Turning the Point is an attempt to bring together local neighbourhoods, civil society initiatives and cultural practices around Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg into dialogue with each other. It is about listening to stories, bringing different understandings of the present together and renegotiating ideas for the future. The aim is to organise communicative situations, dialogues and narratives between actors and their locations in a variety of ways, to exchange knowledge experiences from different living and working contexts and at the same time to actively and discursively open up common spaces of activities.
Moritzplatz is particularly suitable for this due to its multi-layered history – think, for example, of the Wertheim department store or the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse border crossing, social demonstrations and urban planning dynamics. As a protagonist, Moritzplatz therefore means much more than a highly frequented traffic junction. This is where different milieus and protagonists as well as their histories and present tenses come together: descendants of Turkish labour migrants, the socio-cultural milieu of SO36 and the creative economic structures of the Aufbau Haus. In addition, there are long-established companies such as ‘Berliner Schrauben’ in the second row, which are now in dialogue with gentrifying forces of post-industrial companies in new buildings such as ‘The Shelf’ or ‘The Grid’. Overall, a complex urban mix comes together here that both (re)produces social differences and contrasts as well as sharing experiences and concerns of social participation and change. With current initiatives and neighbourhood projects, Turning the Point aims to make different voices heard and asks how one can bring an urban structure into dancing.
The three sequences
Turning the Point sees itself as a process-orientated project with an open outcome. In three sequences, Turning the Point, together with a large number of actors, unfolds an approach of civil (self-)education and experimenting, which will gradually materialise over the course of one and a half years (2024/25).
Sequence 01 Checkpoint Moritz
Checkpoint Moritz combines an archival panorama with new encounters. This includes artistic works that have dealt with Moritzplatz in recent decades and years, as well as documentary evidence from the 19th and 20th centuries. Pia Lanzinger also invites people to take part in vocally offensive tours and encounters under the name KreisverChor. The project takes the venture of becoming offensive in the mode of associative singing together with groups and initiatives from the neighbourhood, thus giving the ‘Checkpoint’ a further twist.
Sequence 02 Little Big Cha(lle)nges
A cross-section of Pia Lanzinger’s artistic practice is shown as an exemplary way of working method. The question of civil participation in a cultural and social context is often formulated provocatively. Particular milieus that embody unfulfilled promises receive increased attention. The big conflicts are emphasised on a small scale and aesthetically performed.
Sequence 03 Re-Gathering
In the spirit of sustainability, understandings of cultural and social commitment is to be updated: Can concerns, desires and analogies around Moritzplatz be perceived, gathered and thought together? In keeping with this setting of questions about the analogy of cultural and social as well as artistic, discursive and curatorial practice, a book with Pia Lanzinger’s projects will also be published.