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CARRYING THE CITY OTHERWISE

nur für Incom-Mitglieder

Playable Infrastructures: Sound, Space, and the Mobile Playground 

This seminar builds on a project developed in the previous semester and moves toward its realization within the context of Berlin Bleibt #5, taking place at the end of June 2026. 

Over the course of 2.5 months, a mobile vessel and a series of performative formats—games, sound situations, and encounters—are developed, tested, and situated within the area around Mehringplatz and Mehringdamm. Rather than approaching the city as a fixed environment, the seminar understands it as a field of relations shaped by migration, housing conditions, infrastructures, and everyday negotiations of presence and access. 

The project does not aim to represent these conditions, but to engage them through situated action. The vessel, developed collectively by students, functions as a mobile and shared structure that carries sound, hosts interactions, and moves through different sites, activating temporary situations. Alongside it, a set of games and performative formats emerges that invite participation, interruption, and exchange. 

Sound is approached as a material that circulates, overlaps, and transforms. Listening becomes a situated practice, shaped by position, proximity, and attention. Games are not treated as fixed systems, but as open frameworks that can be entered, altered, or resisted. 

Through this, the seminar asks how relations can be composed without being stabilized, and how situations can remain open to multiple voices and forms of participation. 

Throughout the semester, a constellation of artistic and theoretical practices accompanies the work. From the material engagement of the Gutai movement to the improvisational social practices described by Saidiya Hartman, the sonic awareness of Pauline Oliveros, and the attention to circulation and systems in Hito Steyerl, these references are not treated as fixed frameworks but as tools for thinking and acting. The work is further informed by Christina Sharpe and Isabelle Stengers, who offer ways of understanding how different histories, atmospheres, and forms of life persist and coexist without being resolved into a single narrative. Writing by Sasha Marianna Salzmann brings a Berlin-based, post-migrant perspective that foregrounds lived experience, memory, and shifting belonging. 

The seminar unfolds through a series of questions that remain open and are approached through both reading and practice. How can a structure move through the city without fixing its meaning? What kinds of relations can be produced through sound, play, and encounter? Who can participate—and under which conditions? How are space and access shaped by visible and invisible infrastructures? What happens when multiple voices, histories, and perspectives coexist without agreement? Can play operate within conditions of inequality without masking them? And what does it mean to carry something—sound, memory, relations—through the city? The seminar culminates in the presentation of the vessel and related performative formats as part of the festival. 

The outcome is not understood as a finished object, but as a situated and evolving practice shaped through collective work, testing, and engagement with the specific conditions of the neighborhood.

Fachgruppe

Raumstrategien

Modul I: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt I

Modul III: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt II

Modul III: Theorieseminar: Performativer Raum

Modul I: Theorieseminar: Raumanalyse

Modul V: Wahlpflichtfach

Modul V: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt III: Hauptprojekt

Modul IV: Praxisseminar: Projektkooperationen und kooperatives Arbeiten

Semester

Sommersemester 2026

Wann

Dienstag, 10:00 – 13:00

Erster Termin

07.04.2026

Prüfungsleistung

Please hand in a pdf with documentation and a reflection essay on the work made in this semester, weaven in with the theory dealt with throughout the course.

Kurssprache

Englisch

Raum

Library room, Concordia (3rd floor, Raumstrategien) and public space around Mehringplatz and Macherei and HAU Berlin

Archivierung

Relevanter Community-Workspace / wird nicht reduziert

Lehrende