Tempelhof Field sits comfortably at the apex of the lengthy (and frequently surreal) list of Berlin's leftover, vacant, abandoned and forgotten spaces. A long-functioning, now-defunct airfield, it was the site for a number of historical events, the Berlin Airlift and Nazi rallies among them. Now, it is a thousand-acre public green space, a pebble-shaped hole in the map of the city that no one seems quite sure what to do with. The vast runways swallow weekend cyclists without a trace, the greenswards accommodate hundreds of barbecuing locals with room left for thousands more and the former terminal plays host to a seemingly endless succession of events: festivals, biennials, conventions, concerts. It is, strictly speaking, immense.
That immensity became the physical and theoretical backdrop for a provocative event organized by the crew at Raumlabor during the first of three weeks of June; fourteen interventions into this strange context were realized by a varied roster of artists and designers, under the moniker The World Is Not Fair | The Great World's Fair 2012. Working from the premise that the very scale of Tempelhof renders it immune to the monumental form-driven strategies beloved of contemporary architecture and city management alike (plop a MAXXI in the middle of this place and we'll see how well that works out, they seem to be saying), the organizers instead curated a path through the field and populated it with a coterie of small oddities.
field post 2012 | hans-werner kroesinger
In their best moments, the interventions were ambiguous amalgams of artistic intent and the layers of meaning inscribed in the site; this blurring was furthered by the astute decision to employ as a leitmotif the broad-banded red and white stripes to be found on many of the remaining pieces of original airfield infrastructure. My favorite work by a wide margin was Hans-Werner Kroesinger's Field Post 2012, which consisted of a sound installation in the overgrown grass behind the former radar station, emanating at low volume from a series of monochromatic grey speaker housings that hid in plain sight, falling into the background as simply more inscrutable battered objects in a scene filled with the same.
Treading through the weeds towards a cluster of people witnessing a performance piece at the back of the lot, in which a middle aged man in black evenly reads from a sheet the story of the site, it took several seconds for it to register that a new soundscape had been overlaid onto the ambient one. The effect, once it took hold, was somewhere between spooky and sublime. Inside the radar station itself, one found a room at once carefully preserved and oddly incised - a series of apertures had been cut into the walls and floor, some revealing the underlying technological apparatus, others featuring quaint dioramas. The sum of these parts was an experience that was both didactic and alive, simultaneously presenting the history of the place and playing host to an unmistakably contemporary aesthetic experiment.
institute for imaginary islands | lukas feireiss
In another noteworthy effort, the artist Lukas Feirass presided over an intervention that was a startlingly successful mashup of "high art", an installation piece, and a community space; it featured a video loop of a choppy ocean beneath a grey sky played against the board-formed concrete wall of a dank, unlit munitions bunker, a whimsical series of colorful models that transformed the grassy swell above the bunker into a notional island full of visiting Gullivers, and a (well used) space for the creation of handicrafts and kid-art.
At the scale of the intervention, these two pieces (along with a few others, such as 52.4697°N 13.396°E, in which a Turkish actor and a German film director set up a camp and invited Romani to park their trailers and live there) began to show signs of the site-specificity and urban purposefulness that I have been hunting for. Each had their flaws (ham-fistedness and a questionable sensitivity to agency and voyeurism, in the latter case), but each also seemed in genuine pursuit of a construct which was at once spatial, provisional and site-conscious, and which responded to a specific program.
Running within (and alongside) the broader fair, the Institut für Raumexperimente hosted a series of talks and symposiums featuring a wide range of artists, writers, activists, and architects. The Institut is Olafur Eliasson's weird and wonderful fiefdom within the UDK, a Berlin-based art school, in which students work from Eliasson's studio space rather than the school, and which expects its participants (according to Eliasson) to do "fifty percent of their work in the street rather than the studio." The programming provided by the Institut was an exciting corollary to the interventions, providing a forum for the earnest and enthusiastic discussion of the issues underlying the Fair (it helped that there was a bar located roughly a hundred feet away).
institute for spatial experiments | daniel pascual of deconcrete cooks a geopolitical paella
The goings-on there deserve (and may yet receive) a post of their own - highlights included a roundtable on art in public space featuring Eliasson himself, and the two-day Performing Politics event. This was memorably concluded by Daniel Pascual's powerpoint lecture-cum-performance piece, in which a 150lb. "geopolitical paella" was cooked in front of the audience, each ingredient sourced from a specific town or region of Spain and placed in the enormous pan one by one, as Pascual spoke about that locale's relation to the ongoing economic crisis.
Zooming out to take in the event as a whole, I was encouraged to find in it many of the ideas for which I advocate: it consciously situated itself as a collection of experiments, brought together as part of a larger experiment in search of meaningful ways to engage with Tempelhof. It took place within a framework of economic austerity (its already small budget was severely slashed, from the rumors I heard), yet managed to provide a forum for a range of young practitioners to test their ideas.
Some of those ideas were better than others, but I would hope that the organizers were as unfazed as I was in the presence of the failures - failures which signaled the genuine taking of chances. The larger experiment, which drew consistent crowds over the course of my half-dozen visits, will, I hope, be judged a success.
