The publication Black Studium documents the installation Black Lives Audio Triptych by Ina Wudtke. It uncovers traces of the history of Black people in Germany and is a multidirectional reminder of past and present anti-racist struggles.  

The work activates archive material, in particular songs, texts and photos relating to Fasia Jansen (1929 – 1997), Hilarius Gilges (1909 – 1933) and Joseph Ekwe Bilé (1892 – 1959) – all three were active in the context of the workers’ movement. 

The audio work consists of three staged audio self-portraits. The staging goes back to the techniques of the agit-prop play groups of the Weimar Republic. Local dialects were often used to reach workers; the actors were not supposed to merge with the roles as in bourgeois theater.  

The speakers, through their current social commitment, can be seen as continuing the protagonists’ political work: Jasmin Eding (speaker Fasia), for example, belongs to a group of Black women who organized with others ADEFRA (Black Women in Germany) in the 1980s for the rights and visibility of Black people in Germany. The Krump dancer Kofie Boachie (speaker Hilarius Gilges) was instrumental in organizing the Black Lives Matter demos in Düsseldorf. Jaenne-Ange Wagne (speaker Joseph Ekwe Bilé) deals with the colonial entanglements of cultural institutions. 

„We only started to deal with our Black history in the mid-1980s and now 37 years have passed and a lot has happened.“ – Jasmin Eding

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On 4 April 2016, around forty people gathered to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin Mitte. Most of them had attended the site’s dedication in 1986—the lived history of a place whose meaning has consistently been denied.

In the 1950s and 60s the site was earmarked for a high-rise tower for the East German government yet this never materialized. Then in 1973 plans were laid—and ultimately realized—for a forum in the form of a public park. After 1989 the park remained unchanged or possibly was even forgotten.

Today, there are two opposing camps: on the one hand those who advocate an exact reconstruction of the city’s ground plan as it looked here in medieval times—almost as if the historicism driving the reconstruction of the palace on the far bank of the Spree has proved contagious; and on the other, the ‘modernists,’ who are committed to preserving and further developing the last vestiges of East German Modernist architecture and urban planning.

Located as it is between the television tower and the future Humboldt Forum, the Marx-Engels-Forum is a place of commemoration par excellence. It has been closed to the public since 2010 owing to work to extend the subway line U5, but is set to enjoy a new lease of life as an urban recreation zone by 2019. This publication illustrates and puts up for debate both the history of the site and the recurrent negotiations regarding its use, including those of 2015 in which the public was invited to participate. How might an open space—since, YES, that’s what is all about—be preserved at a prime downtown location and configured such as to accommodate continually changing uses?

If freedom is to be a feature of the appropriation of the forum then freedom must be inscribed in the very design of this urban public space, from its inception. And what better solution therefore, than to base its development on the physical presence of various sculptural ensembles? After all, the sculptures were there first—and not only those of Marx and Engels!

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Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, local citizens took the initiative and began replanting a section of the former border strip between the districts of Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin and Wedding in West Berlin.

They thus literally laid the groundwork for a public park whose completion would prove to be a bone of contention for the next twenty-five years—a period in which participatory planning procedures exhausted civic engagement, and social and spatial polarisation became increasingly extreme.

As this detailed reconstruction of the history of Mauerpark illustrates, the site is no isolated example but rather symptomatic of developments in many parts of Berlin and other cities too: for what is at stake here is the reach of representative democracy.

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