“Migration is not only the movement of people, it is also the movement of spaces. The speed of these movements and transformations has increased since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Who has made room for whom and where since the fall of the wall?” – this was one of the starting questions of project initiator and artist Stefanie Bürkle. Answers can also be found on the project website at www.placemaking.de, a public sketch book that illustrates the process-related character of the project.

Stefanie Bürkle is a professor of fine arts at the Institute of Architecture of the Technical University of Berlin. In recent years, she has again and again explored perceptions of the city in art projects such as “Palace Wallpaper” (Palasttapete) or “Loi chao tu Hanoi,” a photography and video project about Vietnamese life in Germany.

The exhibition is accompanied by an interactive game book featuring texts on space and migration, illustrations, interviews, a migration game, memory, and fold-out maps.

The exhibition at the Schering Stiftung is part of an overall program by the artist, who has presented her work at several locations in Berlin since September. The six-channel video installation “Placemaking” is part of the group exhibition “Berlin 89/09 – Art between Traces of the Past and Utopian Futures” (Berlin 89/09 – Kunst zwischen Spurensuche und Utopie), which is on view at the Berlinische Galerie from September 18, 2009, until January 31, 2010. Excerpts of the video documentation and the interviews can be seen in several “Placemaking | Guerilla Screenings” that take the findings back to their places of origin:

November 14 – 21, 2009, 1 p.m., at Mercan Restaurant, Wienerstr. 10, 10999 Berlin
November 21 – 28, 2009, 10 – 11 p.m., at CCCP BAR, Torstrasse 136, 10115 Berlin
November 28 – December 5, 2009, 2 – 3 p.m., at Talad Thai, Gervinusstr. 2-3, 10629 Berlin