_Strollology (DEU), Why is Kottbusser Damm Beautiful?
#Perception of landscape #Historicity of places #Journey as a reward
30.08.13 at 12:00,
Kottbusser Tor in front of Kaiser‘s, Skalitzerst. 134, 10999
3 hrs, English/German
Audience should have a camera/cell phone with a camera
Maximum group size: 10 people
The tour we've created for B_Tour revolves around the concept of Lucius Burckhardt‘s Spaziergangswissenschaft (in English strollology, the “science of strolling”) Based on field trips, Burckhardt engaged himself in matters concerning the perception of landscape. He argued that landscape should be considered a construct created by our imagination rather than being an environmental phenomenon. Our perception rests on a cultural package of previous representations – only in exceptional cases we perceive something that we haven‘t been prepared for through our cultural background, by literature or by pictorial representations.
Our tour follows the route of a typical weekend stroll outside the Berlin city gates in the 18th and early 19th century: leaving the city at Cottbusser Thor (now Kottbusser Tor), down a sandy road lined with trees, towards the vast meadows around Hasenheide – even then a popular local hangout. The traditional narrative depicts an archetypal landscape that is deeply rooted in our cultural heritage and that we're prepared to think of as beautiful. Over the course of the centuries, the city has spread far beyond its old gates, and erased all traces of the area‘s former rural character. Nowadays, following the same route, we walk along a six-lane road, through the busy Kreuzkölln neighborhood to Hermannplatz, a chaotic square where the traffic converges – be it by car, on foot, on bike, or on the underground. Our tour reflects the historicity of the places, but also raises the question of how the same stroll could be narrated today. Is Kottbusser Tor beautiful? And if so, what images and aesthetic „pre-formulations“ would we use to describe that beauty?
Our tour follows the route of a typical weekend stroll outside the Berlin city gates in the 18th and early 19th century: leaving the city at Cottbusser Thor (now Kottbusser Tor), down a sandy road lined with trees, towards the vast meadows around Hasenheide – even then a popular local hangout. The traditional narrative depicts an archetypal landscape that is deeply rooted in our cultural heritage and that we're prepared to think of as beautiful. Over the course of the centuries, the city has spread far beyond its old gates, and erased all traces of the area‘s former rural character. Nowadays, following the same route, we walk along a six-lane road, through the busy Kreuzkölln neighborhood to Hermannplatz, a chaotic square where the traffic converges – be it by car, on foot, on bike, or on the underground. Our tour reflects the historicity of the places, but also raises the question of how the same stroll could be narrated today. Is Kottbusser Tor beautiful? And if so, what images and aesthetic „pre-formulations“ would we use to describe that beauty?
Anna Sprang & Lars Roth
Anna Sprang and Lars Roth met at the Art School in Kassel, where they both studied visual communication. Their artistic collaboration started in 2007 with the documenta12blog and ”Palmenhain 2.0“ – a digital communication space realised in cooperation with the curators of documenta 12. After detours to New York City and Brunswick they now live in Berlin, where Anna Sprang works as an art director at VICE and Lars Roth as a professor of visual communication and new media at the hdpk. In 2012 they founded strollology.com, a blog about strolls through Berlin, digging up the stories behind places and rediscovering Berlin’s many overlooked corners. They offer regular cultural-historical strolls through Neukölln in cooperation with Slow Travel Berlin.
See their interview on Tumblr and in the B_log section
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/strollologyberlin/posts/204604673040121
See their interview on Tumblr and in the B_log section
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/strollologyberlin/posts/204604673040121
