The struggles for nature access, clean air and water, public parks and open spaces in the ‘Red Wedding’ are as old as the neighbourhood itself. Its radical political history is closely linked to the struggle for ‘green’ spaces and environmental justice, as the neighbourhood was notorious for gloomy tenements and the pollution caused by local industry. ︎︎︎
How are demands of equality interrelated with self-determined spaces in the past and present? How do free communities become laboratories for creative and visionary forms of collectivity? How can urban dwellings be designed in solidarity and equity? These questions form the starting point of our project «Free State of Barackia» which draws inspiration from an independent free state founded 150 years ago by migrant workers and disenfranchised urban dwellers in berlin, that stretched from Kottbusser Tor to Hasenheide. ︎︎︎
The programme ‘Radical Mutation: On the Ruins of Rising Suns’ forges bridges between historical struggles for equality, anti-racism and representation in arts/culture and current efforts for radical change in cultural spaces. The city of Berlin is the starting point for tracing these histories and their legacies, which lead us from Douala to Neukölln, from Tiergarten to Harlem and beyond. The title of the programme references one of the first recorded Black theatre revues produced in Germany (‘Sunrise in Morning Land’, 1930) staged at a popular working class ballroom in Neukölln, which challenged the portrayal of Black people in cultural productions of the Weimar Republic. ︎︎︎
