Berlin Stories: The Collective Coral Colony

The project The Collective Coral ColonyBerlin Alexanderplatz, now 70 years after its first print-run, attempting to reflect its specific historical and political formulations of the city on our contemporaneity.

Döblin’s tale presents its protagonists and sites as a symbiotic relationship between people and places, a neverending, reciprocal loop in which its is impossible to distinguish Franz Biberkopf and Alexanderplatz from one another. This has the particular effect of fictionalizing the whole space of lived experience within the story, presenting the city as simultaneously a psychological reality as well as an architectural palimpset of cultural memory. In his 1924 essay Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters (The Spirit of the Naturalistic Age), Döblin defines cities as “...the principal home and seat of the human group. They are the coral colony for Man; the collective being.

Döblin’s immediate urban experience was Berlin; his point of view allows us to revisit Berlin today and propose, through the project The Collective Coral Colony, a discussion about the artist’s link with the city. The goal of this discussion is to develop strategies for visually translating this relationship through a political and performative approach to fiction. The politics of fiction, specific locally concerning Berlin, articulates itself beyond Berlin Alexanderplatz through an examination of modern and contemporary German literature.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn presents us with a story of a Turkish migrant worker as an outsider in Berlin, while P.O. Enquist in Ett annat liv describes ‘70's Berlin from his perspective as a writer ’exiled by choice’. Throughout these texts a common question arises, and gives us a possibility for a comparative study between two different types of creative processes; -text based and -image based imaginations on the idea of living in a city: ’If I were not to live in this city, would it be still be my story?’

Curated by Adnan Yildiz with research and development help from Kim Einarsson

Artists: Nevin Aladağ, Larissa Fassler, Annika Larsson, Johannes Paul Raether and Solmaz Shahbazi