontaneous projects at seemingly vacant
plots, that is, in spaces planners and large-scale developers normally consider economically
irrelevant.13 She also mentions that in addition to publishing a “how to” book about managing
underutilized urban spaces for developers, cultural event planners, and local neighborhood
authorities, the Berlin Senate Office provides the following services: webpage inventories of
available properties for temporary use; management assistance for building and construction
gaps owned by public agencies; the coordination of a Berlin-wide database of vacant plots
awaiting redevelopment; and funding for small consultancies that mediate between owners and
so-called “temporary users.”14
City authorities refer to this “new” planning concept as Zwischennutzung or temporary
use. The formal recognition and management of so-called urban wastelands—including
brownfield and former industrial sites (unused sites that may have high levels of environmental
pollution from former uses), unused buildings, and vacant plots and buildings resulting from
division, war damage, erasures by successive political regimes, poor planning, and the disuse of
infrastructure—are actually radical for any city or state planning agency. Yet in the international
urban management context defined by Richard Florida’s persuasive rhetoric about the
significance of the “creative class” to urban economic growth, the notion of “temporary use” by
“urban pioneers” in the “creative city” appears to be a new planning fad in Berlin, similar to
other cities searching for a way to become competitive and establish an economically based
identity.15 Although many local residents are cynical about the ways in which seemingly
redundant spaces in the city are being claimed by city authorities under the label of
Zwischennutzung, Berlin does make a contribution to how urban space might be theorized and
even “mapped.”
1 K. E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005).
2 “Turn it one more time – Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser – Parcella # 03,” in
Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, SkulpturenPark Projects: realisierte Projekte/realized projects
2006-2010, booklet at http://www.skulpturenpark.org/download/09-01projects_sm.pdf, p. 10
(accessed 5 March 2010).
3 Ibid.
Till 23
4 Ibid.
5 For a discussion of behind-the-construction-site-scenes of the city-marketing program
Schaustelle Berlin, see C. Columb Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of
Urban Reinvention in Berlin Post-1989 (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2011); Till, The New
Berlin. Other artists also used inverted perspectives, scale, and viewing platforms to question the
city’s marketing strategies, such as artist and scenographer Stefanie Bürkle: http://www.stefaniebuerkle.
de/buerkle/index.php. For a discussion of Bürkle and Köbberling and Kaltwasser see K.
E. Till, “Re/Staging the City: Artistic Urban Encounters,” in Space and Truth/Raum und
Wahrheit: Monitoring Scenography 2, eds. T. Brejzik, W. Greisenegger, and L. Wallen (Zurich:
Zurich University of the Arts/Züricher Hochschule der Künste, 2009), pp. 114-25.
6 On looking see J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972); J. Berger,
About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1980); M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:
Pantheon, 1971).
from
After the Wall, Ed. Marc Silberman, Palgrave-
Macmillan. © Karen E. Till, 2010.
Art, Politics and Urbanism at Skulpturenpark Berlin
Karen E. Till
Twenty years after unification Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through
marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped
with plastic façades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine.1 Although
these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and
reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first fifteen years of Berlin’s
post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to
situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited
visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as
planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center
might replace this former parliamentary building of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three
plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms
that led down into those sites . Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn it one more
time (2006-08), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of
earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms
erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the
division. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a new
view into the history of a place.”2 Köbberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” of
the city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter urban natures. The artists listed the
diverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biological
species on a large billboard at the site. For the artists “the stairway [down into the excavation] …
provided an experiential path,” bringing viewers into the opened ground “to be surrounded by
the site’s intrinsic, biological processes.”3 When standing on the platform, visitors were
surrounded by layers of earth and the plants just above ground and at eye level. Here they could
witness “the territorial appropriation [of the city] by wild plants:” “This overwhelming presence
of flora presented the natural potentials of the place typically beyond the interests of its potential
developers.”4
As these artists remind, the urban practice of viewing the city from atop wooden
platforms has a deeply personal as well as political and economic performance history in divided
and post-unified Berlin. Viewing platforms in recent memory were first erected in haphazard
fashion by locals to retain some kind of contact between family members and neighborhoods
separated in 1961. These flimsy structures became associated with memories of loss,
displacement, and division for many Berliners. Sturdier viewing edifices were later erected in
West Berlin, changing the emotional politics of viewing to a geopolitical gaze of authority. As
Cold War icons of defending Western spaces of “democracy,” the platforms soon also became
tourist attractions that promoted the voyeuristic consumption of the (Eastern Bloc) Other and an
understanding of urban space as transparent. Moreover, at the time that Köbberling and
Kaltwasser installed Turn it one more time, their inverted use of a platform in Berlin questioned
post-unification viewing practices at construction sites by developers and city authorities.5 The
artists exploited the trope of the platform to challenge the assumption that city planners and
politicians are the city’s strategic experts, or the all-seeing, masculine surveyors who look at and
define the world according to national imaginaries, property values, and potential economic
development. Rather than look up at the spectacle of skyscrapers and renovated structures being
built and rebuilt, they asked the viewer to look down into the spaces of land speculation and then
to move down into the earth, like a city archaeologist. The platform created an urban encounter
of inverted perspectives, reminding us that the act of looking is never neutral but always tied to
specific histories of social practices, institutions, and power relations. The artists questioned the
authoritative gaze as a form of knowing, playing with perceptions of distances and closeness, to
confront the scopic regimes of the state and the city’s institutions for economic and scientific
management.6
Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s installation points to the inherent problems of city
marketing strategies. To package landscapes, streetscapes, and even neighborhoods as
consumable scenes treats space and time as bounded entities that can be commodified. Even
though cities continuously undergo processes of transformation, planning land-use maps, public
policies, and even theories of the city represent urban space and life as well as the places
residents inhabit in static terms. In contrast, the artists invited residents and passersby to explore,
envision, remember, and create new ways of encountering their city, past and present.
As architectural historian Dolores Hayden argues, little scholarly work documents the
changes, losses, and new designs of particular places in cities that may resonate in the collective
memory of local residents.7 And yet the experiences, memories, and desires of residents and
visitors offer a complex repository of understanding “urbanism as a way of life,” to borrow urban
sociologist Louis Wirth’s oft-cited 1938 essay.8 If urban designers, the building professionals,
and urban theorists are serious about producing socially sustainable cities and communities in the
future, they must acknowledge that residents are the caretakers of urban places. As I suggest in
this chapter, planners as well as scholars have much to learn from locally based artists who have
experimented with a range of participatory and transformative approaches to engage residents in
representing and defining their city and the places and neighborhoods they inhabit. At the same
time artistic interventions offer residents creative practices that encourage an appreciation of the
fragility of the social ecologies of place. As I have argued elsewhere, such nuanced interactions
and attitudes may also result in the development of a place-based ethics of care in the context of
a city that has experienced a violent national past and dramatic urban change.9
In this chapter I focus on projects such as Turn it one more time curated by the artistic
collaborative Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum that have emerged as a direct consequence of the
divided city and are located in the shadow of the former Berlin Wall in one of the city’s former
“death strips” in Berlin Mitte. In what appeared to be an empty, overgrown lot in an isolated yet
centrally located part of the city, artists worked in and through this post-Wall space,
appropriating the materials and spatial practices of city-building professionals including media
images, buildings, streets, and parcels of land, while questioning how land development and
urban use in the “new” Berlin ignored the legacies of a once divided city. Rather than treating
space as an empty container to be filled in or emptied out, they began with an understanding of
the city as constituted by inhabited places that intersect with other complex places.10 Their
artistic matter mobilized the stray stuff, remnants, leftovers, unwanted forms, and seemingly
empty lots of the city (including the “death strips”), to create what I call “interim spaces”
through which non-normative, critical spatial and historical imaginaries of the city could be
explored. Their work invited encounters with the city as an enacted environment, and asked
visitors and locals to take notice of the complex ways places are made and remade.11 To
understand how these artists, visitors, and residents engaged with the projects, I first consider the
more general post-unification marketing and planning contexts of their work.
From Zwischennutzung to Interim Spaces.
In 2008 Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit launched a new image campaign for the city under the
slogan “Be Berlin” (Sei Berlin). As urban sociologists Claire Columb and Ares Kalandides
asked, “Why does it still matter for Berlin’s political leaders to search for a new image, a new
slogan, a new ‘brand’ twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the city?”12
They noted not only that the “New Berlin” marketing strategy was not so new by this point in
time, but also that the city did not appear to be functioning well economically. Although the
“creative industries” sector appears to be strong, such as in music, design, and art, the city-state
(Land) of Berlin has nearly faced bankruptcy, so that the public sector has had to rely heavily on
private funding and public-private partnerships. Columb further argues that the “Be Berlin”
marketing campaign and the recent “Urban Pioneers” project of the Berlin Senate’s Office of
Urban Development appear to be capitalizing on local, spontaneous projects at seemingly vacant
plots, that is, in spaces planners and large-scale developers normally consider economically
irrelevant.13 She also mentions that in addition to publishing a “how to” book about managing
underutilized urban spaces for developers, cultural event planners, and local neighborhood
authorities, the Berlin Senate Office provides the following services: webpage inventories of
available properties for temporary use; management assistance for building and construction
gaps owned by public agencies; the coordination of a Berlin-wide database of vacant plots
awaiting redevelopment; and funding for small consultancies that mediate between owners and
so-called “temporary users.”14
City authorities refer to this “new” planning concept as Zwischennutzung or temporary
use. The formal recognition and management of so-called urban wastelands—including
brownfield and former industrial sites (unused sites that may have high levels of environmental
pollution from former uses), unused buildings, and vacant plots and buildings resulting from
division, war damage, erasures by successive political regimes, poor planning, and the disuse of
infrastructure—are actually radical for any city or state planning agency. Yet in the international
urban management context defined by Richard Florida’s persuasive rhetoric about the
significance of the “creative class” to urban economic growth, the notion of “temporary use” by
“urban pioneers” in the “creative city” appears to be a new planning fad in Berlin, similar to
other cities searching for a way to become competitive and establish an economically based
identity.15 Although many local residents are cynical about the ways in which seemingly
redundant spaces in the city are being claimed by city authorities under the label of
Zwischennutzung, Berlin does make a contribution to how urban space might be theorized and
even “mapped.”
1 K. E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005).
2 “Turn it one more time – Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser – Parcella # 03,” in
Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, SkulpturenPark Projects: realisierte Projekte/realized projects
2006-2010, booklet at http://www.skulpturenpark.org/download/09-01projects_sm.pdf, p. 10
(accessed 5 March 2010).
3 Ibid.
Till 23
4 Ibid.
5 For a discussion of behind-the-construction-site-scenes of the city-marketing program
Schaustelle Berlin, see C. Columb Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of
Urban Reinvention in Berlin Post-1989 (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2011); Till, The New
Berlin. Other artists also used inverted perspectives, scale, and viewing platforms to question the
city’s marketing strategies, such as artist and scenographer Stefanie Bürkle: http://www.stefaniebuerkle.
de/buerkle/index.php. For a discussion of Bürkle and Köbberling and Kaltwasser see K.
E. Till, “Re/Staging the City: Artistic Urban Encounters,” in Space and Truth/Raum und
Wahrheit: Monitoring Scenography 2, eds. T. Brejzik, W. Greisenegger, and L. Wallen (Zurich:
Zurich University of the Arts/Züricher Hochschule der Künste, 2009), pp. 114-25.
6 On looking see J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972); J. Berger,
About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1980); M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:
Pantheon, 1971).
from
After the Wall, Ed. Marc Silberman, Palgrave-
Macmillan. © Karen E. Till, 2010.
