There hasn’t been much to say up until now, and with the terrible internet connection it’s been impossible to upload new photos. But of course, no news is sometimes good news and now with the end of my first month in Berlin I can finally share some stories.
It was a quiet first month. The program here is new and a bit disorganized (though everyone running it from this side of the Atlantic is helpful and brilliant) so it’s taken some of my classes a while to get going. With the weather being so cold and the German government holding our passports for visa processing, I’ve really been spending a lot of time just reading for school. Things finally started to pick up about a week and a half ago. Since then, I’ve had two class trips, explored Hamburg, presented a midterm, and begun an internship. Though not necessarily in that order.
One of the field trips was with my German class. We went to see one of the few old buildings in Berlin: the Knoblauch House (Garlic house, apparently). The building has been turned into a museum that gives insight into the life of the city’s early wealthy. We followed that trip with some time practicing German in a café before going to a museum that looked at the lives of the city’s early (as in industrial-age) working and elderly characters. That museum focused on the work of the artist Heinrich Zille. He worked with crayon, lithograph, and film, and he loved to showcase the ordinary: women with children, old people walking, furniture, men at work…the people of Berlin as he knew them. I really enjoyed his style, but can’t find an image of my favorite picture anywhere so can’t share it.
The other field trip was with my Cities, Culture, Communities (I think?) class. We met early on a Saturday in Kreuzberg to learn about the history of the neighborhood. The area had a bad reputation so a few years ago some of its young residents decided to begin giving tours to show people the Kreuzberg that they knew. Our tour started at the neighborhood museum where we heard a lecture on the history of migration (since apparently the government here doesn’t like to acknowledge that immigration exists) since the settlement of the area. The first immigrants in Kreuzberg were actually the French Huguegnots way back in the day. Currently, people talk about the Turkish population but the area actually has a lot of Arab immigrants and a huge Polish population. It’s the home of the anti-Nazi “gang” SO36 (aka the “36 Boys/z”), a small petting zoo, numerous bars, courtyard mosques, a legal red-light district, excellent food and the park where the May Day demonstrations take place each year. All things we saw or visited on our trip. Our tour guide was 12 when the wall came down so she remembers growing up with it cutting through her neighborhood. She told us about how she used to bounce balls against it. She also remembers a time when she couldn’t fathom that there were people living—a whole city of them—on the other side, strangers she later hugged and cried with on a cold November 9th when the wall was opened.
While all this was happening, I was planning a midterm presentation on the biographies of objects for my museum class. Well…that and studying for German and hunting through a fleamarket in search of pieces for a friend’s art project. Also, NYU here doesn’t arrange internship opportunities but the art teachers independently set their students up with artists in the city. One of my good friends started working with a pretty awesome woman who mentioned that she may need more help with event planning and publicity stuff over the next few months. My friend suggested me because she knows I’m interested in curation and have a bit of experience in all the non-art things that her new artist friend had mentioned. So I went for an interview and ended up hanging around to help clean the studio for a fundraiser that happened last night.
In between the cleaning and the event itself, my school took us on a ‘mandatory’ (because people would not go?) to Hamburg. We took a bus tour and a boat tour and a museum tour… I actually had a pretty good time. The tours were tough because it was hard to hear over the chatter of my restless peers, but they sat through the 4 hour bus ride there and then a 2 hour bus tour and then a 2 hour boat tour so I totally understand the restlessness. The city is interesting. It’s small and the only real residential area we saw was full of mansions on the water. The rest of the city is built around the center-city shops and the ever-busy port. In the evening we walked around the famous red-light district and decided that it looked like Times Square before running away to an area where we had been told the student like to hang out. We found a place called Culture House and just sat in there for a while to talk and people watch until it was time to return to the hotel and get some rest.
I went with a group to the Hamburg Deichtorhallen on our second morning there. We walked in and the gallery was strangely empty of people. Then a man came in and asked what we were doing there. Apparently the museum was closed and the door was locked. He asked how we broke in and our group leader explained that the door had been open and that she had called a few days ago to let the gallery know what time we would be coming. He insisted that she hadn’t called and she told him to check for a recording. He also insisted that the door had been locked and we must have broken in. Since we were standing inside the front hall, arguing this point really seemed like an exercise in absurdity. Amongst ourselves we decided that, sure, we must have broken in. Right.
Later, when we were legally inside, we explored photographs done in a diverse range of styles. Stephan Tillmans makes “Leuchtpunktordnungen” shots of television screens while Helena Schätzte groups portraits of old people with photographs of rugged landscapes. Interesting stuff. The other part of the gallery was hosting a Gilbert and George exhibition. I’ve never been sure how I feel when confronted with their work, but this time was different. This time there were a mind-blowing number of works covering this huge gallery, and there was a film screening in a side room which explored their many years of working together. Seeing their pieces as components of different series’ with different names and goals helped me appreciate them much more than before. The video also mentioned that they curate all their own shows and are the only living/British artists to show a retrospective at the Tate Modern. It was pretty fascinating.
With two hours until we headed back to Berlin, a friend and I went in search of adventure and stumbled into a Carnival celebration. There were people dressed in beautiful ornate costumes posing for pictures and dancing in the street. Inspired, we went in search of masks for ourselves, which we found (along with some lunch) just in time to get back to the bus. I read on the way home and then unpacked and cleaned for a bit. Suddenly it was 10 pm and I was meeting my friend to head to that fundraiser I mentioned.
I feel like I’ve lived 10 years in the past few days. So last night we ended up bartending at the fundraiser. It was supposed to end around 1 am but 1 came and went. We were having a lot of fun talking to people and dancing and practicing our German a bit. Everyone there seemed to be having fun too. The crowd was mostly a chill one and people were friendly. Then around 5 some drunk jerk set off a fire extinguisher in the hall so that was the end of the party. We tried to clean up a bit but I got cut on some broken glass…between that and the chemicals and the fact that we hadn’t slept the past few nights we decided to head home. We spent today cooking and doing homework quietly in my room. Tomorrow classes start again. I have one week to do a field study, crank out another midterm, and figure out how to best host my soon-to-be visiting friends when I’m in class most of each weekday.
And spring is officially coming. I saw a crocus blooming in a park.
As I said, things are starting to pick up at last.
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