The exhibition The Dialogic City—Berlin wird Berlin was part of the initiative Stadt/Bild (Image of a City), a joint exhibition project which approached the notion of “The City” as a thematic cluster from various perspectives, and consisted in four coinciding exhibitions. Supported by the Senate of Berlin, the project acted as the prelude to the Berlin Art Week 2015. Taking the publication of the same title (0179.1 The Dialogic City—Berlin wird Berlin) as its central point of departure, the exhibition located at Berlinische Galerie, explored perspectives on dialogic acting in the city echoing the book’s seven chapters. Beyond approaches to participation, possibilities of how to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable opposites in Berlin, a city where these antagonisms are in place more extremely than elsewhere, were drafted from different perspectives. Building on the chapters of the publication, seven commentaries were realized in the large exhibition hall of the Berlinische Galerie.
On one wall, a long pile of several thousand copies of the silver-shining publication The Dialogic City—Berlin wird Berlin was installed, free to take for each visitor, and reflecting the row of shelfs located on the opposite wall. There, approximately 500 models and documents of architectural competitions were presented, that have taken place in Berlin and belong to the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, a municipal museum. Due to a lack of financial and personnel resources, only a fraction of the material has been digitized so far. The exhibition addressed this problem by making the models from the depot visible in the exhibition space. An integral part of the museum that is usually hidden from the public thus became visible. On the one hand, it is possible to imagine an alternative Berlin on the basis of these models and to reconstruct it using the competition entries. On the other hand, they exhibit a history of ideas that remain even though they were not realized and can be used as an inspiration for contemporary debates about the city.
© Thomas Mayfried
© Thomas Mayfried
© Thomas Mayfried
© Thomas Mayfried
© Thomas Mayfried
© Thomas Mayfried
© Olaf Grawert