A key part of the publication comprises films created in French and German as part of the research project Choix d’un passé, in collaboration with Moïse Merlin Mabouna. These films are accompanied by textual and visual sequences from the video works S. – Je suis, je lis à haute voix and Erase them! – The image as it is falling apart into looks. The e-book also includes a playable film-clip and elements from the film performance Der erste Blick #1, created in collaboration with Angela Melitopoulos and Vassilis S. Tsianos.

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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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Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley’s collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley’s other artistic works is inserted into the book.

I Speak Radio opens with Bromley’s eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

Complementing the print version, audio excerpts from I Speak Radio and A Voice Exists in Voicing can be heard in the e-book. The e-book includes two additional texts: a conversation between Bromley, Brandon LaBelle and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and a condensed text form of Red Forest’s “Radiogram #3: The Enchanted Technologies of Transmission”, in which, alongside Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova and JD Zazie are featured as important companions and inspirations.

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This publication clears up misunderstandings and explains why social housing of the sort built in the German Federal Republic and West Berlin is a myth. Instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households it has so far primarily been about promoting economic development and private property ownership, instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households. This is reason enough to examine the principle of social housing and ask why it is so difficult to reform.

The third, revised edition of The Myth of Social Housing provides updated figures and content in Andrej Holm’s text, as well as a new introduction by the editors, Ulrike Hamann and Sandy Kaltenborn, which reflects on Berlin’s housing policy changes of the last ten years.

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For some time now, the housing question has once again been a subject of public debate: the issue of housing provision for those who have nothing to gain from a booming real estate market. This also includes people seeking refuge. The response to demands for more social housing, however, is limited: there has not been enough new construction to compensate for the number of social housing units lost due to the expiry of occupancy commitments for publicly assisted housing. But is the social housing system even capable of guaranteeing low rents in the long term?

This publication clears up misunderstandings and explains why social housing of the sort built in the German Federal Republic and West Berlin is a myth. Instead of meeting the long-term needs of low-income households it has so far primarily been about promoting economic development and private property ownership. This is reason enough to examine the principle of social housing and ask why it is so difficult to reform.

The second, revised edition of Die Legende vom Sozialen Wohnungsbau provides updated figures and content in Andrej Holm’s text, as well as a new introduction by the editors, Ulrike Hamann and Sandy Kaltenborn, which reflects on Berlin’s housing policy changes of the last ten years.

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Man schenkt keinen Hund brings together a multiplicity of perspectives by the contributors – artists, theorists, activists, and students and teachers in the courses – to question the concept of culture recorded in the course books, in their texts and imagery, as the expression of an ostensibly homogeneous national identity. It gathers analytical observations and artistic propositions to articulate a critique of the ideological concept and governmental instrument of ‘integration’ – especially in light of the recent and cyclically recurring debates in Germany around ‘Wertegemeinschaft’ (‘community of shared values’) and ‘Leitkultur’ (‘core culture’).

The e-book edition Man schenkt keinen Hund – (No) Bildbeschreibungen und Interviews presents itself as an excerpt from the print version. In addition to a conversation about teaching in ‘integration courses’ and a colonial-pedagogical close reading of a selected textbook chapter, the e-book assembles the entirety of the so-called ‘(No)Bildbeschreibungen’ [(No)picture descriptions], a literary-essayistic short format.

Supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Bezirkskulturfonds Mitte

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In the first parliament of the reunited Berlin, efforts to anchor these expanded political rights in the new constitution were largely defeated. However, a provision for legislation by the people was adopted.

As a result, in the state of Berlin laws can be passed directly without the parliament by popular vote. In recent years, two laws have been passed in this way: the public disclosure of municipal water contracts and the preservation of the Tempelhofer Feld. Although a majority of Berliners—in all districts—voted in favor of the latter in May 2014, the governing parties soon tried to overturn this legislation passed by the citizens. In response, a new citizens’ legislative proposal, “Volksentscheid Retten”, was initiated in 2016 to strengthen legislation by popular vote in the constitution.

These two processes, in 1989/90 and 2016, aimed to enable all Berliners to participate in shaping the constitution. This book traces the connection between the two.

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“Commons is not something that just exists out there, nor is it something that is objectively present in certain resources or things. It is a relation of people with the conditions they describe as essential for their existence, collectively,” writes Stavros Stavrides, architect, activist, and author of Common Space: The City as Commons.

Stavrides understands the creation, development, and maintenance of commons as a social practice that radically challenges capitalist values and hierarchical forms of social organization. Constructed in this way, urban spaces differ both from private enclosures and from public space as we know it: common spaces are permanently inviting and continually in the making, spaces which are not simply shared but through which sharing itself is shaped.

This book, edited by Mathias Heyden, provides an introduction to Stavrides’ thinking about the City as Commons. Occupied squares, self-managed facilities and autonomous neighborhoods in Greece and Latin America exem-plify his theory of urban commoning, which, within the context of the global debates and struggles for social and economic justice, points in the direction of a truly emancipated society.

Reading sample (pdf):

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Stavrides understands the creation, development, and maintenance of commons as a social practice that radically challenges capitalist values and hierarchical forms of social organization. Constructed in this way, urban spaces differ both from private enclosures and from public space as we know it: common spaces are permanently inviting and continually in the making, spaces which are not simply shared but through which sharing itself is shaped.

This book, edited by Mathias Heyden, provides an introduction to Stavrides’ thinking about the City as Commons. Occupied squares, self-managed facilities and autonomous neighborhoods in Greece and Latin America exem-plify his theory of urban commoning, which, within the context of the global debates and struggles for social and economic justice, points in the direction of a truly emancipated society.

Reading sample

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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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