I was extremely honoured to spend a couple of days in March 2021 walking and talking the entire length of the Berlin Ringbahn as part of George Kafka’s fantastical idea for a radio show, which he then edited into something very special.
All posts filed under: talking
URBAN HOSTS: Presentation on Rotraut Pape’s “The Wall – The Vertical Horizon”
“But what effect does the disappearance of such artefacts have upon the collective memory of a city? Or in the case of the artefact at the heart of this evening’s discussion, the Berlin Wall, we must ask a more complex question: what happens when such artefacts neither fully endure, nor totally disappear?”
UNIVERSITÄT DER KÜNSTE BERLIN SUMMER SCHOOL: Letter to Ernst Litfaß lecture
“Entitled ‘No other German ever had as many monuments as Ernst Litfaß’, the presentation took the form of a letter about the history of the advertising columns, addressed to their creator, and explored the implications of new forms of screen-based mediation of the city.”
BERLIN URBAN SURFACES TOUR: For Making Futures School participants
A tour that viewed the German capital through its myriad architectural surfaces – including DDR-era murals, reconstructed Prussian palaces, building-scale printed fabric advertisements and: supermarket fridges.
WAY TOO CONCRETE V: Special Iceberg Edition
“I’ve spent recent weeks fuelling a strange obsession with not so much the object of the iceberg itself, but rather its representation across media, past, present and future. Beyond this, I have also developed a perverse fascination with the manner in which those past and present versions seem to be informing the confusing and terrifying nature of not just future representations of the iceberg, but also their actual reality. It is a collage of these different projections that I have brought to you who have gathered within this most stately of icebergs this evening.”
WAY TOO CONCRETE IV: “No other German ever had as many monuments as Ernst Litfaß”
“Despite your dislike of messiness and your attempt to curtail this aspect of Berlin’s character that so offended you, it is it through disorder and random intervention that the columns have manifested a sort of resistance in the face of impending doom – even if, for some of them, the battle is ultimately unwinnable. Since I took that first image in January, I have gathered many more. The sight of completely unblemished coloured columns has become rarer with each passing week.”
MONO.CLUB #53: moderated discussion with Francis Kéré
“I am tempted to invert one of the core questions that appeared in the event description: “Can architecture create a sense of community?” and instead reframe it as, “What kind of architecture can a sense of community create?”
WHAT IS AN EDITOR? Curating and Communicating Architecture talk series
“You could say that editors are similar to urban planners. Someone needs to be looking at the bigger picture, to join up the dots, to make each package of information a communication. More importantly, we need editors to help create pathways: routes in and through the information multiverse for both the reader and the subject matter.”
AUGMENTED TECHNOLOGY: Launch of Volume 51
Launch event of V51 Augmented Technology hosted by Books People Places and Volume at Theater O-TonArt, Berlin.
MEDIATED SPACE – PUBLISHING, PRACTICE AND PLATFORMS: Curating architecture and the urban lecture series at TU Berlin
Talk delivered to students of Fakultät VI Institut Für Architektur at Technische Universität Berlin, as part of the Curating Architecture and the Urban lecture series.
URGENT CITY: Urban Assets round table
I was a speaker at the round table on the theme of “urban assets” at UrgentCity, an event organised by Amateur Cities and New Generations, comprising two days of workshops and discussions on the vocabulary of urban challenges.
WORD IN ARCHITECTURE: Seminar on publishing for MSc Urban Design students at TU Berlin
Drawing upon the perceived divisions that endure in the fields of both architecture and publishing – digital/print, text/image, architecture/everything else – this seminar presentation at Technische Universität Berlin explored the grey areas in between such definitions.
Fiona Shipwright 