“The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.”
“But what can I do in front of this mighty beast
Tearing apart the city’s heart
Who said the streets will remain the same?
Who said the city can still be strolled?
Who said the neighborhoods remain our innocent game?
Who stole nature from us and asked us to preserve the environment?”
– Faraj Suleiman, Hymn to Gentrification (Better than Berlin)
A Guide to Treaty 6 Territory in Berlin/A Guide to Berlin in Treaty 6 Territory, uses the intertwined, nonlinear lives of weeds in North America and specific locations in Berlin to interrogate ongoing patterns of colonization, possession and settler belonging. The work locates the evidence of ongoing colonial patterns not as historical, or something to be found either ‘elsewhere’ or in museums – but as active living presences in the places we interact with every day, as told by our plant neighbours in complex, entangled ways. The work seeks to counteract these patterns not only by exposing them, but (against progress, the temporary, the ‘new’, and the many other competing ecologies of absence) through practices of presence, inhabitation and what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls rehearsals of disengagement.
This project consisted of an interactive city walk through the current and former ruderal sites of Dörnberg-Dreieck, Lützowplatz ,Magdeburgerplatz, Tilla-Duriex Park, Schöneberger Hafen and Naturerfahrungsraum „Robinienwäldchen“ in Berlin with readings and further reflections recorded in a hand drawn riso printed guide.
A Travel Guide to Treaty 6 Territory in Berlin/
A Travel Guide to Berlin in Treaty 6 Territory
2022
Participatory city walk with risoprinted ‘guide’