Gifts of Glass – An Offering (English)

Moving between slabs of concrete, glassy surfaces, and space-age facades, Sasha Amaya, dancer, choreographer, and installation artist, invites us to reflect on the modernist architectures established by the US in Berlin during the Cold War. What powers and demands do materialities possess? What presuppositions do we afford them? What resonances do they engender? What are the lines between beneficence and domination, control and charity, instruction and the sharing of resources? And how do these political questions rumble between our memories, instincts, and sensory human selves.

On a journey from the Amerika-Haus to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, through the Hansa Quarter, which was designed in 1957 for the International Building Exhibition Interbau, we are invited to an auditory reflection that explores these questions.

Colorful drawing in the style of a city map.

Gifts of Glass – An Offering

© Lena Pozdnyakova

Gifts of Glass is part of the performance series Tracing Influence: Intervening in Western Cold War Architecture. The series is dedicated to four Cold War architectures in Berlin that bear witness to the institutionalization of US power in the promotion of educational institutions and the dissemination of knowledge. Various artists engage performatively with these architectural spaces and their site-specific histories to develop new forms of gathering that question the power dispositif of their past.

Tracing Influence was conceived by Kirsten Maar, Sophie Schultze-Allen, Hannah Strothmann and Luise Willer with the support of Mariama Diane, Friederike Hartge, Martina Kutsch and Giulia Weis as part of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Intervening Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the Berlin Central and Regional Library and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.

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