Tracing (Future) Mobility through Walking and Film

About

Using flânerie and filmmaking the workshop delves into questions surrounding traffic, mobility, city-making, co-habitation and the use of public space in Berlin, from construction projects to so-called ‘culture-wars’ surrounding transportation.

How does mobility shape our everyday life in Berlin? And what are the consequences of different kinds of moving through the city? With the planned extension of the inner city car highway A100 Berlin currently is home of a highly disputed construction project: The highway would displace or erase garden parcels, trees, flats, cultural centres, criticised by a growing protest movement. Meanwhile, in the capital’s 2023 election the conservative party CDU made the question a central and emotional part of their campaign stating: “Berlin is for everyone. Also car drivers.” They won the election.

So what does Berlin actually have enough of? Cars or bike lanes? Available space or transport highways? And what does enough mean for whom in that context? Using flânerie and filmmaking the workshop aims to delve deeper into these questions surrounding mobility, city-making, co-habitation and the use of public space in Berlin, from architectural possibilities to aspects of so-called ‘culture-wars’ surrounding transportation.

We propose walking as a method to start artistically researching these issues. Grounded in the flâneur after Walter Benjamin, the figure will be de- and reconstructed from a postcolonial and feminist point of view, then combined with other practices such as dérive and strollology. Likewise, modern smartphones, consumer cameras, computers and readily available software allow us to create meaningful audiovisual works to investigate and disseminate findings. A critical walking practice will thus be combined with DIY-filmmaking, covering the conception, shooting and editing of the participants’ own works on one of Berlin’s highly contested and future-relevant questions

Course leader

Mirjana Mitrovic & Jan-Holger Hennies

Fee info