by Clementine Butler-Gallie
Over a weekend in June 2024, The ReRouting Project (RR) hosted its second weekend walking residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau (KHF), a cultural site in the centre of a Berlin forest. This text is a reflection on the residency by its initiator Clementine Butler-Gallie, taking form in three parts; 1) an introduction to RR, a curatorial investigation into the potential of moving with others as a space for exchange and encounter; 2) a note on the residency site as an edge-and-borderland; 3) a reflection on how walking with others was used as a dialogical method in divided times.
1. ReRouting; The Umbrella
Détournement is a concept initiated by the International Situationists in the late 1950s as a response to capitalism’s power to commodify and society’s participation in formations of ‘spectacles’. The term can be translated to mean something between diversion and subversion, rerouting and hijacking, or as scholar Sadie Plant writes ‘it is a turning around and a reclamation of lost meaning: a way of putting the stasis of the spectacle in motion.’
ReRouting is a curatorial initiative inspired in namesake and mission by détournement. It is a reaction to a feeling that authentic exchange can get lost in current curatorial climates. In order to investigate this, walking or moving is proposed as a method. RR is a ‘walking space’ in that it creates places of meeting and exchange that are in motion.
Launched in June 2023 as a research question, RR has since become a host to various artistic and curatorial ‘walk’ experiments — Walk as a term is open to consideration here as the project invites movement with whatever means and methods available, rather than only with two feet. One of these experiments comes through pairing the method of walking with artist residencies. RR now hosts a number of variations on this format, but in this text, the focus will be on a recent group residency that specifically looks at walking with others on a site of division.
2. Edge-and-borderlands; The Site
An edgeland is a place where urban meets rural. A borderland is the area either side of two edges, or a site of overlap. Frohnau is a district in the far north of Berlin where the city merges into forest. The district marks the edge of Berlin, with the other side becoming the Brandenburg region. It also marks the route of the border that 35 years ago this November split the city into East and West, with the wall running directly through the forest with traces still locatable today. This site is both an edgeland and a borderland in its topography past and present.
One special site within the forest holds many remnants of past divisions, whilst also continuing to leave new traces of connectivity. Künstlerhof Frohnau is the name given to a collection of buildings constructed over various stages, including a pavilion dating from 1907, which was moved to the site for protection in 2002. The full site originally functioned as a military hospital in the 1930s, which was abandoned due to World War One. In the 1950s the site was revived, first as a lung-sanatorium, then as a psychiatric facility, and post reunification, one building complex on site was used to house refugees, mainly, but not only, from Bosnia. Since 1998, artists working in various disciplines entered the secluded site and started to transform it into the space it is today. As you enter along a cobbled road running through the forest, a series of letterboxes decorate an old fence hinting at the community at work within.
Homi K. Bhabha refers to culture as ‘borderline work’ both in relation to its potential to negotiate varying positions and its ability to refigure the past as a form of disruption to the present. This concept feels particularly fitting when considering such a site as KHF, and especially in relation to the current political climate in Germany, tainted with accounts of censorship, anti migration sentiment, and a large rise in support for the far-right. As an edgeland, Frohnau forest is split between Berlin and Brandenburg, with the latter voting 29.2% for the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland in this September’s state elections. The cultural scene in Germany has also been split in the past year, with many institutions and individuals silencing others and a general feeling that divisions are paramount within many projects, both in relation to political opinion or to how one decides (or not) to navigate conflict.
KHF is a cultural space hosting diversity and dialogue in its programming – it is a form of negotiator in both the physical borderland of its location and the divisions at play elsewhere. I had the opportunity to participate in a number of enriching projects based at KHF in the past, and when laying the foundations of RR as a project that did not want to simply focus on the romanticised notion of walking with others but explore its potential as a space for potentially difficult dialogue, KHF and its borderlands at the edge of the city seemed a fitting place to begin.
3. Walking & Sitting; The Method
The walking residency was conceptualised to take place over a weekend and was focused on Berlin-based participants, who were selected via an open call. The weekend format hoped for a more accessible residency period, without the necessity to rearrange work and life commitments. With the participants all living in the same city, the aim was that conversations and connections could commence over the residency and easily continue after. The reason it was called a residency rather than a workshop was the importance that for this short period the participants lived alongside each other, residing in a building at KHF that is allocated for such situations.
The terms Residency and Walking contain juxtaposing senses of motion; to reside insinuates staying put whilst walking is about being in motion. The weekend was about both. Although walking was the curatorial framework of the project, sitting was an equally important space of exchange. In the open call, the participants were asked to propose a walk for the group, although this was not mandatory. The residency was programmed around the walks offered, with meandering moments in-between for sitting and eating together.
Some walks responded directly to the bordered site, others connected more abstractly. Artists Claire Waffel and Mareike Drobny proposed an action titled Walking the Line / Being the Line, where the group traced part of the old route of the wall by walking silently behind one another, each holding a part of a blue rope. The walk ended at a site in the forest where few trees grow due to the sand that covers the surface, a trace of the ‘no man’s land’ that had surrounded the wall. Here, the group convened and shared their experience, first by tracing the route through drawings and then through discussion. Various themes emerged including how the act performed hierarchies of position, and how this made some feel the urge to escape and others a responsibility to guide those behind them. How the blue of the rope appeared in the landscape was discussed, bringing up the arbitrariness of borders being given names based on colours – green or red lines. As we stood together on this sandy site, a small tree could be spotted, pushing through the unconventional soil, a small sign of resistance perhaps!
Methods of resistance threaded into the walk exercise proposed by Juliana M. Streva, with a focus on how walking can resist traditional notions of study or knowledge forming. The group was handed a card each, on which were written various quotes or thoughts as prompts. Some examples included; How can a walk perform as counter-archiving? How can a walk perform as counter-mapping? How non-visual senses have historically been viewed as subjective or intuitive and therefore illegitimate forms of knowing. One card included a quote by Fred Moten in relation to study as ‘talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice’. The group paired off and began to walk through the forest with no defined direction, opening discussion through the written prompts, and switching to converse with another freely. We reconvened as a group when first music was heard and then a tall, concrete structure emerging through the trees was spotted – an old East German watchtower with a wedding party celebrating in the community garden that now surrounded it. From there, we walked back towards KHF to the sounds of their celebrations.
Other walks included an exploration of the term Gleaning by Cleo Wächter with an invitation to glean the surroundings and create a collective exhibition from our findings. Jong Sung Myung invited us to experience a tea ceremony before meandering towards the lake in the forest. And our final walk of the weekend by Andrey Ustinov took an adventurous turn, drawing a direct line from the gate of the KHF and inviting us to follow it in a straight line (no matter of the foliage encountered en route) in search of the middle point of the whole forest. We were given ear protectors and mysteriously told that we would know when we had reached our desired destination as we would then need to cover our ears. We arrived at a place of wild foliage and after some circulation, an immensely loud sound suddenly echoed, alerting us to our success in finding the centre.
The various walk propositions, both playful and serious, silent and dialogical, created a framework for the group to get to know one another and their practices, inviting conversations to take place both formally and informally. Here, sitting became an important partner to the walk format. On returning from our various walks, the space at KHF offered a cosy fireplace and forest garden to rest and reflect. The kitchen was, of course, also a vital space to the weekend’s exchanges. Participant hn. lyonga shared reflections on spices and ingredients whilst communal cooking took place, conversations again meandering over meals.
Framing this residency with the question What does it mean to walk together on a site of division? perhaps set an expectation that conflict should arise for true debate to take place. There were moments when the current state of devastating divisions and destruction across the globe entered the group dialogue, there were times it felt these themes were sitting on an edge somewhere. Some takeaways of what it may mean to walk with others on such a site in this time include this need to navigate both silence and debate, with rest a requirement for resilience, and that sitting is important in order to keep walking.
Various sitting and kitchen moments, Frohnau, June, 2024 – Image 1 & 2 by Kaya Behkalam, Image 3 by Viviane Tabach
Participants of the June 2024 walking residency: hn. lyonga, David JongSung Myung, Juliana M. Strevo, Andrey Ustinov, Cleo Wächter, Claire Waffel & Mareike Drobny
Residency organisational team: Clementine Butler-Gallie (RR), Viviane Tabach (RR), Kaya Behkalam (KHF), Setareh Shahbazi (KHF)
References:
Situationist International. 1958. “Détournement.” Situationist International Journal 1. Accessed August 27, 2024.https://libcom.org/book/export/html/1413.
Plant, Sadie. 1992. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge.
Shoard, Marion. 2002. Edgelands. In Remaking the Landscape: The Changing Face of Britain, edited by Jennifer Jenkins. London: Profile Books.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
“Results of the 2024 Brandenburg State Elections.” 2024. The Brandenburg Election Results Portal. Accessed September 27, 2024. https://wahlergebnisse.brandenburg.de/12/500/20240922/landtagswahl_land/ergebnisse.html.
Moten, Fred. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.
“Ein Wachturm als Naturschutzturm: Der ehemalige DDR-Grenzwachturm in Frohnau” [A Watchtower as a Conservation Tower: The Former GDR Border Watchtower in Frohnau]. 2021. Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald. Accessed August 27, 2024. https://www.sdw-naturschutzturm.de/2021/08/12/rbb-bericht-ein-wachturm-als-naturschutzturm/.