by Akira Takayama
While we traverse the built reality of the city, we are constantly surrounded by unrealised building plans, lost artistic designs and visions of a different way of living together. To mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele the Japanese artist Akira Takayama invites the public to take six guided tours on the Berlin Ringbahn that will enable them to encounter these ghosts of alternative futures.
The ideas for these unrealised projects have come from the archives of the Berliner Festspiele, other Berlin cultural institutions and individual architects and artists. Takayama transposes them to the present and asks which visions we want to make reality in future. On four weekends the 27 stations of the Ringbahn will be turned into locations for forgotten plans for the future whose stories will be retold in new ways by experienced tour guides. The guided tours will be conducted in German and English.
For What If Berlin, more than 100 unrealised artistic project ideas and urban development concepts were reviewed, spanning the fields of architecture, film, visual arts, theatre and performance, music, urban art and activism. Drawing on this research material, Takayama selected 27 unrealised designs and assigned each one a potential future location at a specific S-Bahn station. The tours in and along the Berlin Ringbahn make these alternative future visions accessible, whilst offering different thematic perspectives:
How can the forgotten artistic heritage of the GDR be revived? What infrastructures and urban systems enable participation and diversity? How can the centre of Berlin open up to its periphery? Where do the new boundaries and invisible walls lie in the once-divided city, and how can we overcome them? The audience is invited to imagine a different city – a “New Berlin” once again – and will have the chance to get involved at the end: from 28 August, for a period of three months, people can vote on the Berliner Festspiele website for the project that Berlin needs most.