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When you dialogue with community, sometimes community wins
Hisae and I headed up to Wedding yesterday, attracted by two events, Wedding Dress, a festival of urban fashion and arts, and Camp Berlin, an inter-city art exchange between Berlin and Hiroshima featuring Japanese artists from the Berlin Bubble.
We started with the Wedding Dress event, which occupies vacant 1970s storefronts along three blocks of the Brunnenstrasse, just where Mitte turns into Wedding, its poorer, more multi-ethnic neighbour to the north. The first attraction was lunch in a place called Pop Up Pub Bento Centre. Here, a couple of designers served us a collision between a trad Japanese bento box and the area's local Turkish cuisine. It was delicious, but it was also food with a message: right there in the polystyrene take-away containers, a cultural dialogue was going on.
The next stop was the big Festivalcafe, where a multimedia artist called Christina Lissmann collared us as models for a piece called ANTISTYLE. This involved dressing us up in colourful shirts and posing us on a mountain of beanbags in front of a big black banner painted with the words "ANTISTYLE GUERILLA". The radical chic was pretty silly, especially when, reading the festival brochure while waiting to get styled as ANTISTYLE GUERILLAS, Hisae and I discovered that the festival's main sponsor is a property letting company called DEGEWO. In other words, all this urban grit, culture, street style and rebel attitude is really about gentrifying a poor neighbourhood and hiking the rents. So it goes... We are antistyle rebels with a cause, but it's someone else's.
Thinking about the "dialogues" going on between the black and Turkish residents of Wedding and the incoming armies of hooded fashionistas with their dreadful ironic 80s music, it was hard to look at the shop-window dummy remake of The Last Supper without thinking that the meal was a fusion cuisine commemoration of Wedding's last days as a working class neighbourhood.
The same thought crossed my mind as we met the editor of a new (and excellent) magazine called Der Wedding, and purchased the first issue of his magazine, a beautiful document full of photographs of Turkish working men's clubs and the corner pubs white working class Berliners call Kniepe. Photo essays on "how we live in Wedding" showed people from all ethnic backgrounds posing in their drab-yet-cosmopolitan apartment blocks. It reminded me of a photo exhibition I saw of old East Berliners in their flats on the Karl-Marx-Allee when I first moved in. That, too, turned out to be a show subsidised by a letting agency, celebrating a culture it was in the process of destroying by attacting -- using the very culture it was displacing -- a new, younger, more affluent group of renters.
The Camp Berlin show also took immigration, globalisation and dialogue as its theme. This time, the dialogue was between the cities of Hiroshima and Berlin, but also between the art show and the fabulous BVG warehouse the show was staged in. BVG is the company that runs Berlin's underground network, and this vast shed is where they used to overhaul their train engines. So, while I obviously enjoyed works like the portable plastic cherry tree which allows you to stage an ohanami celebration wherever in the world you are, and whatever season it happens to be,
or Carolin Wachter's beautiful video piece "Wednesdays I Have Sewing Lessons" (which documented her sewing lessons with immigrants, a kind of spying intended to give her an insight into the women's living conditions and concerns), I ended up feeling that the heavy machinery and fuseboxes of the tram engine shed upstaged the art. When you dialogue with your context, the context sometimes wins. And when you choose, in your trendy art or design event, to dialogue with the community, sometimes the community wins.
On the way back towards the U8 line which would take us back to Neukolln (Wedding's twin district to the south, separated, some say, by some kind of continental drift) we looked into a wonderful bazaar where we ended up buying some clothes: a slate-grey thawb for me, a light cotton cape for Hisae. Nothing in the Wedding Dress "urban fashion" festival had been able to seduce us as these traditional Islamic garments did.
On the U8 line home, I flipped through my copy of Der Wedding magazine, admiring the articles on community, dialogue and gentrification, and above all the dress sense of the muslim women featured in its pages. This, rather than the tedious urban streetwear of the letting agency-sponsored "antistyle guerilla" yuppies, is what inspires me; given the choice between accommodated fake rebellion and the beautiful trad conformity of Islamic immigrant culture, the choice seems pretty clear.
Let's hope DEWEGO don't force the immigrants out of Wedding and turn it into another Prenzlauer Berg (a place of expensive trainers, hooded tops and baby carriages). The Wedding Dress festival has a Street Clash page which pits urban fashionistas in various cities around the globe against each other on a daily basis and allows viewers to vote on "winners". This is one area where the "dialogue" concept hasn't been adopted: there are no working class muslims pitted against the skinny-jeaned, white-shoed hipsters (who look remarkably similar, wherever they happen to be in the world). Maybe the organisers are worried the muslims would win the street clash (they'd certainly get my vote). But if that happens, how the hell do you hoist and hike the rents -- let alone the price of trainers and hoodies?
We started with the Wedding Dress event, which occupies vacant 1970s storefronts along three blocks of the Brunnenstrasse, just where Mitte turns into Wedding, its poorer, more multi-ethnic neighbour to the north. The first attraction was lunch in a place called Pop Up Pub Bento Centre. Here, a couple of designers served us a collision between a trad Japanese bento box and the area's local Turkish cuisine. It was delicious, but it was also food with a message: right there in the polystyrene take-away containers, a cultural dialogue was going on.
The next stop was the big Festivalcafe, where a multimedia artist called Christina Lissmann collared us as models for a piece called ANTISTYLE. This involved dressing us up in colourful shirts and posing us on a mountain of beanbags in front of a big black banner painted with the words "ANTISTYLE GUERILLA". The radical chic was pretty silly, especially when, reading the festival brochure while waiting to get styled as ANTISTYLE GUERILLAS, Hisae and I discovered that the festival's main sponsor is a property letting company called DEGEWO. In other words, all this urban grit, culture, street style and rebel attitude is really about gentrifying a poor neighbourhood and hiking the rents. So it goes... We are antistyle rebels with a cause, but it's someone else's.
Thinking about the "dialogues" going on between the black and Turkish residents of Wedding and the incoming armies of hooded fashionistas with their dreadful ironic 80s music, it was hard to look at the shop-window dummy remake of The Last Supper without thinking that the meal was a fusion cuisine commemoration of Wedding's last days as a working class neighbourhood.
The same thought crossed my mind as we met the editor of a new (and excellent) magazine called Der Wedding, and purchased the first issue of his magazine, a beautiful document full of photographs of Turkish working men's clubs and the corner pubs white working class Berliners call Kniepe. Photo essays on "how we live in Wedding" showed people from all ethnic backgrounds posing in their drab-yet-cosmopolitan apartment blocks. It reminded me of a photo exhibition I saw of old East Berliners in their flats on the Karl-Marx-Allee when I first moved in. That, too, turned out to be a show subsidised by a letting agency, celebrating a culture it was in the process of destroying by attacting -- using the very culture it was displacing -- a new, younger, more affluent group of renters.
The Camp Berlin show also took immigration, globalisation and dialogue as its theme. This time, the dialogue was between the cities of Hiroshima and Berlin, but also between the art show and the fabulous BVG warehouse the show was staged in. BVG is the company that runs Berlin's underground network, and this vast shed is where they used to overhaul their train engines. So, while I obviously enjoyed works like the portable plastic cherry tree which allows you to stage an ohanami celebration wherever in the world you are, and whatever season it happens to be,
or Carolin Wachter's beautiful video piece "Wednesdays I Have Sewing Lessons" (which documented her sewing lessons with immigrants, a kind of spying intended to give her an insight into the women's living conditions and concerns), I ended up feeling that the heavy machinery and fuseboxes of the tram engine shed upstaged the art. When you dialogue with your context, the context sometimes wins. And when you choose, in your trendy art or design event, to dialogue with the community, sometimes the community wins.
On the way back towards the U8 line which would take us back to Neukolln (Wedding's twin district to the south, separated, some say, by some kind of continental drift) we looked into a wonderful bazaar where we ended up buying some clothes: a slate-grey thawb for me, a light cotton cape for Hisae. Nothing in the Wedding Dress "urban fashion" festival had been able to seduce us as these traditional Islamic garments did.
On the U8 line home, I flipped through my copy of Der Wedding magazine, admiring the articles on community, dialogue and gentrification, and above all the dress sense of the muslim women featured in its pages. This, rather than the tedious urban streetwear of the letting agency-sponsored "antistyle guerilla" yuppies, is what inspires me; given the choice between accommodated fake rebellion and the beautiful trad conformity of Islamic immigrant culture, the choice seems pretty clear.
Let's hope DEWEGO don't force the immigrants out of Wedding and turn it into another Prenzlauer Berg (a place of expensive trainers, hooded tops and baby carriages). The Wedding Dress festival has a Street Clash page which pits urban fashionistas in various cities around the globe against each other on a daily basis and allows viewers to vote on "winners". This is one area where the "dialogue" concept hasn't been adopted: there are no working class muslims pitted against the skinny-jeaned, white-shoed hipsters (who look remarkably similar, wherever they happen to be in the world). Maybe the organisers are worried the muslims would win the street clash (they'd certainly get my vote). But if that happens, how the hell do you hoist and hike the rents -- let alone the price of trainers and hoodies?
no subject
no subject
http://justinspace.com/blog/?cat=31
Belle photo
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 12:47 am (UTC)(link)florian
no subject
Over here in Madrid the exact same thing is happening in Lavapies, ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9IrJT82lU for some images ) formerly a totally working class area, also home to many ethnic groups from Pakistan, Africa and South America. The area is just beyond El Rastro's fringe so is relatively central and a magnet for property developers and speculators. In the last seven years I've seen the area become more 'gentrified' on each visit. the old communal corrala viviendas of the 19th century are being gutted to make, in their place, one or two spacious flats for rich kids.
Similar to the 'antistyle rebel' event above, a series of cultural institutions with absolutely no connection to the area and its needs, have appeared: the Casa encendida (a Madrid bank-run art centre with notoriously unapproachable echelons of management) hosts exhibitions on urban issues in Lagos whilst ignoring, at the same time 2 streets away, grass roots cultural initiatives like El Laboratorio being booted out onto the street!
A similar thing happened with the demolition of the alternative artist-run theatre ( http://www.gruposurrealistademadrid.org/aviso-para-la-proxima-demolici%C3%B3n-del-nuevo-teatro-olimpia and the building of the CDN ( http://cdn.mcu.es/tvi.php?leng=en&ob= ) on the site.
All this points towards a tendency away from a participative, critical 'culture by the people' ethos towards a yuppified, consumer orientated 'culture-for-the people'. This goes hand in hand with the transformation of a normal barrio community to an area for the privileged. Walking round there you're more likely to see the sort of people from Nathan Barley ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhAr_UeroCk ) than the 70-year-old slipper-clad woman with her pet ducks in tow nipping down to the panaderia for her bread stick!
no subject
Finally getting the chance to bask in it myself in my 20s cira 2000s, I realized that ... I was becoming a small piece of marketing for some real estate agent's brochure. What we all think of as "hipsterism" these days is this marketing gimmick... so honestly, all the stuff we're probably into by nature of ourselves... weird books, music, movies, ideas, style, is basically used to market property, soft drinks, sneakers, all this garbage. So what do you do then? Stop being interested in what you're into? It's bizarre, honestly.
Of course, then you think .. was it always marketing in the first place? What on earth are our lives?
Damned consumers
Ideally though marketing would like to close these down, niche products don't fly of the shelf at the same volume, they cost storage space and finding the buyer is that little harder.
In marketing's perfect world we would all listen to Coldplay, drink Coca Cola and wear Nike (or at least confine our irritating, over-choosy selves to a few mass-producible product lines similar to the above).
no subject
no subject
Degentrification has been happening in New York -- they've started calling Red Hook Dead Hook (http://curbed.com/archives/2007/11/15/live_from_red_hook_a_short_history_of_degentrification.php). Speaking of Red Hook, here's me back in 2005 getting a tour of the then-turning area from Nathan Michel (http://imomus.livejournal.com/123889.html). We visited all the requisite art events in former industrial spaces, sipped latte in cafes with antler motifs, admired the old sailor pubs and the gas works (indigenous legacy stuff), and spoke about the entrepreneurs snapping up property and planning new ferry links to Manhattan. Since then, however -- thanks to the property downturn -- the "turning" has "turned back". Some people in the area are disappointed, and some outside it feel pity and scorn.
no subject
theyve been trying to gentrify wedding for years now and it just doesnt fly. its like a war and this wedding dress thing is just like a blitzkrieg. Do keep us updated if it goes anywhere. I feel like in berlin speculators who want to do those kind of leaps have a little bit of a harder time than in other places - the local communities are more like big sacred cows to whom the wealthy hipsters are just flies they squash with their tails
no subject
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 09:44 am (UTC)(link)no subject
I've written before (in a recent article for Spike magazine, for instance) about how Wedding and Neukolln are rivals, and been worried that Wedding was winning, because it has better art galleries and more artists and is closer to Mitte. But after yesterday I'm feeling that Neukolln might be "winning by losing" -- it's precisely the degentrification thing going on here in Neukolln which will keep it from both the highs of gentrification (the excellent synchronized openings organized by Colonie Wedding, for instance, or the obvious quality of Der Wedding magazine) and its lows (the completely bankrupt culture of boring slightly-deconstructed hoodies, slightly-deconstructed sports shoes, and slightly-deconstructed pop music which was on display in the Wedding Dress event).
So now I'm happy that Neukolln is teetering and faltering. It's precisely that teetering and faltering which is the area's strength -- and this relates to what I was saying the other day about being in a room with co-existing matterzones (http://imomus.livejournal.com/348972.html). The important thing is that different types of people co-exist, and that nobody "wins".
no subject
hey isnt that girl linda lovefoxx or whatever from CSS a prime example (a specially well crafted one, i mean) of all those bankrupt things you are talking about?
Im still bugged by what you said about her the only one "really trying" in the 00's, specially when in the next post you go and celebrate old turkish ladies. Why not choose one of your neighbors in neukoln as the fashion icon of the 00's then?or did you just mean she is "the only japanese girl really trying" even tho she is half?because yeah, if you were to judge the state of fashion by the looks you see in tokyo these days it would be like terminal depression
no subject
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 09:53 am (UTC)(link)Gentrifying Wedding is gonna be hard. There's just no gallery spacing away the fact that the buildings just aren't very nice, most of them being 60s / 70s west German quick-and-dirty reconstructions.
On the other hand, the M10 (aka Hipster Express) is serving the area now, and in the other direction, Mitte is close, so who knows.
der.
cultural capital
On a tangental note a friend, from Wedding, of very 'Arian' appearance recently modeled clothes for a Turkish company whose style might be best described as "ghetto bling" - both he and the company concerned found the idea amusingly subversive - which, I guess, demonstrates that the dialogue on appropriation and authenticity runs in more directions than might be anticipated.
Last naked supper
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 02:02 pm (UTC)(link)I am surprised you didn't mention the population of large rats living in the area.
You can even see one outside the window here, albeit a dead one.
wewillbecome.com
Re: Last naked supper
Re: Last naked supper
“You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 04:32 pm (UTC)(link)Art should express the age it inhabits, not some misty Marxist bronze age.
Capitalism is our culture. It is our hunt, it is our gather. It is our garment, it is our dance. Nevermore the rickety waltz of poverty. Nevermore religion. Some day this era will be looked back upon as a golden age, and people will need to hear from the great philosophers and artists and scientists and doctors who forged and explored such a fascinating triumph (liberal too!), not from the prophets of doom at its door.
Give in to capitalism: its intellect, its art and technology, its medicine and easy-going nature. Embrace and enjoy the smooth framework and spoils - and to hell with piety, goodness and the rip-off of forever!
The Pro-Bling Phantom Turbocapitalist
“Sharia Law should be introduced into the UK” says the Archbishop of Canterbury
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 04:40 pm (UTC)(link)Then: the intellectual hipster argument is wholly atheist. “We all agree, don’t we, that religion is an opium. An agreement to discard free thought. A covenant of blind acceptance. The need for religion, while sometimes perfectly understandable, comes from irrational fears of death and disease and chaos – the sources of which needs to be eradicated, not replaced by superstition dressed as race or culture.”
Now: “I hate Bush so much - I like everything he hates.”
---
“The National Secular Society said it was another example of Britain 'sleepwalking to segregation. Our view is simple. You can't have a country where you have separate laws for separate faith groups', it said. 'The same religious groups who are calling for integration are the same one who want segregation.'"
There is no confusing slicing and dicing with capitalism, just One World Under Pleasure.
The Pro-Bling Phantom Turbocapitalist
Re: “Sharia Law should be introduced into the UK” says the Archbishop of Canterbury
yup that a smiley
the Archbishop of poland
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 05:18 pm (UTC)(link)Re: the Archbishop of poland
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Of course in the US and UK capitalism, deregulation, and free markets are basically a cult, so there's a big circle of people that will die for these ideas. But to read in the mainstream media that capitalism itself is an extreme dogma like communism, is pretty uncommon. It's like people found a dusty box full of pamphlets made for the NAFTA and G8 protests.
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
I also think calling the current state of affairs a "deep crisis" is getting ahead of yourself since wolf says "It is true, on the first point, that none of the financial crises of this period has gravely damaged the world economy".
and if you honestly believe citing one specific example of failure within a specific capitalist system constitutes proof against Capitalism overall, all I really have to do is mention the names "north Korea" and "Soviet Russia" as examples of Communist failure, and I think we'd all agree that those are some of the biggest examples of financial and political failure you're ever going to find.
Communism is based on the belief that wealth should be distributed equally between the people. If you believe this, theres nothing stopping you from practicing personal communism by donating your own excesses of wealth to charities once you've payed for your own necessities.
But wait, you have iMacs and Ipods to buy... And plane tickets to design shows...
Do as I say, not as I do, right?
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Three things the working classes hated...
The blue/red wormhole
It was intriguing to witness how many supposed socialists toasted Gordon Brown succession - as if it were not abundantly obvious all along that Gordy was the forearm up the other dummy's arse.
Under Blair/Brown average worker earnings doubled whilst average bosses earnings trebled, London became an effective off-shore tax haven and last year for example the 54 billionaires whose enterprises are U.K. based paid just 15 million tax on collective earnings of in the region of 126 billion.
Blair/Browne's economic policies would - if compared with Thatcher's - make the the latter old gone-in the-teeth bitch blush.
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Environmentalism is about the fact that without a sustainable way to live on the planet we're all fucked.
Communism is about people looking around saying "hey, you have a porche! Why dont I have one?". Its an entirely moral issue, Enviromentalism isnt.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as society gives you a way to feed yourself, clothe yourself, shelter yourself, and heal yourself affordably, thats it; we have that in the UK. Thats all you need. Poverty is relative. The rest is about accepting your lot in life.
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
My comment concerned the 'Do as I say, not as I do' maxim coincidentally propounded by certain proponents of these respective belief systems, that and nothing more.
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 08:05 pm (UTC)(link)Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
Theres nothing wrong with Capitalism with socialist aspects. "Mixed economies". Im all for that. But Communism? No, I dont agree with that.
Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
(Anonymous) 2008-02-08 12:04 am (UTC)(link)Re: “You give anti-capitalist a bad name..”
(Anonymous) 2008-02-08 12:14 am (UTC)(link)~*/|\*~
arch bishop kebab
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 06:32 pm (UTC)(link)i think capitalism may be worst
in long run there will be more death
Re: arch bishop kebab
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