A WALKING ARCHIVE
A web-app project by DasBuchprojekt (2023) in collaboration with Kaya Behkalam, Rim Naguib, Ahmad Gharbeia and Sophia Paeslack.
Archiving is a collective practice. Walking, seeing, hearing, experiencing. The biography of a place is condensed in the nodes of its stories. Through your mobile phone, the Walking Archive navigates you through the layers of a neighborhood, in dialogue with its residents and visitors. It invites you to follow a person’s personal view of their neighborhood around Oranienplatz, thus also engaging with the big question: Who actually writes history? And can there be something like A History at all?
So far, the Walking Archive includes nine neighborhood walks around Oranienplatz, telling stories of political contexts, forgotten places, resistance through gardening, collective work structures, the male dominance in the squatters’ council, guest workers, artists and fierce fish vendors. Kreuzberg is a neighborhood of great social tension, today as it was 40 years ago. The microcosm of a house is the starting point of a journey into the web of urban biographies. People who have lived here for a long time, feel connected to the place, or visit it for a specific reason, take you to a different time, to a different place.
We think physical presence sometimes makes the difference, so the perspective matters in the Walking Archive. The stories start at the place of their occurrence, and through the network of narratives, you can float freely because remembering is always a movement.