Berlin

I learnt a lot in Berlin. Not from the festival alone, but from the trip and the city itself as a whole. In my time there I attended several events at Transmediale (see post Transmediale’) and also visited the Cathedral, old Berlin, Charlottensburg Palace, the TV Tower, the Aquarium and the Aqua Dom, took a boat ride, went to the Zoo (the famous one, not the new one), walked around beautifully built buildings with unique architecture, explored several markets, went to the Reichstag twice, the Brandenburg Gate, the Sony Center, Checkpoint Charlie, La Fayette, William Echhart Memorial Church, the Europe Center, The Jewish museum, the Jewish Memorial, took a walk from Alexandraplatz through to Tiergarden station along Unter Den Linden, and generated over an hour and a half of film and 785 photographs.

I found the city itself to be breathtaking and ever so interesting. Walking through Mitte I thought it was so unique to be able to really see what existed pre war, what had survived the war, and how the city itself has been re-developed to still present it’s past whilst making way for a more unified and culturally excepting culture. Buddy Bears were a great symbol of this, and were to me extremely inspiring products of design. The Berlin Wall itself (the postcards and remaining slab on Unter Den Linden illustrated) I thought was also remarkable in the sense that although the wall itself was a badly formed and ugly construct, it had been repainted over the years by the public, and really expressed the city’s dislike for it. To see these postcards lining the streets of Unter Den Lindin, and to see the way that the whole City has been re-developed since it’s demise, I could really get a taste for the feeling and the spirit of the city, and the strong emotions the city has been privy to over the past century were so strongly present in it’s design. Walking along the river near the Cathedral I stumbled upon old cobbled streets and the original monument of the Berlin Bear, a beautiful statue that looked so lifelike, and as if it were real, and weary of the past. The Sony Centre at Potsdam was another amazing example of this. To see the way it has been developed from an urban wasteland in the 1960’s, to the eye-catching new commercial haven was astonishing to me, and I left the city with the feeling that it is an undiscovered gem that will continue to develop further until it receives as much tourist attention as places like Rome or New York. I could write about so much, but am picking out just three highlights to post about that have all inspired me and however I can see myself creating work this year that is influenced by so much of what I saw on the trip.