drj art projects and edition ROTE INSEL are launching a new information service. A digital shop window will be set up directly next to the exhibition rooms of the programme gallery at Leberstraße 60 from the end of January.In the future, current content will be communicated there directly on site, so that even in times of social distancing and closed exhibitions, a topic-related contact to art, architecture and urban development remains possible.
At the start, a special focus will be placed on the history of the former gasworks in Torgauer Straße and its development. The current occasion for this is the imminent structural completion of the subsequent use as the EUREF Campus, which began in 2008: the preserved scaffolding of Gas Tank IV, which was shut down in 1995 and is known far beyond the neighbourhood as the Schöneberg Gasometer, will be converted into an office building with a congress centre. What exactly is planned can be seen and commented on in the plans on display at the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district office from 25 January 2021 as part of the citizens’ participation.
For better illustration, images and catchy texts will be shown in an animated presentation in the digital shop window of the info channel. In addition, photos, texts and explanatory data are summarised on an associated website for a more in-depth classification in the context of the city’s history and urban development. This in-depth information can be found and read in real time via a QR code.
The presentation, and subsequently the compiled information on the website, have the aim of providing the viewers an enlightened position and a well-founded critical opinion on this construction project on the basis of current informed critical opinion on this building project. Only in this way can an objective debate succeed.
The other contents of the info channel in the Digital Shop Window that will be conveyed in the future are laid out in categories that will be will be updated and expanded on an ongoing basis.
Background
Since 2008, the programme gallery drj art projects in Leberstraße 60 has been showing exhibitions and projects on conceptual and minimal art and architecture. The strong local link to the Rote Insel neighbourhood is evident both in the reference to the name – drj is the current abbreviation of dr. julius | ap, which refers to the street’s namesake, Nazi resistance fighter Dr. Julius Leber – and in the name of the affiliated edition for publications and edition works, edition ROTE INSEL, which was founded in 2010.
Over the past 13 years, a space for exchange on current developments in the district has thus emerged beyond art, architecture and urban topics. As early as 2008, tours of the city’s history and discussion rounds were offered on the measures of the Stadtumbau-West programme that were being planned at the time, for which architecturally sound contexts of the past, present and future of the neighbourhood were compiled and conveyed to the participants in short lectures. The newly installed information channel with the digital shop window ties in directly with this educational work.
The basis of this work is always the application of the methods developed by Prof. Dr. Jonas Geist [1936-2009] in the 1980s at the Research Centre for Building, Space and Everyday Culture at the Berlin University of the Arts specifically for architecture and urban development research. His last assistant was Matthias Seidel, architect and founder of drj art projects. In addition, the research of the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Berlin History Workshop), which also did outstanding groundwork on Red Island district research as early as the 1980s, is an indispensable part of any study of this special area of Berlin.
drj art projects
Matthias Seidel + Christiane Bail
Leberstraße 60
10829 Berlin-Schöneberg
