Guided TourThe City is Not for Sale
Guided Tour by Arts of the Working Class
We gather first at Café Tiergarten for orientation, tea, and cake (5pm)—a pause to exchange perspectives and map the city as a network of encounters. We interview neighbours, artists, and curators, reflecting on the night ahead: what does it mean to inhabit a city under pressure, and how can artistic gestures trace survival, solidarity, and speculation? As the collective of activists and scholars who comprise Architects for Tempelhof remind us: scarcity cannot destroy solidarity, repetition can become possibility, and dialogue reveals our innate anti-capitalist soul as it shines through our consumerist habits
Featured Night unfolds between the remnants of yesterday and the fantasies of tomorrow. It stages a dance of ruins—not the sterile choreography of the model, but the improvisation of the street, where excess and scarcity collide, and survival itself becomes movement. First stop: Galli’s Pazienza at Grotto. Here, fragility is treated as a source of strength. Visitors engage with the artist in dialogue about patience and the poetics of slow gestures, while residents recount local histories of decay and renewal, and curators reflect on ephemeral interventions that resist permanence. We move forward to Pickle Bar (6pm) for Selin Davasse’s Corpus Iuris Artis: III. The Appeals. The performance transforms choreography into law.
At n.b.k. (7pm), the exhibitions of Margarethe von Trotta, Nora Turato, Stephan Crasneanscki, and Patti Smith interrogate authority across media. Film, text, and performance scatter narratives, reminding us that archives and institutional memory are never neutral—they are contested terrains. We hop on bikes or take an Uber to Between Bridges (7.30pm), Sofía Reyes opens a portal of hallucinations (›Alucinación‹), while Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino turns the residency into a rehearsal for queer resilience. Conversations explore urban imaginaries and strategies of care and survival, as neighbours recount instances of community solidarity and curators observe intersections of ritual, resilience, and performance. Around the corner, Refuge Worldwide presents Humans in Transit, giving voice to stories that are often silenced—from Libya to the middle of the Mediterranean—while inviting guests into conversations about the layers of migration and the ethics of representation.
The 36-headed exhibition ›Polyphonic Views‹, part of this year’s Spatial Festival at Funkhaus Berlin, explores performance beyond physical acts, using space and sound to dissolve boundaries between artwork and audience. Finally, at Flutgraben, ›The Deluge‹ (curated by Lee Plested in collaboration with Matthias Krause Hamrin) conjures water as ruin and renewal. Conversations explore its symbolic and material presence, before the afterparty with from-disco-to-disco legend Eric D. Clark and DJ Puddle. Improvisation and reflection let the evening ripple outward.
Through these passages, three urgencies recur: Ecological crisis: made visible in debris, exhaustion, and the afterlife of materials; artistic precarity: rehearsed in gestures of fragility and persistence; and collective imagination: necessary to navigate futures beyond the logics of exclusivity.
Dates
Fri, 12 SEP, 5pm—2am