Mittelweg is a publication made by: Maria Ader, Jessica Arseneau, Lina Augustin, Nellie Chu, Diana Duarte, Shauna Janssen, Ariela Kader, Anne Marchal, Ayumi Miyano, Reese Riley,
Mariangela Tinelli, Maria Tsilogianni, and Megan Wiessner.
During the residency AFFECT Modul V at Agora Collective facilitated by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and coordinated by Paz Ponce.
Each piece of the publication is the result of our research in Neukölln-Berlin during September 2015.
Poetics of Statistics
For my contribution to this project,
I decided to making a survey on the street Karl-Marx-Straße in Neukölln and asked to the people passing by: “where do you go?” or “wohin gehst du?”. As an exchange to their response, they were receiving one of the three poems I chose for the cultural diversity of the neigborhood.
One was from Mahoud Darwish Now On You Are You, a Palestinian writer which had an engaged discourse during his time. Another one was from Polish writer Wisława Szymborska, The Three Oddest Words, and the other one from Turkish Nazim Hikmet, Five Lines. The three poems had different discourses, engaging with mobility, language with a philosophical angle. This experimental exercise and performative gesture gave me the occasion to encounter with many people of different cultures and ages in Berlin-Neukölln. I compiled the 201 answers to make statistics and to create poetic sentences. The intention was to reveal not only a geography of the places and the activities of the daily, but to creates a wider reflection on mobility and migration, which conduct to a construction of identities and, therefore, a neighborhood’s imaginary.
Here is some example of the texts :
“When vowels and consonants echo on the facades of Berlin-Neukölln, various linguistic arcades draw lines over time
201 people answered the survey while being on displacement toward a place or a moment, between an architectural path and narrative gestures.
Result of this survey are spread around the corner”
“The result shows that 21.5% are going to a place called home, 29.4% to a private space, 3.5% to Arcaden, 34.8% to a public environment and there are 6% who doesn’t know where they are going”
“53.2% have identified a context, 14.9% an action, 12.9% are going along their wills, 9% to an enforced displacement”
“Among all the people moving in innumerable directions, 10.4% are going to take part in contemporary rituals, 33.3% projected themselves into a productive space where economy flows and 8.5% are heading further”
One was from Mahoud Darwish Now On You Are You, a Palestinian writer which had an engaged discourse during his time. Another one was from Polish writer Wisława Szymborska, The Three Oddest Words, and the other one from Turkish Nazim Hikmet, Five Lines. The three poems had different discourses, engaging with mobility, language with a philosophical angle. This experimental exercise and performative gesture gave me the occasion to encounter with many people of different cultures and ages in Berlin-Neukölln. I compiled the 201 answers to make statistics and to create poetic sentences. The intention was to reveal not only a geography of the places and the activities of the daily, but to creates a wider reflection on mobility and migration, which conduct to a construction of identities and, therefore, a neighborhood’s imaginary.
Here is some example of the texts :
“When vowels and consonants echo on the facades of Berlin-Neukölln, various linguistic arcades draw lines over time
201 people answered the survey while being on displacement toward a place or a moment, between an architectural path and narrative gestures.
Result of this survey are spread around the corner”
“The result shows that 21.5% are going to a place called home, 29.4% to a private space, 3.5% to Arcaden, 34.8% to a public environment and there are 6% who doesn’t know where they are going”
“53.2% have identified a context, 14.9% an action, 12.9% are going along their wills, 9% to an enforced displacement”
“Among all the people moving in innumerable directions, 10.4% are going to take part in contemporary rituals, 33.3% projected themselves into a productive space where economy flows and 8.5% are heading further”
Only one of them was not part of the publication and had to take place at a dead-end, in the urban space connected to the place where I did the survey :
Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics, are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication, the beginning of a story the rest of which is written by footsteps, to the daily “news”, television news reports, legends, and stories that are told (memories and fiction of foreign lands or more or less distant times in the past).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. 1984.
Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics, are part of them, from the alphabet of spatial indication, the beginning of a story the rest of which is written by footsteps, to the daily “news”, television news reports, legends, and stories that are told (memories and fiction of foreign lands or more or less distant times in the past).
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press. 1984.
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